What Are Your Personal Foundational Texts?
Writer Karen Attiah recently wrote about the pleasure of perusing other people’s personal libraries and then asked her followers what their “personal foundational texts” were…those books that people read over and over again during the course of their lives. Here was her answer:
Herge’s The Adventures of Tintin were foundational books for me — and probably why I’m in journalism today.
Otherwise:
Autobiography of Malcolm X
Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider”
Howard French: A Continent for the TakingAnd lately: Anaïs Nin’s diaries
And I haven’t re-read them in a long time, but Barbara Ehrenreich’ Nickel and Dimed” and Dambisa Moyo’s “Dead Aid” were paradigm shifting for me.
There are tons of good books mentioned in the replies and quote posts. One of the most faved answers features a book called They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45, which I don’t think I’d ever heard of but sounds fascinating and unfortunately very relevant.
In thinking about the books I’ve read that made a significant impact on how I see and understand the world, I’d have to go with:
- Various Richard Scarry books (like Cars and Trucks and Things That Go) when I was little, although Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood & Sesame Street probably had a bigger and more lasting impact on who I am as a person.
- Where the Red Fern Grows was my favorite book as a child — I read it so many times. And there were these biography series for kids at my local library and I read a bunch of them. The two that I distinctly remember were the books on Thomas Edison and Harriet Tubman. From the Edison book I learned that a clever lad from the Midwest could make and invent wonderful things using your mind and your hands. And Harriet Tubman: she was straight-up a superhero and her story taught me all I needed to know about the truth of American slavery.
- I first read Orwell’s 1984 in 1984, when I was 10 or 11. Probably affected my view of the world more than any other book.
- As an adult, I’d say that A Natural History of the Senses, Nickel and Dimed, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1491, Chaos, A People’s History of the United States, and The Warmth of Other Suns have formed the backbone of my view of the world. There are probably a few others that I’m forgetting, but those are the biggies.
How about you? What are your personal foundational texts? Note that, as I understand it, these are not simply your favorite books, but the books that mean a lot to you and have been instrumental to your development as a human.
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I find myself seeing examples of the lessons in Hardball: How Politics Is Played Told by One Who Knows the Game all the time, and a lot of how I think about marketing comes from Purple Cow by Seth Godin.
I like the framing of "foundational texts" as opposed to biggest influence, or favorite, or most influential. The idea of text becoming the bedrock of a life just feels right.
Mine are probably all fiction/plays, which isn't a surprise given who I've grown up to be. Off the top of my head: The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury), The Transit of Venus (Hazzard), Bel Canto (Patchett), Microserfs (Coupland), the collected works of Eugene Ionesco, A Little Night Music (Sondheim).
And (yes!) A Natural History of the Senses - I have my paperback from 1992 on my shelf a few feet from where I'm typing this, tattered and much loved.
I have exactly that same paperback, also tattered.
Absolutely loved Bel Canto!
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY - Michael Chabon
LESS - Andrew Sean Greer
THE SECRET HISTORY - Donna Tartt
RAGTIME - E. L. Doctorow
THE HOURS - Michael Cunningham
THE ART OF FIELDING - Chad Harbach
THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE - John Irving
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS - Allan Gurganus
MYSELF AMONG OTHERS - Ruth Gordan
A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW - Amor Towles
GEEK LOVE - Katherine Dunn
AWAKENINGS - Oliver Sacks
SCOUNDREL TIME - Lillian Hellman
PALIMPSEST - Gore Vidal
THE MAN WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH THE MOON - Tom Spanbauer
Encyclopedia Brown
Hardy Boys (reboot)
Tale of Two Cities
Lord of the Flies
Adventures of Huckleberry Fin
—————————
The Watchmen
The Return of the Dark Knight
Catch 22
Heart of Darkness
The Stranger
The Trial
Crime and Punishment
1984
Animal Farm
A Confederacy of Dunces
Steppenwolf
Sidhartha
**Enders Game Saga (Orson Scott Card)
The Dark Forest (2nd book in Remembrance of Earths Past trilogy)
Vietnam - Max Hastings
The Iliad
————————————————
Moby Dick
Everything between the dashed lines I’ve read multiple times if not double digits and my relationship with the material is constantly evolving and impacting how interact with other media.
