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.

LEAVES OF GRASS (WALT WHITMAN)

Why I love it

A RESPONSIBILITY TO AWE (REBECCA ELSON)

Some of why I love it

EINSTEIN’S DREAMS (ALAN LIGHTMAN)

Why I love it

THE LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ (JOHN STEINBECK)

Why I love it

THE ABUNDANCE (ANNIE DILLARD)

Some of why I love it

THE RIVER OF CONSCIOUSNESS (OLIVER SACKS)

Some of why I love it

THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS (ROSS GAY)

Why I love it

WILLARD GIBBS (MURIEL RUKEYSER)

Why I love it

THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS (JOHN KOENIG)

Why I love it

THE FRAGILE SPECIES (LEWIS THOMAS)

Why I love it

THE SOURCE OF SELF-REGARD (TONI MORRISON)

Some of why I love it

THE STAR THROWER (LOREN EISELEY)

Why I love it

EXISTENTIAISTS AND MYSTICS (IRIS MURDOCH)

Some of why I love it

UPSTREAM (MARY OLIVER)

Why I love it

CHAOS (JAMES GLEICK)

Why I love it

THE WAVE IN THE MIND (URSULA K. LE GUIN)

Some of why I love it

NOTHING PERSONAL (JAMES BALDWIN)

Why I love it

THANKS (RACHEL HÉBERT)

Why I love it

CONSOLATIONS (DAVID WHYTE)

Some of why I love it

A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURNING MACHINES (JANNA LEVIN)

Why I love it