Right now I'm reading "The Last Coin" by James R Blaylock, which btw is out of print and fairly hard to get ahold of. So I'm not sure if you could just walk down to the library and borrow it. Its about the 30 silver pieces Judas got for betraying Jesus, and this villian guy called Pennyman is trying to collect them all because when they are all gathered together, it will start the Apocalypse. Its pretty interesting and all the characters are kind of quirky. I think it would have been a lot better with a cooler main character.
Before that I read the complete works of HG Wells (The Time Machine, Island of Dr Moreau, Invisible Man, War of the Worlds, etc). I'm sure most people have read at least some of those, so no real point in going over them. Although I am kind of interested in knowing if many other people read older books like that. I used to read mostly just modern scifi/fantasy, but for the last few years or better I mostly read old classics like Dickens, Poe, Shelley (Frankenstien), Stoker (Dracula). When the new Planet of the Apes movie came out they finally republished the original novel so I finally got to read it. That's one thing I hate about older books, for being the "classics" they are often hard to get ahold of.
Which reminds me, after they put out the new Cout of Monte Cristo movie, they reprinted that story as well and I finally got to read it.