(dominic: this list of papers was originally recommended to me by Brain Noguchi @bnoguchi, and was a great start to understanding distributed systems)
Here's a selection of papers that I think you would find helpful and interesting:
The seminal paper about event ordering and concurrency. The important result is that events in a distributed system define a partially ordered set. The connection to what we're working on is fundamental, as this defines how to detect concurrent updates. Moreover, the chosen algorithm to turn the partially ordered set into a totally ordered set defines the conflict resolution algorithm.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/time-clocks.pdf
Context: I was asked for a list of interesting reading relating to "distributed databases, behavior under partitions and failures, failure detection." Here's what I came up with in about an hour.
For textbooks, "Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming" is a superb introduction to distributed computing from a formal perspective; it's really not about "programming" or "engineering" but about distributed system fundamentals like consensus, distributed registers, and broadcast. Used in Berkeley's Distributed Computing course (and HT to @lalithsuresh) Book Site
Notes from courses like Lorenzo Alvisi's Distributed Computing class can be great.
There are a bunch of classics on causality, [Paxos](ht