The books we read when we’re young can shape our lives.
In his impoverished youth, Abraham Lincoln read deeply from the Bible and Shakespeare, and the rhythms of those works echoed in his speeches. As a 12- or 13-year-old slave, Frederick Douglass took the money he had saved from shining shoes and bought a copy of Caleb Bingham’s “The Columbian Orator,” a book he kept on hand his entire life and described as his “noble acquisition” and “rich treasure.” At age 19, Louisa May Alcott, renowned to this day as the author of “Little Women,” drew up a list of “Books I Like,” which included authors such as Plutarch, John Milton, and Thomas Carlyle.
