Book recommendations?

[Carol]

Carol earlier:
> > Really, though, if you want to be culturally literate and your
native language is English, it's really a good idea (and often quite
pleasurable) to read Shakespeare's plays. 
> 
> Kemper now:
> I'm not asking to be more culturally literate in the American sense.
I'm looking for English writing from Canadians, Australians, New
Landers, etc.  I'm looking to understand other English speaking
cultures through their writings.

Carol again:
Then wouldn't Shaksepeare qualify? Obviously, if you're trying to
learn history through his history plays, that's not going to work, and
 many of his plays are set in times and places other than his own
(with no concern for historical accuracy), but you can learn a lot
about Renaissance England through his plays and poems. Or is your
concern with more modern English-speaking cultures? (And I was joking
about his works not being fiction and consequently not qualifying for
your list. Obviusly, I knew that Goddlefrood's "Who was this
Shakespeare character, anyway?" was facetious; I was in a similar
frame of mind, but clearly that didn't come across to either you or him.)

Kemper now:
> I've read all the America classics you've suggested.  Hawthorne's
'Young Goodman Brown' is one of my all time favs though I could live
without ever having to read the Scarlet Letter again.

Carol:
I like "The Scarlet Letter," bu I could live without "The Minister's
Black Veil" and some of the other short works. And I'd like "Young
Goodman Brown" better if it didn't refer to my ancestor, Martha
Carrier, as "a rampant hag" and "the promised bride of hell."

Kemper: 
> I've only read the odes.  I think I read a short story by Shelley
but for the life of me can't think of what it was.  Maybe it was an essay?

Carol:
Most likely it was an essay, probably "A Defence of Poetry," which is
quite famous and influential. Shelley was a brilliant poet, but he
didn't have the right sort of imagination to write short stories. The
few works of short fiction that he wrote are highly forgettable. You
might be thinking of his wife's novel, "Frankenstein," written when
she was only nineteen, which was inspired by being in company with him
and Byron and is her only work of genius (though she wrote other
novels after his early death).

Here's "Ozymandias," which is a sonnet and consequently all of
fourteen lines, justly famous:

        I met a traveller from an antique land,  	
	Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  	Stand in the desart....Near them, on the sand,
  	Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
5 	And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,	
  	Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
  	Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,	
  	The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
  	And on the pedestal, these words appear:
10 	My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
  	Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
  	Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
  	Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
  	The lone and level sands stretch far away."

"Desart" is not a typo but Shelley's early-nineteenth-century spelling
of the word. The poem has three speakers, the unnamed narrator, the
traveler, and Ozymandias, and the subtle irony is, IMO, very powerful.

Carol, hoping that the copied-and-pasted poem doesn't come unformatted