1 week ago
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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.
LEAVES OF GRASS (WALT WHITMAN)
A RESPONSIBILITY TO AWE (REBECCA ELSON)
EINSTEIN’S DREAMS (ALAN LIGHTMAN)
THE LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ (JOHN STEINBECK)
THE ABUNDANCE (ANNIE DILLARD)
THE RIVER OF CONSCIOUSNESS (OLIVER SACKS)
Some of why I love it
THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS (ROSS GAY)
WILLARD GIBBS (MURIEL RUKEYSER)
THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS (JOHN KOENIG)
THE FRAGILE SPECIES (LEWIS THOMAS)
THE SOURCE OF SELF-REGARD (TONI MORRISON)
THE STAR THROWER (LOREN EISELEY)
EXISTENTIAISTS AND MYSTICS (IRIS MURDOCH)
UPSTREAM (MARY OLIVER)
CHAOS (JAMES GLEICK)
THE WAVE IN THE MIND (URSULA K. LE GUIN)
Some of why I love it
NOTHING PERSONAL (JAMES BALDWIN)
THANKS (RACHEL HÉBERT)
CONSOLATIONS (DAVID WHYTE)
A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES (JANNA LEVIN)
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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