Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
The bible, cover to cover: if reading western literature or philosophy produced in whatever year A.D., the bible is required reading for comprehending many the references and various rhetorical modes.  I'm irreligious from a muslim background myself but I'm reading it now.  Same goes for the qoran, my family is not a practicing muslim family and thus I never read it, but it's a part of the canon, must be read.  I'm not sure if I would like to have read these earlier tho, as now I have the consciousness to not be fooled by the stuff in these books.Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth is a very nice guide into mythology and what that and religion are.  It's like a vaccine for any sort of fundamentalism or bigotry, if read with some accompanying knowledge of mythological traditions.