robyn reads books

I registered Hector.

June 24, 2026

To have your life acknowledged.

To have someone say:

I see you.

You were here.

You mattered.

One thing that surprises me, looking back through my notes, is how little I want to talk about the gods.

They are everywhere in this poem. Arguing, meddling, seducing, deceiving, prolonging suffering, choosing favourites and moving lives around like game pieces. Entire books are shaped by their interventions. And yet, when I think about what will stay with me, it is not Zeus (frankly, he disgusts me) or Hera or Athena.

What remains, what always matters, are people.

Patroclus weeping because others are suffering. Hector standing outside the walls knowing exactly what awaits him. Priam crossing into the enemy camp because love demands it of him. All mighty moments of cinema.

So sure, the gods can alter outcomes. But it is the humans who give the poem its heart.

I wasn’t prepared for Hector.

Like many people approaching The Iliad for the first time, I arrived expecting Achilles to dominate the experience. That the climax of his rage and fury driven by all-consuming grief would be how this epic sticks the landing. Not at all. Instead, somewhere along the way, Hector became the character I carried with me. He was flawed. He doesn’t win. He accepted his fate.

And in that he remained recognizably human: his imagination is always occupied by other people… his wife, his son, his parents. The city behind the walls.

Even at the end, when Priam and Hecuba plead with him to come inside, what devastated me was that everyone who loved him valued his life more than his reputation. I ached for Hector.

For all its battles, The Iliad repeatedly returns to the same tension: the distance between being admired and being loved. Or being known, remembered. Book 22 belongs to Hector, and to me.

The night I finished the poem, I reached out to someone I had cared about deeply.

Alas, there was nothing left to solve or say. No revelation waiting at the end. No hidden answer that might rearrange the past into something easier to live with. And that didn’t surprise me. I mattered less than I hoped. Clarity. Finality.

So I finished Homer’s poem thinking about them.

Priam does not go to Achilles because he expects a different outcome. Hector will still be dead in the morning. He goes because there is nothing else he can do. Because staying away is worse than going. And maybe he goes because love and grief give him no other direction than there. Or I suppose he has nowhere else to go. Sometimes we just don’t.

So some acts are meaningful regardless of what they change. Some acts are meaningless. And that’s always where I struggle, but I’ve learned that if it is meaningful for me then that is enough.

I have been thinking about that for so long now. About what remains when possibility falls away and reality finally settles in.

About the dignity of caring for someone despite… everything.

I care.

Without needing the feeling to become anything else.

Just… I care.

Without turning uncertainty into a verdict about my worth.

Because… I care.

Without demanding that another person carry what they cannot carry.

And so I carry. And care. And accept.

It was always very clear to me that I wasn’t really reading Achilles and Priam from a distance. I think I was standing beside them too, not literally, dramatically, romantically, of course… but emotionally.

Which tracks for me. It is how I read books. I don’t tend to follow plots as much as people. I’m often wondering who they love, who they miss, whose voice they are carrying around inside themselves. And why.

Perhaps that is why the gods never became the center of this story for me.

I registered Hector.

I registered Priam.

I registered Patroclus.

I registered the ordinary warriors standing around Patroclus’ body.

I paid a lot of attention to attachment.

Who are they to one another?

Who waits for them?

Who is grieving them?

Who is standing beside them?

The same thing happened whenever the armour came off.

Not literally every time, but it was a fascinating way to symbolize how armour carried reputation, status, duty, glory.

Patroclus in Achilles’ armour.

Hector wearing Achilles’ armour.

Priam kneeling before Achilles.

Achilles weeping.

These were some big images for me. So whether the armour is stripped off someone or removed voluntarily, what’s left is simply a grieving father, a devoted friend, a frightened son, a husband saying goodbye to his wife.

The poem kept reminding me that beneath the armour was just a person being loved and lost. For Achilles in Book 18, totally stripped bare and before new armour arrives, nothing mattered anymore. His companion was gone, certainty was gone and his future was gone. You could feel the rawness of his grief and despair. And then the shield came, and wow, it was wild to stand on that threshold with him.

I wear armour. Not heading into battle anytime soon but I did remove it once, for someone, and it didn’t turn out so well.

Sometimes I worry that I do this too much.

That I care too much.

Reflect too much.

Feel too much.

