When we were kids, my brother Andy and I read as many of the Tarzan novels as we could get our hands on. They were great!
I recently reread "Tarzan of the Apes" and found it was still very enjoyable. On a certain level it's a very silly book: very dated, slightly racist even. It's best ideas are borrowed from "The Jungle Books". But it's still a well written adventure story. I'm not sure if I'd recommend reading all 24+ books in the Tarzan series -- though I seem to recall that "The Jewels of Opar" was pretty good too.

Waugh was a curmudgeon of the first water. In later years he came to be embarrassed by the lyricism and romanticism of "Brideshead Revisited", which is one good reason to start with it. Another good reason is that it's a masterpiece.

I started with Pale Fire because somewhere I saw this quote from it:

I am the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure of the window pane.

I've read the 5 volume David Hawkes translation of "The Story of the Stone" (aka "The Dream of the Red Chamber" or "Hong Luo Meng") several times and I much prefer it to the abridged version that I read. It's an extraordinary book. That being said, it's still a slow read in places.

Try the first volume, and be prepared for sudden shifts in style, from mythology and fairy tale, to social realism; from overly refined aestheticism to bawdy humor; from elevated spirituality to the argot of gangsters. This work is truly Shakespearean in its range.

Kim is one of the most magical novels I've ever read. It is an exotic adventure story written by a British subject who was madly in love with India. Its beautiful prose evokes the smells, tastes, sights and sounds of that country, blending espionage, mysticism, anthropology and folklore in one of the strangest coming of age stories I've ever read.