Every editor I know has a book (or three, or seven) that rearranged something inside their head. Not books they admire from a professional distance, but books that grabbed them by the collar at exactly the right moment and said, “This is what writing can do.” We asked the ScrollWorks Media editorial team to share theirs. The answers surprised me, and I have worked with these people for years.

What follows are personal stories. These are not reviews or recommendations in the usual sense. They are accounts of collision, those moments when a particular book met a particular person at a particular time, and the person came out different. I think that is the most interesting thing about reading: it is never just about the book. It is about what you bring to it and what you are ready to receive.

Clara: “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson

Clara is our senior editor. She has worked on every title in our catalog, from The Last Archive to Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners. She is precise, patient, and occasionally terrifying when she finds a dangling modifier. So when she told me that the book that changed her life was Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, I was not surprised by the choice, but I was surprised by the story around it.

“I read it when I was twenty-two and temping at an insurance company,” she told me. “I had an English degree that felt useless and no idea what to do with it. I picked up Housekeeping at a used bookstore because it cost a dollar fifty.”

What struck her was not the plot, which she described as almost beside the point, but the sentences. Robinson writes with a density and precision that rewards slow reading. Every sentence carries weight. For Clara, this was a revelation about what editorial attention could do.

“I started paying attention to sentences differently after that book,” she said. “Not just what they communicated, but how they were built. The engineering of them. I realized that editing was not about fixing mistakes. It was about understanding how language works at the level of individual words and helping a writer get closer to what they actually mean.”

She applied to her first publishing job within a month of finishing the novel. Twenty years later, she still rereads it every few years. “It gets better every time,” she said. “Or maybe I get better at reading it. I honestly cannot tell the difference.”

David: “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro

David handles our non-fiction titles and brought The Cartographer’s Dilemma into our catalog. He is the kind of editor who sends you a three-page email about a single chapter and somehow makes you grateful for it. His pick was Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, a book that runs over 1,200 pages and somehow feels too short.

“I read it the summer after college,” David told me. “I was living in New York, interning at a magazine that no longer exists, making no money. I found a copy at the Strand that was falling apart. The spine was cracked and someone had underlined passages in the first hundred pages before apparently giving up.”

What got him was the scope. Caro spent seven years on the book, conducting hundreds of interviews and reading thousands of documents. David had never considered that a single book could contain that much research, that much ambition, and still be readable.

“It showed me that non-fiction could be as compelling as any novel,” he said. “Caro was not just presenting facts. He was constructing a narrative about power, about cities, about how one person can reshape the physical world that millions of people live in. The writing itself is extraordinary, but what really got me was the commitment. The idea that you could spend years of your life trying to understand one thing, and that the effort would be worth it.”

David credits that book with his decision to move into non-fiction editing. “Every time I work with an author who has done serious research, I think about Caro. I think about what it means to really do the work. And I hold our books to that standard, even if they are shorter and the subjects are different.”

Maren: “Beloved” by Toni Morrison

Maren is our newest editor, but she brought a perspective that has already influenced how we approach acquisitions. She came to publishing from academia and still has the scholar’s instinct for close reading. Her pick was Beloved, which she first encountered in a college seminar.

“My professor assigned it without any warning about what it was,” Maren said. “I think that was deliberate. She wanted us to come to it without preconceptions. I read the first fifty pages in my dorm room and then sat there for a long time trying to understand what had just happened to me.”

Morrison’s novel does something that Maren had not previously believed fiction could do. It makes history physical. The past in that book is not a memory or a lesson. It is a presence, something that occupies space and demands acknowledgment. For Maren, this reframed her entire understanding of what stories are for.

“I had been studying literature like it was a puzzle to solve,” she said. “Morrison showed me it was something else entirely. A novel could be an act of witness. It could hold pain and beauty in the same sentence and not resolve the tension between them. After that, I could not go back to reading as an academic exercise. I needed to be part of making books happen.”

Maren’s influence is visible in our recent acquisitions. She championed Still Waters by Elena Marsh, a book that shares Morrison’s interest in how the past lives inside the present. “I am not comparing anyone to Morrison,” Maren was quick to add. “But I look for that quality. That willingness to sit with difficult material and trust the reader to sit with it too.”

James: “The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel”

James is our copy editor, and he is the person in our office most likely to have an opinion about the Oxford comma. (He is against it, which starts arguments roughly once a month.) His pick surprised everyone: Isaac Babel, the Russian-Jewish writer who produced some of the most compressed, violent, and beautiful short fiction of the twentieth century.