Before the dashed lines were works that changed my relationship with books and the notion of reading for pleasure. Lord of the Flies was the first assigned reading that I relished.
Finally Moby Dick is the one tome I have picked up dozens of times… began in earnest and for various reasons met with cognitive inertia.
It is my “white whale”. I am committed to persevering, but the allegory is so dense… so ripe with literary reference … that I need to pace myself.
Eventually.
Also What it Takes - by Richard Ben Carson…
Why I will never run for public office.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I played the text adventure game on my folks' old DOS computer years before I got the book at the library. Got as far as the Vogon airlock. My first grown-up novel after a lot of RL Stine and DE Athkins stuff.
Finite and Infinite Games. Confirmed stuff I already felt but gave me a new lens for the world.
Improvise by Mick Napier fundamentally changed the way I did improv, which is what I spent my free time doing for most of my 30's.
AD&D 2nd Edition Player's Handbook. A reference, but I read it front to back. D&D feels more like "this is the prototype for all fantasy" to me than anything else in the genre, even Tolkien.
Brave New World — As a teenager, more than 1984 or Fahrenheit 451, this book demonstrated the danger of complacency and self-satisfaction.
Nickel and Dimed — As a French living in the US in my 30s, this book explained a lot of the American society at once (a lesson that may also apply to the French society more and more now...).
Creative, Inc. (Ed Catmull) — Lots of gems that resonated with me and still do when I went on to run / build / participate in various small businesses / startups in my 40s and now 50s...
Just read Brave New World for the first time ever this year and it blew my mind. Can’t believe I’d somehow never crossed paths with it before!
Horton Hears a Who—he was so dedicated and earnest in the face of ridicule and mob mentality. Baum's Oz series, Nancy Drew, Jo March, Anne Shirley, and Little House modeled curious and delightfully stubborn female leads for me as a kid. Oz and Tolkien were my pre-Potter magic, and Where the Red Fern Grows (sob) and Watership Down introduced grit and survival.
Foundational as a young adult: Travels with Charley, Walden, A Portrait of a Lady—all exploring beyond established systems, traveling, and reflecting/observing/taking responsibility for one's choices. The Ender's Game series and The Worthing Saga were sci-fi favorites. Catch 22/FUBAR and The Tao of Pooh—very opposite—loom large, too.
Related: I regularly wonder how often young boys have books with curious, stubborn, capable female leads read to them if they don't have a sister (or even if they do). Being mixed, I also think about how white my childhood role models were, and how rare and exciting it was for me as a kid to see an Asian or half-Asian American girl in literally anything.
Anne Rioux in *Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters* (Norton, 2018) suggests that boys—who generation after generation are mystified by teenage girls and desperate for some key to unlock it all for them—should all read *Little Women* and it's [madness? confusing? regrettable?] that we don't actively steer them in that direction.
I can't put my finger on any texts that I would call "foundational" but Ender's Game crossed my mind. Flowers for Algernon was memorable too. I didn't read much in my younger years.
As a teenager, Jamie Delano's run on the first year of Hellblazer taught me a lot about politics, as well as setting me on a path to appreciate the weirder end of the comics medium.
In my very early 20s Iain Banks' The Crow Road was a pretty good "how to live" text, or at least "how to grow up". Really happy I got to thank him in person a decade later.
A few years later I read The Illuminatus Trilogy which didn't seem a big deal at the time but in hindsight totally reprogrammed my brain. Thanks RAW!
Jason, I wore out my copy of Where The Red Fern Grows as a kid from reading it so much. Absolutely foundational and I sometimes still think about the descriptions of trapping raccoons with holes drilled into fallen trees and nails and shiny objects… so vivid still in my brain. I wonder what it would be like to reread as an adult.
I re-read Sideways Stories from Wayside School with my 4th grader recently and was so delighted at how much of it I remembered (and how weirdly dark the humor is in a kids book!).
Books that have stuck with me otherwise feel surprisingly few: Hitchhiker’s Guide, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, A Brief History of Time. Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire and Omnivore’s Dilemma definitely influenced me in my young adult days and set me down a path of continued fascination with plants and food and many, many other books about those subjects.
