I won’t mention some of the obvious classics, allthough I believe that (as mentioned above about Frankenstein and Hans Christian Andersen) reading the book is (almost) always worth it. Even if, maybe I should say especially if, you have already seen the movie. They are in some way complementary, but the books give you the opportunity to use your own imagination to “translate” the writers thoughts, rather than that of the producer and director of the movie. In movies, too often things are removed, altered, rewritten etc. to please a large and probably “average” audience; they are after all paying for it and movies are big business.

Anyway, the ones that immediately caught my eye and that you should read are all the books by Primo Levi (233, 270, 556 + whatever book didn’t make the list, e.g. the Periodic Table). He was an Italian chemist, who as a Jew and resistance fighter in WWII was arrested and sent to a concentration camp; he survived because his background as a chemist helped him to get a job outside the camp. Sounds depressing perhaps, but he writes beautifully about his relations with others in the camp and later on his way back to Italy after being freed by the Russians.

Secondly, a book I cannot recommend to too many people: “To kill a mocking bird” by Harper Lee (456). Such a shame she wrote only this one book. I always wondered why so many good books have come out of the American South?
By the way, this is one of the books where the movie is just as good, go and see Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch again as well :) !

Finally, since you mention being born in Indonesia, have you read the Max Havelaar (882)? I didn’t even know it was translated (I read it in Dutch since it is one of our classics, written in 1860), and I wondered what an Indonesian would think about it. However, I checked on Wikipedia and found that it was already translated into English in 1868 (but only in Bahasa Indonesia in 1972), and that an Indonesian novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, argued in The New York Times Magazine that this is “the book that killed colonialism”.[1]

Talking about modified story, you should read the original Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. I read it before I watched the all-happy-and-cheery Disney version of Little Mermaid. Couldn’t believe how much they altered the whole story… The original Little Mermaid is one of the saddest fairy tales I’ve ever read.

I’ve also read some part of the original Peter Pan. Also quite sad in my opinion.