"The Hobbit"
J.R.R. Tolkien
One of my all-time favorites; I know it so well I could almost quote the book as I listened. It is arguably the grandfather of modern nerd culture. It does, of course, lead directly to the masterpiece The Lord of the Rings (which I'm thinking about reading for the dozenth-or-so time), and between the two works Tolkien gave us the modern conceptions of wizards, elves, dwarves, magic, quests, and more. Even if authors and filmmakers and designers stray from the formulas that Tolkien invented or codified (or borrowed from ancient myth), they do so only while acknowledging their debt to them. It is a claim that would be worthy of a dissertation, but I reckon without these books we would not have far-ranging Gesamtkunstwerk franchises such as Harry Potter, the superhero craze, or role-playing games. Tolkien's deep world-building set a standard for storytelling that others since have striven for (mostly in vain). And it all started with, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
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