I read a lot of pulp sci fi paperbacks as a kid, old Bradbury and Vonnegut and Arthur C Clarke stuff that I used to buy from library paperback sales; and I’m 100% sure it was influential to who I am today but I wouldn’t point to any single titles necessarily…
Omnivore's Dilemma had a huge impact on me.
Sideways stories has stuck with me forever! - am still leery of any 19th floor of a building.
That raccoon trap still sticks with me. What a metaphor for so much of human consumerism.
Behave by Robert Sapolsky had a profound impact on me. As a kid, Winnie the Pooh, giving me a lifelong foundation of love and friendship and care. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, for sure.
Ways of Seeing is up there. Along with The Medium Is the Massage. And less renowned, Delirious New York.
I like the idea of trying to limit my foundational texts. The books I read over and over:
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (this genuinely changed my relationship with nature)
On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry
Kingdom, Grace, Judgment by Robert Farrar Capon (as a former pastor, nothing shaped how I express my faith more than this book. Oh that the American Evangelical Church would read it…)
I'm not sure if Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell changed the way I interact with the world, but I do return to it year after year, and would call it the book I love the most. I'm always chasing the feeling I have while reading it, spending a significant amount of time trying to suss out why I love it so that I can find another book that hits me in a similar way. After years of trying, it was Piranesi that got closest. She's reportedly working on a modern-day follow up to Strange and I do hope I get to read it one day.
*Pilgrim at Tinker Creek* -- I read it again every few years, and remember again that seeing is not automatic and that what you see depends on how hard you think. Foundational, absolutely. [Edit: Also, ordering *Kingdom, Grace, Judgment* from my library network immediately. - JNF]
Joshua -- Now I'm dying to hear your foundational texts!
I've read *Infinite Jest* at least three times, does that count? Clearest picture of the nature of addiction/worship as I had yet encountered, when I first read it. Also, DFW was the closest we had to a modern moralist in lit at the time (I think George Saunders might be filling that role now).
*Jonathan Strange* made the rounds in my family, and we've read it at least twice. Again, men trying to deal with their own moral compromise, and learn from it, in spite of astronomically bad consequences. There's something there.
I always cite Calvin and Hobbes, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and George Carlin's standup specials. Later, James Joyce, James Baldwin, Frank O'Hara, Walter Benjamin, Jane Austen's BBC adaptations, Erich Auerbach, Jorge Luis Borges, and Hayao Miyazaki were all really important to me. As a technology and media journalist, David Carr was my most important model.
I wish this list weren't so heavy on men! As a scholar, I can say that Susan Stewart, Danielle Allen, Johanna Drucker, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Cornelia Vismann were big influences. But while they mattered, Woolf and Stein were less important to me than Joyce, Morrison and hooks less than Baldwin, Dickinson and Moore less than O'Hara, etc.
Also: D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, a book I loved (I'm wearing a t-shirt featuring it now) and have given as a gift many times. Plus The Muppets, Sesame Street, Square One Television, Mister Rogers, all that kid shit.
I read Calvin & Hobbes constantly as a child and it has thoroughly informed my world view on the nature/desirability of growing up and the role of imagination and technology in our lives.
The Autobiography of Malcom X is a book I selected in grade school to do a book report (I recall that I liked the X on the cover) and is how I came to learn, as child, the degree to which life could be unfair.
The things they carried turned me into a voracious reader in high school (I read it in one day after it was assigned in an English class) and also changed my assessment of what it means for something to be "true"
His Dark Materials is the book that most impacted my view of religion and the role I wanted it to have in my own life. It is also the book I have re-visited the most as an adult.
The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go are the books that taught me the importance of open and honest communication with others and with myself and also capture neatly how difficult or painful that can be. Thinking about them still makes me sad.
If on a winter's night a traveler taught me the importance of context in our appreciation of art - the difference between viewing something as a reader vs an active participant in it's creation. I think about it frequently.
My son and I have been slowly working our way through The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.
I read all of these strips when they were first printed, from the morning newspaper. My older brother shared in the enjoyment, we always got a kick out of the plots that spanned multiple days of the week.
Book 3 of 4 in the complete collection has coincided with my son gaining confidence in his own reading ability. He attempts some of the strips that look "easier" (the ones in which Calvin is not challenging someone else's worldview). Hopefully by the time we finish Book 4 he can return to the beginning & read them all to his younger brother.