That I assign significance and meaning where none exists. But every book (yes we’re still on books, sort of) that truly matters to me seems to argue the opposite.

Again and again, I find myself moved by the same things:

recognition,

being known,

being seen,

being chosen,

being loved.

And companionship most of all.

I don’t know if these are small concerns or large ones to other people. I only know Homer was writing about them three thousand years ago. And if they were worth writing about then, perhaps they are worth paying attention to now.

By Book 13 I was completely fixated on the deep camaraderie that runs through the entire poem. Men standing beside one another, fighting for one another, grieving one another, and even carrying one another. Why? Because bravery does not exist alone.

The glory, the gifts, the praise, the individual acts of heroism… those things increasingly felt secondary to what I found at the poem’s center: relationships, loyalty, encouragement, brotherhood, and the gap or the absence left behind when someone is gone.

Then I reached Books 16 and 17. And suddenly it felt as though the poem revealed what it had been doing all along:

Grieving.

I read The Song of Achilles a few years ago, and perhaps that deepened the weight of Patroclus’ death for me. But I’m not entirely convinced. I was very surprised how present their companionship already is in Homer’s poem, and how clearly the depth of their attachment emerges from the text itself. And so in Book 17, the grief for both Achilles and Patroclus’ felt enormous.

By the time I reached Book 18, the poem brought that grief fully into the foreground. And I found it beautiful.

I’ve been carrying a great deal this year.

A connection ending. A final reach. The realization of limits. The clarity that arrives when reality finally settles into place. The relief that comes with clarity. The sadness that accompanies it.

The loneliness that sometimes accompanies acceptance.

For a long time I treated grief as evidence that I was stuck.

As evidence that I should have moved on by now.

That if I were stronger, wiser, healthier, I would have reached the other side already.

But The Iliad offered a different possibility, at least as I experienced it.

Priam is not failing because he grieves Hector. Achilles is not failing because he weeps.

Their mourning is not evidence of weakness. It is part of the journey itself. And proof that love existed. And we all know that is a beautiful thing.

I suppose that is what I have been searching for all along.

To be registered.

To have my life leave some imprint in the people I love.

And perhaps that is why I read the way I do.

I register people.

Their words.

Their silences.

The things they reveal and the things they do not.

Sometimes more deeply than is comfortable. Often more deeply than is reciprocated. And always to my own heartbreak.

But when I look back at everything this poem has left me with, I am wondering if that is not a flaw at all. Perhaps it is simply my attention. The shape of my love or how I love or my capacity for it.

Maybe one day I’ll believe all the evidence I’ve collected about who I am and stand comfortably inside it. As comfortably as I do with Priam, Hector, Patroclus. For now, it sits in small piles around my desk.

And here.

A poem ending.

A chapter ending.

A woman closing one book and one chapter of her life in the same week.

Learning, slowly, that grief is not evidence of failure.

It is evidence that something (or someone) mattered.

Note: I read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. Her introduction was one of the most insightful pieces of literary framing I’ve encountered and shaped much of how I approached the poem, particularly its attention to grief, mortality and the emotional lives of its characters. A spectacular read, cover to cover.
The cost(ume) of being human

June 23, 2026

Want the anatomy of my recurring obsessions? I do.

There are books I loved, books I admired, and books that shape the way I read. This is one of the latter.

As I build this little reading room, you’ll see certain questions and themes resurfacing with suspicious regularity. Not intentionally. Yet they explain both why I read the way I do and why my shelf looks the way it does.

Why I’m drawn toward interiority.

Why consciousness fascinates me.

Why loneliness keeps appearing in my reviews.

Why “being seen” keeps appearing. (Whatever that even means. Totally sketch term imo.)

Why so many of the books that resonate are preoccupied with identity, alienation, perception, and the weird human desire to somehow register our existence in the world.

Do I need to explain this? No. But that’s me, I like to (over)share as a way to process my thinking. To have a pretend conversation with a pretend someone… because isolated and lonely… because no one gets me… because I have shields… because I have no one to share my depth with… because because because.

I never set out to build a reading life around these questions. They are just naturally becoming the skeleton, the soft tissue, all of the inside of me.

So looking back, No Longer Human can be found in the anatomical illustration of my grief-stricken emotional architecture.

This book is almost pure alienation.

Pure self-consciousness.

Pure performance.

A person who feels fundamentally unable to participate in human life the way everyone else seems to.

