I think short stories would suffice for Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea is probably the way to go if you feel you must do a novel. The others feel dated to me and his women make me want to scream. Despite that, he is the master of the short powerful sentence -- well, he and Raymond Carver. I've learned so much about short story writing from those two.

I realized later I should have also mentioned Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy and Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf (pair it with The Hours, but maybe not until after the rain stops).