I come late to this discussion, but instead of recommendations, I have a couple of different tangents.

#1) The books Cindy mentions in her initial post are "larger than life" stories, characters swept in the maelstrom of history.

They could write books like that then because:

-- there was no Internet, no social media, so people read more than now (I truly wish I'm wrong about this)

--people had a longer attention span

--one of the fondest hopes of the authors' was for the book to be done in a miniseries, which many of them were (it was the golden age of the miniseries), so the books may have been intentionally long

--we were then closer in time to, for example, WWII (older relatives, many still alive when the books were published, were affected by the conflict), so those books had more resonance then than with the current generation

#2) The books that we read when we are younger create a greater impression than those we read later in life. A couple of reasons for this:

--were more impressionable. As persons, we change over time, so things that used to impress us as young persons, may not anymore.

--the world has become more cynic, and even if we try to do not become cynic, we have a more realistic worldview than we had then (which, is in part, why were more impressionable earlier in life)