In case you want to read papers but don't really know where to get started, here's my collection I've read over the years: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/315/articles/index.html ... feel free to browse through it and pick up anything that looks interesting. You'll probably want to scroll all the way to the bottom and work your way up the list.

Many of the classics are in there, such as the Plan9 paper and Paxos Made Practical.

If the images are distracting, here's the list without them: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/315/articles/index_no_ima...

Actually, looking over it, that list isn't very curated. Just Ctrl-F "unix" and that'll take you to some good papers.