<human>: Condense the text into a few key points

Greetings! I am a broke student and all my books are far, far away. I have been needing something to read so I decided to make a small investment for one of those new Kindles and download some free Project Gutenberg books in order to catch up on some classics, at least until my wallet starts fattening up again. 

So /r/books, give me your suggestions! Please? It'd be really, really awesome to have this list bookmarked, and (bonus!) you get the chance to reminisce about classics previously read, as well as the wonderful opportunity to argue with other redditors about what's essential for an unread engineer such as I (and I'm sure many other readers).

I figured I'd start with some Twain, and maybe some Dostoevsky (even though I couldn't make it through Crime and Punishment many years ago), some Kafka (I love his creepy, terrifying style, but I can't help but get the feeling a lot of what he's trying to say is going right over my head), Joyce (who's definitely over my head)...

My favourite authors are more modern, and I've definitely seen their names pop up here fairly often: Vonnegut, Murakami, Eggers, and Mordecai Richler (who I don't see as often)
<bot>: (really? in an /r/books thread about classics?) recommend me some out-of-copyright books which are on Gutenberg so that my broke ass can get edumacated about the classics.