I’ve been reading variations of that question ever since:

What does it mean to be a person?

Kafka asks it.

Lispector asks it.

Kundera asks it.

Harpman asks it.

Before those threads became recurring obsessions in my reading life, Osamu Dazai was asking it too.

Placing No Longer Human on the shelf feels right because it’s origin-story material. A book that has seeped into the deepest, most structural part of my identity.

I read and heavily annotated it during a strange period of my life. One marked by solitude, hurt and this odd yet growing tendency to turn toward books in search of understanding other people and myself.

What follows is what I wrote closer to the experience itself.

Side note, regarding terms, I may have bounced a bit between human anatomy and blueprint for a building. Same same.

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. Posted to IG on March 5, 2026:

Does exposure feel like risk to you? Have you felt that being ‘seen’ may still come with conditions? Does safety live in staying agreeable, light, unthreatening? Do you monitor the room constantly for ‘threats’?

Yes.

Often described as alienation or confession, No Longer Human reads precisely as a life organized around performance. Joking as strategy, charm as insulation, jesting as panic response to silence. Yozo believes himself inhuman, fundamentally misaligned with society, and therefore performs (avoids) accordingly. But his fear is not of being disliked, it’s being found out, and suffering the pain that goes with that.

His despair unsettled me, yes. But it was his certainty, the conviction, that pulled me in. Every interaction confirms his defectiveness. Every kindness, a misunderstanding. Every failure, proof. Proof of not qualifying as human.

I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.

I kept thinking about how an internal narrative, repeated long enough, can harden into architecture. He never questions his. I do. Am trying to anyway.

-where do I confuse my defensive armour with my true self?

-at what point did my coping mechanisms turn into my personality?

-when does my need to be safe overshadow my need to be real?

-where/when do I stop? (before existential fracture of course ;)

There’s a point where Yozo doesn’t stop. He moves toward detachment, toward self-erasure. That’s where I felt the edge between us… where he continues toward annihilation, I move toward integration.

The sections on love were the hardest. Not longing for it, fearing it. The idea that being loved is exposure. That if someone truly sees you, the mask must fall. And if you’ve ever let it fall, trusted that it would be held carefully, you know how vulnerable that is. And when someone can’t hold what they reach for, you learn where your edges are. So… armour up, perform, hide. And on and on we go.

The epilogue is where the shift happens. Yozo is described as gentle. Ordinary. Human. The world did not experience him as the monster he believed himself to be. It’s tragic. He was never irredeemable, he just never allowed for the possibility that his story about himself was wrong.

The margins: this is the first book I’ve ever annotated. Not academically. I don’t really know the rules. The margins just became a place for personal reflections, part diary, part boundary-setting exercise, part trying to ‘see’ myself, and Yozo.

A visceral/relatable read because it:

-names masking without dramatizing it, without ‘meme-ing’ it, without diluting it

-examines people-pleasing as survival

-understands how self-narratives can lead to fate

-refuses redemption (which makes the epilogue devastating)

-forced me to locate the edge between recognition and self-erasure

-met me in winter, quietly, and made me aware of my own interior narratives

For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces.
Do you have a storied sex life? A storied book life?

June 19, 2026

On desire and the need to understand ourselves

Do your desires reveal something true about you? Are they impulses you wrap up in philosophy, romance, meaning? Maybe you act on them to feel free… or to feel something. Or because life is short. Perhaps it’s love, can you tell the difference?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being totally possessed me and left me vaguely seduced by existentialism.

The book felt slippery. Storylines emerge and disappear. Reflections interrupt the narrative constantly. Not sure if it’s simply Kundera’s style but everything he was doing here had me… charged. And maybe the current was already vibing before I picked this up but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Kundera understands how contradictory people really are, how we’re pulled between opposing desires all the time. Through Tomas, Tereza, Sabina, Franz and the shifting intimacies between them, he moves through friendship, love, infidelity, politics, jealousy, freedom and attachment. They contradict themselves constantly, and they know it, feel it.

Some people want intimacy but resist being fully held by another. Some want freedom until it merges with loneliness. Some desire deep connection while remaining fundamentally separate from the other.

One painful undercurrent is the difficulty of perception. Everyone is trying to understand themselves while being misunderstood by people closest to them. Trying to love each other through layers of fantasy, interpretation, affairs and imagined versions of one another. Kundera even manages to make compassion feel complicated and heavy.

