In a couple months I’ll hit a major milestone in my prison odyssey, the 20-year mark. That world out there has changed so much over the last two decades. I remember sitting in my cell, watching the news as Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans in 2005, thinking how I was just buying crack in a 9th Ward housing project a couple months before. If someone would’ve run up to me back then and said “Dude! There’s a hurricane coming!” my response would’ve been something like “And???” It’s crazy to call myself lucky after wasting so much of my life in prison, but I consider myself a very lucky man. Fortunate to have survived my own ignorance. Blessed to have transcended my old knucklehead self. Grateful to have a release date.

There is such a thing as criminal menopause. Most 50-year-old prisoners neither think nor act anything like the younger, more impulsive versions of ourselves. Years in isolation will do that to a man.

One misconception of institutional life is that it is nonstop danger and violence. Pure adrenaline. This has not been my experience. There are patches of turbulence, for sure. But for the most part, prison life is monotonous. This is why so many of us turn to books. As a character in my favorite David Mitchell novel once pointed out, “Though books are no true escape, they will keep a mind from scratching itself raw.”

The following is a collection of books that have kept me company over these last 20 years of incarceration. Not just any old books.  Masterworks. I selected ten in no particular order. Just the best of the best.

• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell—I almost gave up in part one. What a colossal mistake that would have been. This is one of those books I return to every few years. Gas.
• Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr—I read his Pulitzer Prize-winning All the light We Cannot See first. Terrific novel. But this one is even better.
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt—Not sure why I even picked this one up. But once I did, I could not put it down. Such memorable characters. Awesome book.
• The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss—I keep hearing unconfirmed rumors that number three in this masterful series is finally out. I’m not a fantasy reader, but the story of Kvothe transcends genre.
• I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb—A novel about twins and schizophrenia. My friend Greg recommended this to me in B dorm at Okaloosa in 2017. I was on bunk check from the first page to the last. Instant classic.
• A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin—Someone forced Game of Thrones on me at Century Correctional in 2007. I read the first couple pages and thought “Nah.” Again, I’m not a fantasy guy. But then we went on lockdown for a stabbing, and I was stuck in my cell with no one to keep me company but Bran and Arya and Jon Stark and the Lannisters. For the next 10 years, I was back and forth between the Florida Panhandle and Westeros.
• The Nix by Nathan Hill—Brilliant writing. I’ve been thinking about this one a lot lately with the DNC convention coming up in Chicago. He nails the ’68 riots. But this is a love story at heart.
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn—One of the greatest twists in modern fiction… I heard they made a movie out of it, but I’d be willing to bet that no director could do on the screen what Ms. Flynn does on the page.
• The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner—I read this around the time I started writing the Miranda Rights series. The author illustrates the incarcerated mother’s regret and pain as if she herself was serving a life sentence.
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace—A 1,000-page novel with hundreds of footnotes that require a separate bookmark. In the movie about this author, who sadly committed suicide a little over 15 years ago, he said that when the mailman dropped the advance copy on his porch it sounded like a bomb going off. Some of the most hilarious and tragic and brilliant writing I’ve ever come across. A difficult but highly rewarding read.