I didn't read it on my own personally, rather, it was read in my eighth grade class from beginning to end. Lots of discussion was had about the foreshadowing and meaning behind Dickens' words. At the time I really didn't appreciate it as much as I should have, but I'm incredibly grateful that my teacher made us read through that.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brian was another one read in class that I think helped shape my perspective on the world for the better.
Will probably make your children atheists though.
So much of the world still runs on fucking bullshit, just look at the justifications for the ongoing [redacted because it'll probably derail the conversation].
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Brave New World (Huxley)
Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)
Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt)
A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt)
The Machine Stops (Forster)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
The Jungle Book (Kipling)
Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)
The Republic (Plato)
Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)
Ringworld (Niven)
The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Man who Would be King (Kipling)
The Pearl (Steinbeck)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
A Scanner Darkly (Dick)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
Dracula (Stoker)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
A Christmas Carol (Dickens)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)
Watership Down (Adams)
Gulliver's Travels (Swift)
Animal Farm (Orwell)
https://www.vox.com/22753080/motel-mysteries-book-david-maca...
The "Mad Scientist's Club" series
The Great Brain
Those "Encyclopedia Brown" stories
The "The Three Investigators" series
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
The original Doyle "Sherlock Holmes" canon
The Soul Of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien
Nineteen Eighty Four
The chapters about electronics are obviously quite dated, but I think it still stands up. I'd absolutely give a copy to the kind of kid who has to take everything apart to see how it works.
Spoiler-free: based on a shared societal belief in a looming existential crisis, a group of young adults attend a military school whose curriculum revolves around a war game with sports-like rules. The System uses the war game to identify for positions of relative prestige those students most willing to interpret the game rules in creative ways, most willing to question assumptions brought with them from the school-world into the game-world, but naïve enough to believe the game is over once they've “graduated” from it. The books explore the many ways in which the “real world” : school-world :: school-world : game-world.