Just thinking of the books I read and reread and reread before I was 21…
How to Eat Fried Worms was hilarious, and showed me that anything can be accomplished with a little planning and a lot of will.
A Wrinkle in Time gave me strange new vocabulary about time and space, which made actual science geekery a bit more approachable. It also prodded me toward strong-headed brainy women.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was riotously funny and I sought out others who thought so too.
The Talented Mr. Ripley made me yearn for European art & travel… like a sociopathic Rick Steves. I swear, I actually did understand he was an anti-hero not to be emulated, and also that I have not murdered anyone.
Have you read (or listened to) the Isaac Steele books (Daniel Rigby)? If you like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy you'll probably like those as well. The audio books are excellent (read by the author with the best sound design I can remember hearing) and included in an Audible account.
Total Paradigm Shifters:
Liar's Poker
Guns, Germs and Steel
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Practical Daily Impact:
How to Win Friends and Influence People: This last one was assigned reading at my first job out of college in sales. Sales was not for me. However, the simple guidance on how to connect with people comes back at least once a week. And, to this day in the extremely rare situation where I am leaving a phone number on voicemail, I repeat it twice.
This is really good to include Carnegie. For me, Getting to Yes and 7 Habits were also foundational in my young adulthood.
D' Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths.
I checked that out of the library so many times when I was maybe 6 or 7 that my parents just bought me my own copy. I grew up in a household that did not attend church, and I think, if we are talking about foundational texts to our lives, that spending so much time at a young age with another culture's gods that you don't want to meet, like, ever (you will get turned into a swan, or worse!) is probably a pretty big reason why I am an atheist. I have spent way more time in my life reading that than the bible, that's for sure.
Books that stuck with me that I read later that I think about all the time. Donna Tartt's Secret History.
Shirley Jackson's The Lottery.
I think about that pep talk Cromwell gives to Henry VIII in Wolf Hall all the time.
Travels with Charley
Snow Crash
The World Without Us
American Colossus- H.W. Brands (If you want to understand the United States in 2024, this book about capitalism in the late 1800s is a good place to start.)
The Dark Tower- Waste Lands (Actually a lot of Stephen King's books, I read a TON of these, at probably too young of an age.)
Any Time Life book I could get my hands on. Gen Xers, you know what I am talking about.
Gen X-er here. I wore out the Time Life "The Universe" and "Evolution" books when I was a kid. The purple one and the brown one.
Great comments and they have reminded me of books I haven’t thought about in a long time.
Elementary School
Where The Red Fern Grows
The Velveteen Rabbit
Superfudge
All the Choose Your Own Adventure and Encyclopedia Brown books
School library also had biographies for kids which I devoured.
Middle/High School
Tale of Two Cities
University & Beyond
You can always improve your foundation
Their Eyes Were Watching God
This book, about a woman’s experience as far away from my own lived experience as possible, is so beautiful that it is one of the few books I’m willing to read over and over.
I love Their Eyes Were Watching God, too. It's one of the truly beautiful American novels, and Hurston was destitute when she died and buried in an unmarked grave!
Victor Hugo: Les Misérables (abridged)
Miguel De Cervantes: Don Quixote
Dalton Trumbo: johnny got his gun
José Saramago: All The Names
Roddy Doyle: Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha
Italo Calvino: Mr. Palomar
Octavia E. Butler: Kindred
Richard Powers: The Overstory
Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Daniel Dennett: Consciousness Explained
Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass
johnny got his gun - I still can't bring myself to read it. Metallica's "One" video scarred me too much.
The experience of reading "johnny got his gun" can certainly be traumatic ..., but it can also be enlightening. The issues it deals with extend far beyond war.
Johnny Got His Gun is one of the seminal anti-war books. Everyone should read it along with All Quiet on the Western Front and Slaughterhouse Five.
Ah, Gödel, Escher, Bach: I got that as a teen for Christmas and it became a real foundation for me: Seeing the beauty of logic and patterns and learning about their limits at the same time.
Books that have stuck with me and provided a way to view this complicated world, or at least some context for it.
