I have just finished reading a student's essay (quite a good one, actually) on Vocation in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I still have about 25 more essays on that topic to go. In other reading, I recently finished Morton Cohen's biography of Lewis Carroll, and I recently bought A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which I hope to begin soon.
The texts that I enjoy teaching because they usually stimulate good discussion include: Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"; Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Shaw's Major Barbara; Orwell's 1984; and Alice Munro's stories, especially her collection Open Secrets.
For useful texts, I'd include three of my favourite ones--Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Major Barbara, and 1984--and I'd add Milton's Paradise Lost and Wordsworth's Prelude, though, for each of these works, I've only taught selections from various books (sections), mainly for survey courses.
I recently taught for the first time a course in Children's Literature, and I really enjoyed researching such works as Nursery Rhymes, Fairy Tales, Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, and some children's picture books. I've enjoyed researching a lot of other texts, but these are freshest in my mind.
I think I'd enjoy managing a good used book store.