I've had the same experience; and I see no one recommendation that will make someone appreciate literature. The argument I heard from a younger AI researcher was that books/stories are just a collection of tropes that get reused over and over. For me it's easier to just recommend Dostojevsky, or perhaps a couple of dystopian classics. Even then not everyone will understand how literature is not just about information which become a story.

For me Crime and Punishment was perhaps a bit painful for me as a teenager I remember entering the same state of mind as the main character Raskolnikov from reading it, but it was also a good capstone to connect the feeling from books by Boje, Strindberg and Chekhov.