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 Taking

And 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.

• books
• Karen Attiah