If you have any interest in historical memoirs, I can't recommend Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand's autobiography 'Memoirs from Beyond the Grave' highly enough. That thing blew my mind. It's incredibly hard to find in English except in abridged versions; I became aware of it after reading Paul Auster's 'The Book of Illusions', in which it's referenced a number of times (though there it's called Memoirs of a Dead Man).
This guy was a regular 18th century Forrest Gump, if Forrest Gump had been a highly celebrated aristocratic politician and novelist. He played a part in the French and American Revolutions, the reign of Napoleon, and various political upheavals in the 1800s.
If that still sounds dry, the book is super-readable and very modern in its structure: he uses flash-forwards and often reexamines events from multiple later vantage points, and through the whole thing he obsesses over his own approaching death, and the gradual disappearance of everything he's known in life, in a very moving and poetic way.