The problems is figuring out which books provide those useful mental models. I found that fiction usually doesn't but a list with recommendations in the comments would be great.
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
L'Etranger - Albert Camus
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Metamorphosis - Ovid
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
The Picadilly Papers - Charles Dickens
Permutation City - Greg Egan
Fiction allows us to experience the most intimate thoughts of people we've never met in a way we cannot emulate in reality. We can visit places we've never been to and experience situations we'd try our best to avoid. We sit for hours hallucinating vividly reading these stories as we download these characters, concepts, and ideas into our meat. And if the story resonated with us we walk away a different person: new connections in our synapses, reinforced signals in existing ones. Stories are one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal; perhaps even more so than mathematics or computation.
I agree that good fiction book can be an eye opener. I'll give the ones from you list I haven't read a try. By non-fiction I didn't only mean science but also historic novels and biographies. I find they come with connections and lessons that no human could have come up with.
Try the Penguin Classics hardcovers. Frankenstein for example[0] includes an amazing abridged version based on the original manuscript and later revised editions as well as a very engaging historical account of the author's life, times, and influences when she wrote it. These are also important things to understand about a story as well and can give deeper insights into its inner structure.
Neal Stephenson's Anathem felt like the most accurate capture of what being a Cambridge mathematician felt like.
The thing that made a lot of history make a lot more sense to me was playing Civilization. I don't know how accurate the details are, but the fundamentals of diplomacy don't change a lot.
Honestly most nonfiction feels like it was telling me what I already knew, or bringing new facts but no new ideas. I can't remember any that actually changed the way I think.
