Balzac's Pere Goriot

The first serious piece of literature I ever read was Hemmingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls. But it was with the second, Balzac's Pere Goriot, that I hit pay dirt. I had a school vacation job as a ward orderly (hospital assistant) at the time and remember the book absolutely gripped me. I read it in the evening and then had it concealed in the pocket of my work coat and used to sneak into empty rooms in order to read a page.
It ignited a lifelong passion for Balzac. Even now I scan bookshops for a translation of a work of his I have not read - unfortunately his huge vocabulary means I cannot read them in French although I do own them all in the original and it will be one of my unfulfilled ambitions in life to have read everything he wrote.
The next time I had such an experience as with Pere Goriot was when I read Jane Austen. After reading Sense and Sensibility I started to read Pride and Prejudice. I was so gripped I literally couldn't put it down and read it in a single day.
I read Pere Goriot again thirty years later and it gripped me just as much. For me only Tolstoy is a greater novelist than Balzac and Austen remains an abiding passion. But Balzac opened my eyes to the great world of literature.