“Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” by Joan Didion (1968)

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If you’re one of the 20-somethings who currently carry tote bags emblazoned with Joan Didion’s face, you’re probably familiar with this one. But if you’re not, her first collection of nonfiction is the best place to start to understand why such tote bags exist. Didion’s essays in “Slouching” are firmly rooted in the culture of the 1960s — Haight-Ashbury, Joan Baez, political zealotry of various stripes — but their brilliance is in the way they still speak to the character (and characters) of this country today. With “Goodbye to All That,” Didion wrote the definitive account of loving and then leaving New York, which hasn’t kept hundreds of writers from trying their hand at the form.

“The Power Broker,” by Robert Caro (1975)

It might take a considerable portion of your 20s to read this book, which clocks in at about 1,300 pages, but it will be worth it. Robert Caro is best known now for his ongoing, multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, but “The Power Broker,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning life of Robert Moses, would have cemented his towering reputation had it been his only book. Never elected to any public office, Moses nevertheless did more to change the shape of New York City and Long Island in the 20th century (their bridges, highways, housing, public spaces) than arguably any other figure. Caro’s book works as both a sweeping epic about an oversize personality and a granular look at the mechanisms of power and influence.

“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” by David Foster Wallace (1997)

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Having just recommended “The Power Broker,” it would be cruel to follow it with the equally massive “Infinite Jest.” So instead of Wallace’s thousand-page, endnote-filled novel, pick up this more accessible collection of his nonfiction. It includes pieces about tennis, David Lynch and the influence of television on fiction writers. But it’s anchored by two long, hysterically funny essays that Wallace wrote for Harper’s Magazine: one about his time on a cruise ship, the other about his visit to the Illinois State Fair. In The New York Times Book Review, Laura Miller wrote that Wallace’s “distinctive and infectious style, an acrobatic cartwheeling between high intellectual discourse and vernacular insouciance, makes him tremendously entertaining to read, whatever his subject.”

“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” by Dave Eggers (2000)

The first sentence of Michiko Kakutani’s review in 2000 says it all: “Dave Eggers’s new book, ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,’ is part autobiography, part postmodern collage, a novelistic ‘memoir-y kind of thing’ that tells the sad, awful, tragic story of how the author’s mother and father died within weeks of each other and how he became a surrogate parent to his 8-year-old brother, and tells it with such style and hyperventilated, self-conscious energy, such coy, Lettermanesque shtick and such genuine, heartfelt emotion, that the story is at once funny, tender, annoying and, yes, heartbreaking — an epic, in the end, not of woe, though there’s plenty of that too, but an epic about family and how families fracture and fragment and somehow, through all the tumult and upset, manage to endure.”

GRAPHIC MEMOIRS:

“Persepolis,” by Marjane Satrapi (2003)

In “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi recounts growing up in Iran in a family of leftists during the time of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. The book was followed by a sequel in 2004 and a movie adaptation in 2007. Satrapi told The Believer in 2006 that she wants her books to counteract black-and-white views of the world. “I’m not a moral lesson giver,” she said. “It’s not for me to say what is right or wrong. I describe situations as honestly as possible. The way I saw it. That’s why I use my own life as material. I have seen these things myself, and now I’m telling it to you. Because the world is not about Batman and Robin fighting the Joker; things are more complicated than that.”

“Fun Home,” by Alison Bechdel (2006)

The source of the Tony Award-winning musical, “Fun Home” is Alison Bechdel’s moving graphic memoir about her relationship with her father. The story of Bechdel’s own realization that she is a lesbian is told in tandem with the story of her father, a small-town funeral director, and his repressed homosexuality. In The New York Times Book Review, Sean Wilsey wrote: “It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own.”