Mother Night by Vonnegut, just reread this and it still has so much relevance to how our world operates.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller. Read this at the end of my senior year of HS and so many of the ideas have stuck with me even though I don’t think I’ve reread it since.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Rhodes. A recent addition, but as a scientist and engineer this offered me an amazing history lesson along with social context surrounding physics in the early 20th century. Still thinking about it years after reading it.
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. Tugs at my heartstrings, hits my melancholy need, and is wonderfully human and absurd.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb is one of my absolute favorite books.
In somewhat chronological order:
Toni Morrison - Jazz,
Paul Beatty - White Boy Shuffle and his early poetry,
Dorothy Parker's stories,
John Updike - the Rabbit books,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons,
Roger Pemrose - The Road to Reality,
Wilkerson - Warmth of Other Sons,
Jean-Claude Izzo - the Marseilles Trilogy,
John Casey - Room for Improvement,
Cixin Liu - Remembrance of Earth's Past, and
anything by James Baldwin or Willa Cather.
When I was a kid I was obsessed with the section on Painting in our Encyclopedia Brittanica
Winnie The Pooh deeply influenced my feelings on friendship
The Lorax and The Sneetches affected my sense of justice for sure
These days, I periodically re-read The Artist's Struggle for Integrity by James Baldwin (an essay), De Profundis by Oscar Wilde, and The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey.
Curious how people view Snow Crash... I still feel like its a prediction of the future still playing out.
I'll 2nd the nomination of Guns Germs and Steel. Even with it's flaws, it opened me up to a way of thinking and a lot of other writing of the topic of humanity.
Totally in on Snow Crash, and once that is re-read, then on to Cryptonomicron for the full Stephenson.
Danny, Champion of the World and The Hobbit were two childhood favorites that is still think about regularly. I made a tradition of reading The Hobbit every time I got sick and carried that on well into adulthood.
A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky is another one I have repeatedly returned to. As a fanatic for all things river related, Peter Heller’s “The River” is another one for me. I would also put in a vote for Thinking Fast and Slow.
*Danny* is one of those "books-aimed-at-kids-that-adults-should-read," because the picture of a parent being open and emotionally mature about their own flaws with their child, and the complicated way children metabolize our character failures and repeat them but also perhaps redeem them, is so instructive. Also, the way we might revisit or even lionize our vices as a way of holding on to our departed loved ones, a grief-processing strategy. Also, that our children may have original ideas, and agency and initiative, that are better than our own, and we would do well to pay attention to them. So many reasons, really.
Yes Joshua, 100%. Danny should have been on my list for exactly the reasons you articulate here. The parent-child relationship modelled in that book was revelatory for me.
Growing up deep in the Bible Belt, it was probably my first introduction to the idea of people being morally complicated, but still fundamentally good.
Parable of the Sowers/Talents by Octavia Butler
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
The Desiderata (poem)
The Language of Letting Go (AlAnon book)
Catch 22
Cat's Cradle
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
Blistering barnacles, yes yes yes to the Tintin books! Also the Asterix books and Prince Valiant and those fershlugginer old Mad magazines...
For "grownup" texts, The Food Scandal turned me vegetarian 36 years ago, and Jude the Obscure and Middlemarch turned me off marriage (twice and never again!).
I didn't know it at the time, but at around age 12, Jonathan Livingston Seagull had a pretty big influence on me.
Also,
Encyclopedia Brown
The Demon-Haunted World
Mad Magazine
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Hitchhiker's Guide
Sneetches and Other Stories - Dr. Seuss
What Do People Do All Day - Richard Scarry
Bloom County Babylon - Berke Breathed
The Complete Far Side - Gary Larson
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
The Mezzanine - Nicholson Baker
Thinking, Fast & Slow - Daniel Kahneman
The Myth of Normal - Gabor & Daniel Maté
Opus! I can't believe I forgot about Bloom County; formative for me on the news and politics front, for sure. My elementary-age kids also found our old Far Side books years ago, and I'm convinced it shaped their pre-meme visual humor.
My kids are obsessed with my Complete Far Side books.
Encyclopedia Brown
Peanuts - I loved going to a great aunt's house because she had the huge Peanuts Treasury tomes.
Bloom County - Probably one of the first political texts I read. I didn't fully appreciate the satire, but I was definitely on to something.
Hitchhiker's Guide - I'm sure I laughed out loud at other books, but this one was different. Tears.
