Nice to hear, OP, I do hope this post is genuine. Don't just read Marx as an economist, by the way, as he was certainly not restrained to that discipline.
Reading works like "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" by Engels and some of Paul Cockshott's works really opened my eyes early on (even if i now find myself disagreeing with much of Cockshott, for example), so maybe check those out. Of course Lenin is also indispensable. You don't have to read all three volumes of Capital before getting into these, by the way. I would maybe even go so far as to recommend that you read other works by Marx and Engels before volumes 2 and 3, as a matter of fact, since some important aspects of the "critique of political economy" are discussed more extensively in other places, and these might come in handy when thonkin about Capital.
Don't forget we have a sticky thread for reading list shit and an entire (sadly underused) board for discussing books and theory at
>>>/edu/, which has spawned a couple reading groups, one of which I think has been reading (or recently read) Capital.