Foundational Texts

Recently, I saw this post from Kottke about so called Foundational Texts, and it got me thinking.

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…

How about you? What are your personal foundational texts?

The question is a super interesting one. What books one reads shape their worldview. All media does this but, at least to me, books seem to hold an outsized influence. A few movies or TV shows stand out to me as being my favorites, fewer still exert a shaping force on me. Books seem to possess a more potent staying power.

The thing is, I don't really re-read books (especially non-fiction). Sure, there's a couple I've revisited over the years, but it's a very small list. That said there are select set of books that, once I'd read them, I've never gotten them out of my head.

So let's get into it (in no particular order):

• The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
• The People vs. Democracy by Yascha Mounk
• The Scientific Revolution by Steven Shapin
• Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
• The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
• Gödel's Proof by Ernest Nagel

Most of these I read in high school and college (or right after college), which is probably why they are so foundational. What's interesting is that, looking at them now, I clearly see a set of themes that stand out to me as foundational to my thinking about the world: optimism vs. caution, systems vs. the individual, agency vs. limits. Perhaps I'll expound more on these in a future post.

Usually, when I to get interested in a topic, I dive in whole hog, and so my reading list tends to be very single-minded for a while until eventually it takes a sharp detour one day toward something usually unrelated. From 2017-2022 that topic was U.S. Politics and Government. When I'm not in that sort of research-mode, I tend to revert to either some classic American novel or Fantasy.

But this means that what "foundational" means to me is that it is heavily influential and formative as to how I think about a topic. When I think of each of the books in the list above, I can immediately recall the change it had on my thinking.

As I've mentioned before podcasts have had a huge impact on me, especially in my late high-school and early college years. Both the Writing Excuses podcast and the lectures from Astronomy 162 at Ohio State stand out in my memory as shaping my interests.

Now, to continue Jason's call to action, what about you? What are your foundational texts?