The Moviegoer
Fast Food Nation - I think this solidified my distrust of a lot of corporate messaging.
Buddhism, Plain and Simple
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - As a software engineer, Pirsig's ideas about Quality really resonated.
Love to see Douglas Adams all over this comment section. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is IT for me, I reread it at least every other year and referenced it in my wedding vows.
The Westing Game. The Rings of Saturn. Reading The Basque History of the World, Cod, and Salt in quick succession.
John McPhee's The Control of Nature and Mark Monmonier's Cartographies of Danger. My shelves are filled with both of their works, but those are the two titles that really pushed me down the path of becoming what I am today (uh, a cartographer specializing in disasters).
Love Kurlansky. I just started his 1968 and, oh boy, is it resonating for me with our current climate.
Hours and hours spent with Richard Scarry and Tintins. Also “Corduroy” by Don Freeman, about a stuffed bear in a department store who comes to life after hours, and E. B. White’s "Stuart Little,” which is a perfect book.
In college I read Borges’s “Ficciones" for the first time and several of those stories (the obvious ones) just plain changed everything I understood reading and writing. Then I read Julio Cortazar’s “Hopscotch," and there's a sentence on page 11 that was so foundational that it led in a traceable line to my eventual career as a graphic designer (and away, thankfully, from academia).
Also Dubliners, Delirious New York, Fournier’s Manual on Typography, Robert Frank’s The Americans, Andre Kertesz's Paris and New York, and Leo Steinberg’s Other Criteria. These are all foundational, as distinct from favorite, in that they formed my basic outlook on any other books and art. (The only music books I read are interviews with Tom Waits.)
Great thread, so interesting to see everyone else’s posts!
Borges almost made my list. I think about The Library of Babel all the time. Mostly when I worry about AI and content mills, but also a lot when I’m filling out pointless paperwork at the office.
Primo Levi - Survival in Auschwitz - I try to read as many Holocaust memoirs as I can. Anne Frank was also a foundational text for me. Whatever I think is hard or difficult in my life can not compare to what many people in the 1940s had to face.
Jonathan Kozol - Savage Inequalities - one of the reasons I continue to volunteer in public schools. Witnessing brutal inequality in public education was also one of the motivating factors in LBJ's life and political career and one of the reasons I love the Robert Caro LBJ books so much.
I would not have studied literature and become who I am today had I not discovered Nicholson Baker's U and I when I was an impressionable youth. A writer named JC Hallman wrote a version of that book in homage to Nicholson Baker, titled B & Me, and I think that's pretty good, too.
No mention of our man, Matt? :wink: (I was considering including A Supposedly Fun Thing...)
I thought of including something but couldn't narrow it down to one work.
@sampotts - seemed too obvious for me! IJ was foundational to my reading life for sure.
This is such a marvelous thread; I have a few foundational texts that came immediately to mind, but reading everyone else's responses reminded me of many others.
My early foundational texts are real white and male; the books that I've most loved, and most frequently read in the last 15+ years are much more diverse:
Can't wait to keep checking this discussion!
I love that you put in Langewiche's long form journalism!
Along those lines, Elizabeth Kolbert's Sixth Extinction and her new book, & Michael Lewis's Fifth Risk also shaped how I look at the modern world.
The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman. It changed my world view and I reread it every five years or so and it is always relevant. Her definition of folly is especially relevant today.
My (re)reading list consisted of a variety of adventures any STEAM kid—well before it was a named phenomena—would consume, certainly with some being particularly influential. In the current era (10ish years), I find myself referencing:
- What The Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World By Jon Young
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants By Robin Wall Kimmerer
for both navigating and being in the world.
I have other favorites, but these are the ones I think about, aspire to, and have read at least a half-dozen times.
In the order I encountered them:
- Pickle-Chiffon Pie
- Baum’s Oz Books
- Journey through Genius
- Hitchhikers (specifically Life, the Universe, and Everything)
- The Doonesbury Chronicles
- Fletch
- A Mathematician’s Lament
- How We Got to Now
This is maybe the greatest thread since Jason opened comments on the site. Many great books mentioned already. I wanted to add Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, which i received as a Hanukah present at age six, read many times, gained new meaning when it was an assigned reading in fifth grade, gained new meaning reading it aloud to my kids when they were young, and still find ways to think about Milo, Tock, and the gang all the time.
