At the risk of sounding like a heathen, I'd avoid James Joyce Ulysses unless you are a bit of masochist. i appreciate what he was trying to do but it just doesn't make a good read, awful hard work.
I kind of get the same feeling trying to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez too, 100 years of solitude was bloody painful.
I looked at The Intellectual Devotional in the bookstore. It made me wish Socrates were still alive. It makes Reader's Digest look in depth by comparison.
As for the question, my recent book discoveries include Soldier's Pay by William Faulkner. It's been on my shelf a long time, but it gets less play in discussions than Faulkner's better known novels. While it lacks the richness and complexity of Absalom, Absalom, As I Lay Dying, Go Down, Moses, and others, it is better than I was led to believe, and far superior to most of the books published in the past few years.