Once Upon a Winter's Night a Traveler, Baron in the Trees, Invisible Cities, Marcovaldo, etc...
Anyone else into the late, great Calvino? One of my favorite authors; he did the impossible in nearly every one of his novels by creating fiction that was both jaw-droppingly experimental and entertaining to read. It's rare that the two come together so well.
I picked up Invisible Cities from the shelf at my library on a whim (I love a shiny cover) and it was exactly the kind of book I was looking for. It doesn't need a plot or deep characters or any of that "novel" stuff to be beautiful.
Having said that though, his other books with plots and characters and that are also great. He's definitely my favorite author and a great storyteller. I think he deserves to be considered one of the great writers of the 20th century.
YAY! Cosmicomics is also amazing. It's a series of short stories, each of which is based on a different factoid of science. It is all told by an omniscient narrator named qwfwq - or something unpronounceable like that. I have to read a story at a time to savor it and not let it go by too fast.
