𝐃 𝐗 𝐌 𝐈 𝐍 𝐈 𝐐

Perhaps my worst trait is impatience. It’s not charming and it does not feel like it comes with ambition or nerves, but the clawing sort, the kind that makes me incapable of restraint in public spaces. I was in East Bay Booksellers, standing somewhere between the staff picks and the poetry shelf, when I realized I was already finished. I had been reading for fifteen minutes, maybe less, though time felt vaporous even knowing I only had twenty minutes left on paid parking. I finished the book before I even thought to look at the price tag. It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t go in planning to commit some small, harmless theft of experience. But there I was, holding the closed book.

I felt guilty, of course. Not because I didn’t pay for the story, but because I had once again let something carry me away. I was flushed. My palms were warm. My husband noticed. He looked at me with this expression he does when I’ve obviously become possessed by something again—affection mixed with wariness. I tried to explain what the book did to me, how I had fallen into it like water, and before I could say anything, he asked if he could read it too.

Still, he told me I needed to pick something else for myself. “That’s why we’re here,” he reminded me. “You came in because you needed a book to read.” He wasn’t wrong. I had been carrying a kind of quiet mania for about a week now. It had been building in me like static. So I wandered back into the aisles, still thinking about the book I had just swallowed whole, and tried to find another one, a thick one, that might hold me just long enough before another attempt at reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Beast in the Shadows, Edogawa Rampo —

Reading Best in the Shadows was like falling into a velvet-lined trap: seductive, claustrophobic, and a little too intimate. (Taro Hirai) Edogawa Rampo’s stories aren’t just unsettling, they’re invasive. Each one feels like peeling back a layer of skin to expose something pulsing and raw underneath. I came in expecting detective fiction, but what I got was something stranger. These are stories about voyeurism, obsession, disfigurement, and desire, told with a kind of cool, elegant perversity that made me feel complicit. There is something deeply tactile about the way Rampo writes. Everything smells faintly of dust and sweat.

What surprised me most was how much I enjoyed feeling disturbed. Rampo’s world is full of hidden compartments, both literal and emotional, and the horror comes not from jump scares or gore, but from the quiet thrill of watching someone unravel. It reminded me of how I felt when I first read Poe or early Tanizaki: fascinated, slightly sick, and unable to stop. These stories are not comfortable.

I think reading is supposed to make people uncomfortable. Not in a moral panic kind of way, but in the way your body aches after you’ve sat too long in one position, forgetting you even had a body. Or the way your stomach turns when you realize you’ve started to sympathize with someone you were sure you hated at the beginning of the book. It’s not about catharsis, exactly. It’s about letting something in, something grotesque or humiliating or just unavoidably human, and then sitting with it until it festers a little. Maybe that’s what Aristotle meant by hubris. Not pride, but the sick recognition of how easily someone could fall apart. 

I think Clarice Lispector should have been part of the recommended reading for young girls, right alongside Judy Blume. Because these two could have saved young women the time–

The Complete Stories, Clarice Lispector (trans. Katrina Dodson) —

Reading Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories felt like being pulled into a place I didn’t quite want to go but couldn’t look away from. Her words don’t offer comfort or neat answers. Instead, they press against the edges of your mind, teasing out the strange, messy corners you usually keep locked up. There’s a weightless heaviness in these stories. She writes about desire, despair, and identity not as tidy ideas but as wild, slippery things that slip away the moment you try to hold them.

The translation of her prose is both intimate and unsettling, like a whisper that unsettles your bones and a secret you’re not sure you should hear. It’s beautiful and exhausting all at once, leaving you raw but alive, like you’ve glimpsed something secret inside yourself that’s been waiting to be named. This collection isn’t easy reading, but for anyone willing to lean into discomfort, it offers a fierce, haunting clarity that lingers long after the last sentence.

That’s all, folks :)