LucasI recently read Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy, and now it's one of my favorite books.
I read a ton of Tom Clancy as a child, took me a decade to get over my paranoia of terrorists. And then 9/11 happened.
What do you mean you "don't like stuff like Tale of Two Cities"? What about Tale of Two Cities turned you off? If it was the language, I'd highly suggest you try suffering through it until you acquire the taste for it. You're losing out on hundreds of years of popular knowledge and novels that have been regarded as somehow "eternal" for centuries due to personal taste. I understand it can be difficult, but reading Western Canon is highly rewarding.
As for the last century or so, I'd suggest authors like Camus, Steinbeck, Orwell, etc.
For Orwell I suggest Homage to Catalonia, a first hand account of his time serving with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. It's a war most people know nothing about, and the book will truly open your eyes if you allow it. I also suggest Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a novel about the emptiness and travails of lower middle class life in Britain. While Orwell's most famous for 1984 and Animal Farm, those are two of his worst works (in my humble opinion). His short stories, essays, and articles are all worth the read.
Now I'm going to quote myself from natf2 because I'm lazy:
Alexandre Dumas- The Three Musketeers has aged incredibly well, and it's commonly used in popular culture, albeit quite distorted.
Jane Austen- I love her prose, but the content is tremendous as well. This might not be your taste, particularly if you don't like the romantic plots of her stories, but there is so much going on in her works that they're hard for me to put down.
Ernest Hemingway- Everything he wrote. Really.
John Steinbeck- Anything he wrote after Tortilla Flat and before East of Eden. The heart of his work is contained in Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle, East of Eden, Tortilla Flat (or Cannery Row, they're remarkably similar), and Of Mice and Men. That may seem a long list, but most of those are relatively short and fast reads.
Albert Camus- Everything in his (tragically short) oeuvre deserves a reading. The Fall, The Stranger, The Plague, and his collection of short stories are all easy enough reads that pay enormous dividends. Top that off with The Rebel, his non-fiction philosophical piece, and you're golden. Do keep in mind that Camus was called "an author who tried to write philosophy." (and Sartre was called "a philosopher who tried to write novels.")
Oscar Wilde- Picture of Dorian Grey, The Importance of Being Earnest, maybe some of his nonfiction.
Once you're confident enough, Russian literature is some of the most beautiful and deeply moving on the planet. The Brothers Karamazov, some of Dostoevsky's shorter works, and Tolstoy's works as well have stood the tests of time. The problem with them is reader comprehension and the constant flood of Russian names.