I rarely reread books. These are the books that have stuck with me the most.
In the order in which I encountered them:
Encyclopedia Brown series - Donald J. Sobol
Architecture books by David Macauley
Choose You Own Adventure series
Runaway Ralph - Beverly Cleary
Jacob Two Two series - Mordecai Richler
The Devil's Storybook - Natalie Babbitt
Marvel Comics (The Defenders, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Daredevil)
Dune - Frank Herbert
Philip K. Dick short stories
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson
A Natural History of the Senses - Diane Ackerman
How We Die - Sherwin B. Nuland
The Brief History of the Dead - Kevin Brockmeier
Lord of the Rings trilogy - J.R.R. Tolkien
What Technology Wants - Kevin Kelly
Yes to David Macauley! I checked out Castle probably a dozen times, casually adding a known favorite to the top of my pile of new books from the library.
When I was in third grade, we had an assignment to write a letter to an author. I wrote my own Encyclopedia Brown-inspired story and sent it to Donald Sobol. I received a reply that was typed, but personalized and signed. Unfortunately, I no longer have that letter.
How We Die and Calvin and Hobbes. Both teaching the beauty and deepness of life.
This is such an interesting thread, thanks everyone for sharing. From youngest to oldest:
Such a pleasure to read all the posts. & I enjoy the GenX overlaps, the Encyclopedia Browns, etc. I mused on this over a couple of days--good dish washing thinking--and decided to stop at 21 years of age.
Are you My Mother? (PD Eastman)
Ramona the Pest (Beverly Cleary)
The Little House on the Prairie series (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
I, Keturah (Ruth Wolff)
Ring of Endless Light (Madeline L'Engle)
Our Bodies, Our Selves: A Book by and for Women (Boston Women's Health Book Collective)
Howards End (EM Forester)
The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck)
Selected Poems & Two Plays of WB Yeats
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
The Ramona books were SO important to me as a younger sister with big feelings (and an infuriatingly well-behaved older sibling).
Saw this thread and FINALLY clicked the membership links (even though I've been reading here on and off since 1998-99-ish, yoiks). This is such a cool idea.
As a voracious reader, there was a lot to choose from:
Lord of the Rings/The Silmarillion/The Hobbit
Hitchhiker's Guide (all)
Peanuts
Mad Magazine
Tintin
The Far Side
Calvin & Hobbes
Stranger in a Strange Land/Number of the Beast
Xanth novels in general
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis
Mr. Bligh's Bad Language, Greg Dening
Infinite Jest
Cryptonomicon/The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson
Mars trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson
The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie
And, perhaps more than anything else, a relatively new one: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow. This is an intense book, yet fills me with hope for us as a species. I'm on a second listen-through right now and it's even more rewarding than Round 1.
All of the books by Polish science fiction author Stanisław Lem, especially His Master’s Voice, Imaginary Magnitude and A Perfect Vacuum. Philosophy, science, irony and playful imagination. I read them first in my late teens and then over and over again, they never get old.
I have been thinking about this post on and off for days. I think of foundational as perspective-shifting but also repeatedly, regularly built from. I too would put Richard Scarry and Encyclopedia Brown in that space. But more personally:
- the Broadway cast of Les Mis, all those people and their messy imperfect lives blew my mind as a middle schooler and still frame some context of morality, justice, inequality, and hoping for better (and with belting musical numbers!)
- Little Women, for showing that stories don’t always end how you want them to (and it takes several readings and years to see why that might be)
- all the autistic coded (in hindsight) characters that I never had words to explain why they felt like kindreds: Anne of Greem Gables, Darcy, Amelie, Wrinkle in Time kids, Entrapta on She-RA (reboot)…
- Jenkins’ Textual Poachers and later Gotschall’s Storytelling Animal articulated parts of why media and fandom and stories are so fundamentally important it changed my career trajectory.
Phantom Tollbooth.
I second several that others mentioned: Octavia Butler's novels, Siddhartha.
I find myself rereading Ted Chiang's stories. D'Aulaires Greek Myths made me think of Zorba the Greek, as well as In The Beginning by Virginia Hamilton, a retelling of creation myths from around the world.
More recently, The Ministry For the Future.
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