Herodotus was a historian and geographer in an age when history was story and geography was legends or else pure mathematics.

He brought, by comparison, an element of factuality to both disciplines. Consequently his importance is in how he differed from those who went before.

If those things don’t interest you, you can safely skip him.

Depends on how much you really want to know about the girl and her work.

I think every book I’ve ever read reads differently the more I learn.

But probably the ones that meet your description most clearly would be Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies and Flowers for Algernon. Required reading in grammar school, and I dimly grasped what they were supposed to be about, but I hadn’t a clue what they were really trying to say.