Dickens and Wilkie Collins are also very fine, if you can find time.  Try 'Edwin Drood' or 'The Moonstone'.

+1 for anything written by Wodehouse.
Thank you Jeeves is possibly the funniest book ever written.

People often don't get Wodehouse, just as they don't get Evelyn Waugh (early novels).  But the man was a genius as regards humour in the way that, say, Galton and Simpson were with Hancock and 'Steptoe And Son'.  You have to read between the lines a bit - if you can stop laughing.

^ One of the greatest - perhaps the greatest - opening chapters in English literature, when Pip first meets the convict. 
I'm with you on '1984', Robbie.

I’m a massive fan of those b/W Sherlock Holmes films too. Always a stirring monologue at the end.

This is whyI love  this place.
I walked in wearing penny loafers and left with books under my arm.
Where else on the web does this happen?

Alvey gladdens my heart. 
I read a huge number of contemporary authors in my mid-twenties, including Rushdie, Carolyn Slaughter, the later Fowles (until I could stand him no longer).  Also - slightly earlier in vintage - Updike, Burgess, Doris Lessing, Alan Paton, V.S. Naipaul.  Read little in the way of fiction now except old favourites.  I should go back to verse.  I used to love Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell and the like.  But I've mixed the serious stuff with people like Stephen King and Elmore Leonard and am happy that my younger daughter, in spite of her interest in Plath, Sexton and their like, is doing much the same.

Non-fiction - try Francis Kilvert's Diary.  Also - hardly Christmas reading but essential - Barnett's 'Collapse Of British Power' in which the author lays into Dickens and Rupert Brooke, among others.  A corrective to the 'Lost Generation' platitudes surrounding 1914-1918. 
I wasted my time a couple of years ago reading up on Lawrence, Woolf, Strachey et al.

I read the four Ripley books that followed Talented.
I absolutely loved them. Highsmith was supposed to be an anti-Semite but had affairs with several Jewish women.

Anyhow back to the topic
For my birthday my wife bought me the 80’s tv series of Maigret.
Really enjoyed it so I recently bought a couple of Simenon titles.
A few years back I attempted the first Maigret novel. Didn’t enjoy it but Maigret at Christmas was far better. I read it in Paris a few weeks before Christmas to get the full vibe.
My families first Air B&B. We stayed directly opposite a Paraboot boutique that I deeply regret not even visiting.
I did come back with one of the  last of Keydge tweeds produced though.

When I go into charity shops these days it’s more to look at the books and CDs than in the hope of finding anything I might want to wear. I need reading fodder for the train journey into work as I refuse to do work, it’s my time for myself. So at any point I always have half a dozen or so unread paperbacks. Currently half way through a biography of Eddy Merckx and waiting are a pilot’s personal account of the Battle of Britain, books about the 1980s Soviet/US arms race, MI5 post 9/11 and the Stasi. Also re-reads of Tom Wolfe, Charles Bukowski and Joseph Mitchell.

I’ve recently gone part time and I have an extra day off per week at my disposal, so on those days when the weather is not fit to go out I expect to be making inroads on this stuff. My loss no doubt, but overall I prefer to expend my time on  factual or semi factual material rather than something someone has made up.

Intellectual posturing aside, I've just been casting an eye over my four year old grandson's present, a Hot Wheels Mega Rex.  Apparently it chews up Hot Wheels cars, making disgusting noises whilst doing so, before shitting them out.  A snip at £42.99.  My wife told our daughter, 'Well, your Dad seems to like it and he's got the mind of a four year old...'  How well she knows me.