For some, being misunderstood matters terribly. Others carry it lightly.

I ached for Tereza the most after reading, and Tomas was certainly familiar up close. Kundera gives her existential weight, in a world obsessed with lightness. She longs for intimacy that feels stable and meaningful while existing beside people unable to live that way.

So the storied sex life? It matters here. Although the sexual energy in this novel is electric, it’s fully controlled by Kundera. There’s no shock value at play. Desire just becomes another way the characters try to understand themselves and fail each other in the process.

What a wildly alive study in contradiction and the human condition.

On reading beyond my reach

One of the pleasures of reading a novel this ambitious is realizing how much remains beyond my grasp. There was an abundance of threads here. So while I was occupied by desire, contradiction, intimacy, perception, longing, being seen… Nietzsche, eternal return, kitsch, politics and aesthetics were all happening in some adjacent room I didn’t have the keys to.

And I just can’t pretend I’m a philosopher. So I know this is all deeply tied to and challenges a lightness/weight philosophy but I’ve been speaking purely from the experience of reading it, feeling it and getting completely tangled up in the contradictions Kundera lays bare.

And I’m still unpacking his thoughts on ‘kitsch’. It’s definitely a concept that requires a second read to fully grasp. A bit too abstract for me as I was focusing my experience elsewhere. But therein lies the beauty of this book – its reread potential seems limitless.

On the intimacy of “You should read…”

Would you agree the circumstances under which a book enters your life is often part of the reading experience itself?

For many, there are books we choose for ourselves, and books that arrive through other people. When I picked up The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it was not possible to separate the novel from the person who recommended it.

For much of it, I found myself reading two texts at once.

Kundera’s, of course, but also my own. The timing of the recommendation, the person, the conversation in which it surfaced, and the emotional atmosphere I was carrying into the book made any attempt at a “clean” reading feel impossible. Certain characters didn’t remain characters for long; that silly mirror got in the way as it usually does.

It’s strange how easily that overlaps with what Kundera is doing here. The same preoccupation I have keeps resurfacing in different forms, in different works: what it means to exist in someone else’s attention, and whether that is what gives a life its weight and meaning.

Also overlapping is how the reader experience can be altered by its point of entry into your life. Similar to how the characters enter one another’s and the circumstances around that. I haven’t been an avid reader for very long. Only in the last few years did reading become a big part of my life. And only recently have I really been given book recs by people who know me well, who say, explicitly, you should read this. That kind of recommendation feels intimate in a way I didn’t expect.

I didn’t know it then when I read this book but I see it now as recognition. Someone saying: This feels like you.

And that actually feels really great.

To be known, even briefly, in the shape of a book or book rec someone places in your hands.

So I wonder: do we remember the recommendation itself, and everything that came attached to it?

I think I will.

I know I will with this one.
Loneliness recruited by unrequited love

June 18, 2026

It would be easy to call Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali a story about unrequited love.

Longing.

Misalignment.

And maybe it is.

It reads as depth and intensity on the page… but why? Distance? Restraint? Everything just slightly out of reach? Simply a mismatch?

Can there be another soul wandering this great globe who is lonely as I? Who would hear me out? Where would I begin?

When you’re in the middle of a connection ending, books like these have a strong likelihood of reading like testimony rather than literature, at least in my experience. Very quickly, and without any safety checks on your self-awareness, a fictional story can become a sworn courtroom statement about your own life.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve become more curious about how quickly we map ourselves onto a narrative, how easily we fill in the gaps with something that feels personal, meaningful… mirrored. And how deliberately some stories are built to invite that projection.

I do it. I get emotionally invested in books, likely to a fault. Sometimes at a cost to my own equilibrium. My mind naturally fills those spaces using my own emotional landscape. That’s part of what makes literature feel alive to me. My guess is some of you are like this too. Gosh, I can’t be the only one?

And the best authors know exactly how to build for that.

An aesthetic of longing. Romanticized distance. Unfulfilled connection. The sense that something profound is just beyond reach.

Some writers create worlds that are merely convincing; others create ones that feel deeply personal. They preserve all the intensity and nuance of an emotion and then hand the reader an invitation to step inside.

