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.
Encyclopedia Brown
Hardy Boys (reboot)
Tale of Two Cities
Lord of the Flies
Adventures of Huckleberry Fin
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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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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