Reddit mentions of Classics for Pleasure (Harvest Book)

You might consider checking out some books about books, to start with. There have been a lot of books published in the last few years that are basically lists of other books as introduced and recommended by various people, and some of them can be quite useful for the beginner. Michael Dirda's Classics for Pleasure would be a good place to start. He has written a number of other books along the same sort of lines, too (this one might also be of interest), but Classics for Pleasure has been very well-received.

Paradoxically, I'd recommend against tackling the classics themselves from the very start. One of the reasons they're classics in the first place is because they're advanced examples of the craft of writing, and for someone not used to reading for the pleasure of that craft rather than for other reasons (which I'll mention in a moment), they can be quite daunting. Your whole project would probably collapse at the outset if you just picked up some Dostoevsky or Flaubert and hoped for the best.

That said, love of the craft isn't the only reason people read, and your understanding of that craft will mature and grow like any other faculty. Some people read to pass the time or to escape from a more mundane life. Some read for a love of incident; that is, they like to read about things happening, and favour books that have strong narratives (sometimes at the cost of description) and exciting things going on in them. I guess the most reductive example of this would be something like a Dan Brown novel, of which type of book it is so often said that "it really moves along." I use this as a familiar example, but you shouldn't take it to mean that enjoying incident in your books is a bad thing. It's not the same as enjoying the craft, but it's not necessarily worse; it just means that people who love a Danielle Steele novel and people who love Tolstoy are loving these works in different ways.

Anyway, here's a list of ten enjoyable, non-threatening, small- to mid-length books that combine craft and incident under one cover:

1. George Orwell - Animal Farm: An interesting refiguration of totalitarian thinking in terms of farm animals. Short and sweet, and certainly quite sad.
   
   
2. Alexander Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A short novel recounting a day in the life of a prisoner in a Soviet Gulag. It's a brutal and intriguing work, but quite easy to get through.
   
   
3. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit: A reasonably straightforward story of fantasy and adventure. It's very good, and if you find you really like it you can then graduate to the much more elaborate endeavour that is the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
   
   
4. Max Brooks - World War Z: A series of fictional interviews with survivors of the great zombie war. If you don't like zombies it won't really be your thing, I'm afraid, but if you do like zombies there is pretty much literally no better book to read. It is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, and contains some interesting meditations on questions of societal structure and military theory. It's a bestseller for a reason.
   
   
5. C.S. Forester - The African Queen: In which a gin-soaked tugboat pilot takes a very prim missionary woman down an African river while trying to avoid - and then attack - the German forces that surround them (it's set during the First World War). It's a funny and exciting book, and was made into an equally great movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn.
   
   
6. John Steinbeck - The Moon is Down: A novella in which an unnamed European town is occupied by unnamed totalitarian forces. The book chronicles what happens to the townspeople as a result, how they resist, how they compromise, and so on. Written in 1942, this would become Steinbeck's most notable contribution to the war effort. It became a runaway success in occupied Europe, and was widely distributed there in underground translations. It's very good.
   
   
7. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game: A classic of modern science fiction about (among other things) a child genius in training to conduct a war against an alien race. There are numerous subplots and many interesting ideas under consideration, and for sci-fi it is thankfully not especially predicated on the technology involved (though there is a lot of neat stuff). It's more about characters and concepts than spaceships.
   
   
8. William Golding - The Lord of the Flies: A monstrous little tale of societal breakdown. A tropical island full of stranded schoolchildren degenerates into a savage tribal bloodbath.
   
   
9. G.K. Chesterton - The Napoleon of Notting Hill: A delightful and utterly bizarre little novel in which the King of England in the then-distant future (1984; the book was written in 1904) re-establishes the medieval boroughs and heraldry and clothing as a joke. But one man does not see that it is a joke, and when some developers want to tear down his home to build a new road, his furious resistance ignites a civil war that consumes all of London. It's a very funny book, but it's also full of epic grandeur and street battles and whatnot.
   
   
10. Edwin A. Abbott - Flatland: A strange novella in which Mr. A. Square, a resident of Flatland (a plane existing in only two dimensions), describes the astonishing consequences of being introduced to the world of the third dimension. It also has a lot of fun side notes about the socio-political makeup of Flatland, and it makes for a quick read once you get used to the slightly antiquated style.
    
    You might also consider the works of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, two English writers who deliver a lot of fun ideas under the guise of satire and adventure. Adams is best if you like sci-fi, while Pratchett is more in the fantasy section, but they're both quite good and accessible.
    
    I hope some of this will prove useful to you. Reading can be a most enjoyable pleasure, and a profitable one besides. Good luck with your beginning.

People of the Book is almost pornography for bibliophiles. This book had me seriously considering going back to school to learn about document preservation.

I went through a period of wanting to read a lot of books about books about a year ago. I think I even have an old submission in r/books on the same subject. Here are a bunch of books I still have on my amazon wishlist that date to around that time. This will be a shotgun blast of suggestions, and some may be only tangentially related, but I figure more is better. If I can think of even more than this, I'll edit later:

The Man who Loved Books Too Much

Books that Changed the World

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

How to Read and Why

The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Classics for Pleasure

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books

The Library at Night

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Time Was Soft There

I have even more around here somewhere...

Edit: Ok, found a couple more....

Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book-Hunter in the 21st Century

At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries

Candida Hofer

Libraries in the Ancient World

The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read

A Short History of the Printed Word

Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption

Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work

The Book on the Bookshelf

A History of Illuminated Manuscripts

Bookmaking: Editing, Design, Production

Library: An Unquiet History

Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms

A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Lore, and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

And yet I still can't find the one I'm thinking of. Will get back to you...

Fuck yeah, I found it!

That last is more about the woman who own the store than about books, but it's awash in anecdotes about writers and stories we all know and love. Check it out.