What are you looking for? Every home should have a big general cookbook with all the basics you can go back to to look up how to deal with an unfamiliar food or jog your memory, like how long to roast a meat or make puff pastry. For one thing you can't get distracted by the internet looking something up!
Better Homes and Gardens and Good Housekeeping both do great basic cookbooks. After that it's a matter of taste.
"How to Cook Everything" by Mark Bittman is a fabulous cookbook.
My favourites of recent years include:
Nigel Slater's "Tender" and the River Cottage "Veg Every Day."
My personal, all time favorites are Jane Grigson's cookbooks. All of them. She was a British cookery writer who was determined to find the best home cooking around Europe and get people making it again and demanding better quality food in the shops. She passed away in the early 90s but her voice is so clear and friendly. It's like cooking with a knowledgeable, encouraging friend in the kitchen and her anecdotes are delightful. Importantly, all her recipes work out. Even if I didn't cook I'd buy her books just to read.
The only caveat is that her recipes reflect what was easily available to buy in British supermarkets at the time so for instance she'll often direct you to use a mixture of double and single cream because for some reason whipping cream was seldom stocked, ditto sour cream. Obviously, just buy whipping cream etc instead of mixing it yourself.
If you like Italian food the "bible" is "The Silver Spoon," though using it requires understanding how Italians eat, i.e. pasta is a starter with little sauce. Ina Garten's books are more accessible to US readers.
The publishers "Hermes House" churned out cheap and cheerful paperback cook books. I started buying them when I was a poor student and still use them often. They are clearly written, nothing is very hard to do, and they work out. They are also the most lavishly illustrated of my cookbooks. Sometimes recipes are repeated between books because the books tend to be thematic "Eastern European," "Mexican," vegetarian," or "baking," but they're never not value for money. The only annoying habit is that they insist on giving everything English names so you might miss "spanakopita" in the index because the insist on calling them "spinach pies."
Ha, you've given be choice paralysis now, even though I've over 100 cookbooks!