In the past I have mentioned that my mother taught me to cook. She's got such a library of cookbooks that when they re-did the kitchen ten years ago she had bookshelves put in at one end. What I learned from her is what others above have already said: start with a solid recipe and go make it your own with what's actually in your kitchen and some fundamentals of food science so you don't wreck things.
That said, there are a handful of cookbooks I jump off from most often:
The Joy of Cooking has everything, and the reference in back covers useful things like what star anise is. That role has been supplanted by the internet, but go look up the decadent Macaroni and Cheese recipe that pre-date Netscape and tell me who taught who.
The James Beard Cookbook is an older hardback that includes laughably few ingredients in the recipes but explains why you need these and the rules for working with them. You don't get x minutes at y degrees so much as a quick rule to estimate how long it might take and how to tell when it's done. You learn a lot when the details are stripped away.
Better Homes New Cook Book is the old 60s three ring binder with the red and white checks that everyone has or has seen. Building block staples like pancakes and breads and pot pies that do not change.
I like
The Complete America's Test Kitchen Show Cookbook because of how much effort they put into testing various techniques and reimagining recipes to get close to the traditional result via other paths that save time or effort. It makes me think more than most other books.
I like Mark Bittman because he gives you a recipe and then sticks in a half dozen short variations to send you off in new directions. The Weber book has a wealth of info on the grill. My wife ran a CSA drop site at our home a a number of years so we have a pile of vegetarian books, but those aren't as helpful as you might imagine. The trouble with CSA boxes isn't that you need to find a variety of recipes for a variety of foods, it's that every year it seems that you're going to get waaaayyy more of one thing for an entire summer because that's what worked that summer and here's your third week of plentiful daikon radishes. There aren't enough cookbooks on earth to get rid of six or eight monster radishes every week.