For me, that’s where it gets a little dangerous. (Yes, indeed I am a woman of danger.) I RSVP’d and jumped feet first into this one without hesitation.

My “therapeutic reckoning” was realizing I had mistaken a story for something more than it is.

If the relationship ends in total, catastrophic ruin, as it does in Madonna in a Fur Coat, you can start treating that ending as prophecy. Like forecasted weather for the truth of your own life. Thankfully, long-range forecasts are usually bogus, and I can handle a few stormy days (or weeks, perhaps months) without a raincoat or umbrella.

So what does that really do? Is this helpful or hurtful in how we recalibrate an emotional trajectory life has put us on? Why is it dangerous? For me, I’ve learned (over a decent amount of time) that it simply robs you of agency.

So yes, this is a beautiful work of literary fiction. It’s also one of the most quotable books I’ve ever experienced.

Then one day, it all came to an end . . . It was that simple, it ended so abruptly that I failed to grasp the enormity of what had happened . . . I was only a little surprised, but deeply saddened; and I would never have thought that such an event would leave such a great and lasting effect on me.

I think that line lands hardest when you’re not only grieving a person, but grieving the possibility they seemed to represent. The feeling that finally, someone sees me. Or finally, here is somewhere for all this love and attention and tenderness to go.

When that ends, when love is unrequited, the loneliness can feel much larger than the actual friendship or relationship.

But that’s a whole other post to come and that’s all I want to unpack here.

I’ll come back to this book another time. Perhaps during a different season of life, through a different lens.
A consciousness looking for itself

June 17, 2026

Sometimes I want what is inside on the outside. I don’t think this comes as a surprise to some of you. We all want to feel whole and alive, don’t want to shrink ourselves down, feel reduced, fit neatly into some compartment we created or one created for us.

Reading Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector felt like being pressed into a consciousness constantly refusing its container. At the same time, the whole book or story or stream was difficult to pin down. It also doesn’t fit into some kind of compartment. It’s dense and interior, totally visceral.

So Joana. I loved inhabiting her mind, brief as it was. She’s feral, instinctive and deeply inward. A woman colliding with the limits of personhood, language, marriage, expectation, restraint, all of it. She possesses such intense self-awareness but absolutely no comfort with it. It felt so fucking good to spend time inside a brain that moves like hers, that traces lines and connections. And yet it skips and jumps into questions, reactions and reflections.

I came out wet, clothes, clinging to my skin, hair shining, down. Something or other stirred in me, and it was no doubt just my body. But in a sweet miracle everything had become transparent, and it was no doubt my soul too. At this instant, I was truly immersed in my interior and there was silence.

The language itself, my god. Bursting, restless, physical… all the sensations. Did I understand it while reading, yes, mostly. I was ready. Now, building a fuller story around her, around me, filling gaps that shouldn’t be filled. Dangerous, probably, but I’ve learned/accepted that’s how I experience literature.

Reading this immediately after The Trial, after already experiencing a kind of crackling tension within me, was to feel that current prolonged. Kafka externalizes a deep pressure through systems, bureaucracy and positioning. Lispector turns inward. One read was claustrophobic externally, the other entirely internal. I felt myself utterly stripped of pretense. Can’t help but connect both of these books to my love for psychologically suffocating horror and how it affects my mind and body.

There was a danger of establishing herself in suffering and organizing herself in it, which would also be a vice and a tranquilizer.

So it’s difficult to organize neatly afterward. And while I was ready and eager to meet Clarice, I absolutely was not braced for the impact of her prose and consciousness. It overstimulated me and made me feel exposed, which is exactly why I loved it.

Joana was dealing with a weather storm inside of her. I have never read a more familiar character than her. She would have hated skinny jeans just as much as I did.

However what Joana has inside her is something stronger than the love that people give and what she has inside her demands more than the love that people receive.

My first Lispector struck near to my heart. Wild this was her debut at 23.
On the need to be chosen

June 17, 2026

On wanting to be wanted.

On appetite and absence.

On what grows in isolation.

On all of these things, really. Whatever title I give this entry would only be one door into what this book is doing. What it did to me.

To feel alive in someone’s attention and to be chosen by them, to have them obsess over you, is difficult to talk about without sounding embarrassed by it. But it feels deeply human and it’s very deeply me. We all want to matter to someone. We all want to feel singular for more than a moment. I want that. I strongly desire it.

