20 Favorite Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian

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It is a beautiful dream, that there is something out there to instruct you how to live — a secret handed down by your parents or your teachers, a system like liberal arts education or cognitive behavioral therapy, a slogan held up by your heroes declaring the answer to the bottomless question of why you are here.

Whenever you wake up, however you wake up, you find yourself on a path no one else can walk for you, a path you must make by walking. Still, you can find signposts that keep you from losing your way in loneliness. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin wrote, “but then you read.”

In celebrating twenty years of The Marginalian — this ongoing record of learning how to live written in marginalia on the books I have read — I have attempted the impossible: to distill a lifetime of reading into the twenty books that have served as the most enduring signposts, apart from those I have written (which always both shape and are shaped by a writer’s life more profoundly than any books read). Here they are, in no particular order.