Books for ambitious 14-17 year old students?

What are your suggestions

From my email

I am a librarian at a high school and the superintendent of my school district tasked me with creating a great books program for ambitious high school students which culminates in an award at graduation. We talked about 4-5 books a year for four years. Students would read the book and then discuss it with me for an 30 mins-1hr as the accountability component (no tests or essays was my preference). I was wondering what some of the titles you might pick for this age range (14-17).

Here is my list. What do you all recommend? (I don’t know much about High School curricula, and I assume you all read Little Women and so on…)

UPDATE: I should add, there needs to be an American emphasis, hence why I have Moby Dick, not Anna Karenina (though that would be a marvellous choice for the 17 year olds).

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14 years old

• Frederick Douglass Narrative

• The Handmaid's Tale

• Asimov, Foundation

• Matthew's Gospel

• Exodus

15 years old

• Henry James The Turn of the Screw

• Poe The Raven, Fall of the House of Usher

• Selected Emily Dickinson

• Solaris Stanislaw Lem

• Macbeth

16 years old

• Marquez Love in the Time of Cholera

• Wharton The Age of Innocence

• Plato's Symposium

• Song of Songs

• Ecclesiastes

• The Winter's Tale

17 years old

• Moby Dick

• King Lear

• The Odyssey

• Borges, Ficciones

• Kafka, short fiction

• Book of Job

Others might be Autobiography of Malcolm X, Walt Whitman, Psalms, Atlas Shrugged, Harriet Jacobs.