So there was an ache when I read this book. A very real and (unfortunately) timely ache.

Take those feelings and hide them. Push them down. Keep them in the dark. Keep them where no one can see them.

I’ve had to do that before. Put my heartbreak somewhere I could not see it. It’s sometimes for the best.

I read The Lamb by Lucy Rose immediately after a run of male interior narrators, mostly horror fiction, so this felt different right away.

Less explained. (Go figure).

More instinct than interpretation. (Again, of course it was).

What happens when love and control blur into the same thing? That question sits underneath everything here.

The story is a rural, intimate and psychologically isolating horror. My absolute favourite kind of read. Lucy Rose builds in small ways, in routines, in attention, in the way someone is watched… or needed. It’s all very domestic and ordinary.

(But not. Because it’s cannibalism.)

There’s real control in her writing and I admired this, intensely. Nothing overreaches. By the end, the pace is still steady, but it tightens, not because of what’s happening, but because of what you understand. That heavy, fertile silence afterwards. I’ll eat that up every time.

Reading this as a mother caught me off guard a bit. Not in an obvious way, nothing is pushed, it’s all nuance. It was how Rose writes about aging, desire and being seen. The precision in it felt very fucking accurate.

You recognize the lives in this without being told. Because it’s you. It’s me. It’s us… darkest parts included.

It’s impossible to truly know someone who hides so much of themselves and consumes so much of others.

The emotional appetites of the women here are voracious and unapologetic. The need to be wanted, to be chosen, to feel something sharp and alive again. And how easily that tips into something else if it’s left alone long enough.

A small interaction near the end (a bus driver) completely shifted the weight of the story for me.

So, not a shocker of a book, just recognition.

In how easily we reshape ourselves to stay loved.

Or to stay safe.

Or to be chosen.

Or to not be “too much.”

There’s a lot of power in a story this rooted in female interior life. In motherhood, the body, its instincts, its loneliness. It’s specific. It’s a bit niche. And so it lands because it’s true.

A favourite this year for the way it engaged me cognitively and emotionally.
“…for what was important to K. was unimportant to him.”

June 16, 2026

In The Trial by Franz Kafka, K. is a man arrested for an unknown crime, gets lost in a surreal, oppressive legal system and increasingly trapped in confusion, helplessness and ‘guilt’.

He gets no love from me.

But as he starts to (over)process everything – questioning, watching people, their glances, tone – he tries to piece together what it all means. Applies meaning because he’s grasping for reason and truth. Overthinking, feeling judged, constantly interpreting everything around him. Wondering who knows what, why someone is looking at you a certain way.

It loops. It was felt.

His uncle – swooping in to help, but –

Until now you’ve been an honour to us, you can’t now bring shame on us.

…and until today I was proud…

Bit of a condescending dick don’t you think?

The middle pops off. An infuriating chapter, but a forever fave.

The advocate and painter – it was merry-go-round energy (for those who remember). A classic search for clarity which led to only more confusion. Lots of explanation, more structure, none of it helps.

Reading it felt like work. Like you reading this entry, maybe?

And the ‘types’ of acquittal… that was full on aggravating. Simply put, here are all of your options K., and none of them actually do anything for you.

So absurd, so true to bureaucracy. And life.

And everyone talking at him, posturing… telling him what he’s thinking, what he should be doing, what it all means, damn, the man doesn’t even know himself. All positioning, all asserted authority. The trying-not-to-be-obvious-but-oh-so-obvious power plays.

The cathedral – is this where the clarity comes?… nah, same system. Talk of truth, lies, necessity… but nothing to hold onto.

The end – after all that circular build, the contrast hits. Jarring.

What was any of it for? Was it inevitable?

Didn’t even like K. for most of it, but then… empathy? Idk.

So it’s like that.

A frustratingly fantastic fairy tale for my first Kafka.
Hello Reader

June 15, 2026

Welcome to my reading room.

I love tracing grief, loneliness, love, desire, consciousness and identity across texts.

I needed a quiet place to express, through words, the version of myself that existed when I read a book. A place to think through: how we love, how we suffer, how we misunderstand one another, and how we make meaning of a life.

I’m slowly gathering book reviews and reflections from the past year, expanding the thinking while the stories are still alive inside me, and giving them a home here.

So this isn’t just a record of books.

It’s a record of me.

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my reading room