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Critique of Pure Reason, Kant > 
Accept no substitutes. If you're interested in modern philosophy, this will be required reading. For the beginner I do recommend that one first look over the works of Locke, Hume, Berkely, Descartes, and Leibniz to obtain an understanding of what specifically Kant is attempting to accomplish; which is the doctrine that we bring more to experience than empiricism admits while not beyond the realm of experience as the rationalists maintain. This is the famous Copernican switch from external objects as the source of all knowledge to human beings as containing the forms of knowledge that we bring to objects. I recommend a careful reading of the Critique so as to discourage false impressions of it. Kant was not arguing for subjectivism or that human beings make up the world entirely with their thoughts. There is a world that is an organized nature in so far as we know it, but "in itself" independant of our minds, it isn't anything for us. Because we all share the same reason, we all share the same universe, and so Kant's system is just as objective and amicable to common sense as any other.
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