Plato, what is he good for?

I was chatting with my much younger brother recently and he mentioned an interest in philosophy. I asked if he'd read Plato, and he returned my query with a question: "Is Plato worth reading?" My own answer: I don't think Plato is really worth reading, but, many thinkers have disagreed and Plato is a place to start when attempting to comprehend the arc of human history. In other words, though I myself am no Platonist I think that to understand what it means to not be a Platonist, as well as grapple with a world influenced by Platonic ideals, one must know something about Plato. This informs some of my other intellectual choices, my interest in religion or politics or homosexuality. I don't have much of a personal interest in these topics in that I don't have a strong emotional attachment or response regarding them, but as these subjects do elicit great emotion on the part of most other humans I believe it is worth investing the time to understand them. Ultimately the dog has to stop chasing its own tail and you do have to ask yourself, what is this all about? What should I read to read it because it means something? For myself, that tends to fall into the category of genre fiction or science. The former has the substance of the simple pleasure. Its appeal is in the qualia it elicits. The latter, to my mind, is magnetic because of its power to model the world as it is independent from my own preferences or pleasures. In regards to the sample space of facts and theories which inhabit the rest of the cosmos of ideas we all have our filters and biases as we sweep through the constellations. Myself, I have a primary heuristic which relies on what others find to be of priority. One man's rubbish is another man's gold.