After my coffee - as announced (wink wink), I started to crawl through the web. Here are some findings:
Wikipedia has different lists put together by different organizations. I find one of them very appealing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_Best_Books_of_All_Time for how it was chosen (highlights done by me):
"
The World Library is a list of the 100 best books, as proposed by one hundred writers from fifty-four different countries, compiled and organized in 2002 by the Norwegian Book Club. This list endeavours to reflect world literature, with books from all countries, cultures, and time periods. Eleven of the books included on the list are written by women, eighty-five are written by men and four have an unknown author.
Each writer had to select his or her own list of ten books.
The books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way; the organizers have stated that "they are all on an equal footing," with the exception of Don Quixote which was given the distinction "best literary work ever written." The following list organizes the works alphabetically by author."
I really like this list! It represents way more regions than the standard "Best of...." lists. This could be a start for the classics.
Furthermore I looked up some Literature prices, but did not find the results very satisfying - a lot of the books are so literary that they do not sound very appealing to me (very subjective statement, I know). I looked at price Goncourt (France) and Deutsche Buchpreis (Germany). I have not done any research in South America or Asia in this field.
Last but not least I had a look at amazon.fr, amazon.es and amazon.de. I can assure you that the shades of grey are pretty high on all of them.
So the tough part is definitely the literature of the present. To find good literature, it will take time. So I am coming back to the idea of a featured country or region per month. If announced upfront, people will have time to research, follow links, crawl through books introduction articles, talk to friends etc.