“I found Babel in my late twenties,” James said. “I had been reading a lot of American minimalism. Carver, Hemingway, that whole tradition. And then someone handed me Babel and I realized that what I thought was spare writing was actually quite wordy compared to what this man could do in three pages.”

Babel wrote about the Russian Civil War, about Jewish life in Odessa, about violence and beauty existing in the same breath. His sentences are short, precise, and often shocking in their juxtapositions. A description of a sunset might be followed by a description of a killing, and both would be rendered with the same careful attention.

“What Babel taught me about editing,” James said, “is that every word has to earn its place. Not just in the sense of cutting filler, which is the obvious lesson. But in the sense that word choice is moral. The words you use to describe something shape how the reader understands it. Babel chose his words with a precision that I find almost frightening. And that made me a better copy editor, because I started asking not just ‘Is this grammatically correct?’ but ‘Is this the right word?’”

James brought this sensibility to his work on Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield, where the historical setting demanded careful attention to language. “You cannot have a character in the 1800s using a word that was not coined until 1950,” he said. “Babel made me obsessive about that kind of thing, and I am grateful for it.”

Rachel: “The Journalist and the Murderer” by Janet Malcolm

Rachel runs our marketing and publicity. She is not an editor in the traditional sense, but she reads more than anyone else in the office, and her understanding of how books find their audiences has shaped ScrollWorks in ways that are hard to overstate. Her pick was Janet Malcolm’s slim, devastating book about the ethics of journalism.

“I read it in college,” Rachel said, “and it ruined me for lazy non-fiction forever.” Malcolm’s argument, that the relationship between a journalist and their subject is inherently exploitative, applies equally well to publishing. The relationship between a publisher and an author involves trust, power, and the tension between commercial interests and artistic integrity.

“Malcolm made me think about honesty,” Rachel said. “Not just factual honesty, but structural honesty. The way you present information shapes what the reader believes. That is true in journalism, and it is true in book marketing. When I write jacket copy or a press release, I am making choices about how to frame a book. Malcolm made me take that responsibility seriously.”

Rachel also credits Malcolm with her belief that short books can have outsized impact. “It is under 200 pages. It says more about ethics and storytelling than most books three times its length. When I am evaluating a manuscript’s commercial potential, I never assume that longer is better. Sometimes the most powerful thing a book can do is make its point and stop.”

What These Choices Tell Us

I spent a long time thinking about these selections after the conversations. A few patterns emerged that I find interesting.

First, nobody picked a recent book. The most recent title in this group was published in 1990. I do not think this means recent books are worse. I think it means the books that shape you tend to arrive early, when you are still forming your ideas about what reading and writing can be. By the time you are a working professional, you have a framework. These are the books that built the framework.

Second, nobody picked a book from their own specialty. Clara, who edits fiction, picked a novel, but not one that represents the kind of fiction she typically acquires. David, our non-fiction editor, picked a biography that is far outside the scope of anything we would publish. The books that shaped them professionally were not templates for their work. They were expansions of their sense of what was possible.

Third, every story involved a specific physical copy. A dollar-fifty paperback. A falling-apart copy from the Strand. A book assigned without warning in a college seminar. This matters. The circumstances of reading, where you were, what your life was like, what you were struggling with, become part of the book’s meaning. I think publishers sometimes forget this. We think of books as products, but they are also events. They happen to people in particular moments, and the moment shapes the reading as much as the text does.

How This Shapes ScrollWorks

I asked these questions partly out of curiosity and partly because I wanted to understand something about our own editorial identity. Why does ScrollWorks feel the way it does? Why do we gravitate toward certain kinds of books and pass on others?

The answers are in these origin stories. Clara’s devotion to sentence-level craft shows up in every editorial letter she writes. David’s belief in thorough research is why our non-fiction titles, from The Cartographer’s Dilemma to Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners, are as rigorously fact-checked as we can make them. Maren’s insistence that fiction can bear witness influenced her editorial direction on Still Waters. James’s word-level precision keeps our prose honest. Rachel’s Malcolm-trained skepticism keeps our marketing honest too.

A publishing house is, in the end, the sum of the people who work there and the reading that made them who they are. Our catalog is the visible output. The invisible input is every book that every person on our team has ever loved, argued with, thrown across the room, or stayed up too late finishing.

I did not share my own origin-story book here, partly because this piece is already long and partly because the editor in me knows that ending with someone else’s voice is stronger than ending with my own. But if you are curious: ask me at a book event sometime. I will tell you about a battered copy of a novel I found in a train station in another country, in another decade, when I was someone else entirely. It is a good story. All the best reading stories are.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.