In the interests of keeping things moving, I'll go ahead and make my pick now and do my writeup for it after the Grey Cup game.
In the European category, I'm really excited to pick up Joseph Conrad's masterful study of evil in a colonial world, Heart of Darkness.
This book is based in part on Conrad's (Józef Konrad Korzeniowski's) own experiences on as a steamboat captain in the Belgian Congo, where he was shocked at the atrocities being committed by a European colonial forces toward the native africans. His protagonist, Marlow, has been tasked with captaining a steam ship up the Congo to retrieve Kurtz, an ivory trader who the trading company wants back in Europe. As Marlow travels up the river, he learns more and more about Kurtz, who is setting himself up as a vicious dictator over the locals; yet many of the people that Marlow meets are in complete awe of Kurtz.
The historical significance of the novel was that it presented an extremely dark view of the nature of humanity and in particular of European attitudes and how it leads to evil; I think that part of the reason that the book achieved such influence is that many of Conrad's views that might have been dismissed as pessimism were later confirmed by the world wars. Really, this was the book that kicked off modernist literature, presenting a hero who eventually stripped away the optimism surrounding him to discover a dark and soulless side to supposed progress.