Obviously this isn't a problem if you think the distance between market forces and The Good is small enough. Unfortunately for me,,

city before sleeping. Don't binge it. --- Hanuman: The Devotion and Power of the Monkey God — Vanamali This is the odd one out because it isn't primarily literary fiction. It's a devotional/mythological treatment of Hanuman drawing on the Ramayana, Puranic material, variant traditions, prayers, and oral stories. It contains 36 major Hanuman stories and commentary on their spiritual significance. The interesting thing, particularly coming from rationalist-adjacent culture, is to not read it as "here are some ancient propositions; which are factually true?" Read it from inside the devotional technology. Hanuman is an extraordinary religious archetype: immense power coupled to almost complete egolessness. He's a warrior, trickster, scholar, celibate ascetic, servant, monkey, and embodiment of bhakti. His strength comes precisely from orienting himself toward something other than himself. So the interesting question becomes: what sort of human psychology is produced by devotion? Why have millions of people found this particular image of strength-through-surrender compelling? Why read it: it's the book here most likely to expose you to an alien-but-coherent theory of mind and human flourishing rather than merely tell you a good story. --- Cathedral — Raymond Carver Carver looks almost absurdly plain next to Bolaño and Calvino. That's the trick. These are stories about drinking, marriages, unemployment, resentment, awkward conversations, shitty apartments, people eating dinner. The prose appears to be doing almost nothing. Then suddenly some tiny gesture cracks open the entire emotional reality of a person's life. The title story is especially wonderful: an insecure, prejudiced man meets his wife's blind friend, and through the seemingly ridiculous act of drawing a cathedral together, something happens that the narrator himself barely has language for. Carver said the story was "completely different from everything I'd written before" and that he'd "tapped into something." He specifically liked that it affirmed something and involved a kind of communion. And a nice endorsement for your purposes: Haruki Murakami chose Cathedral as his selection for an artists' reading series. Murakami is also Carver's Japanese translator and a major admirer of his work. Why read it: it's a corrective to intellectual overcomplexity. Carver demonstrates that you can get somewhere metaphysical without talking metaphysics at all. --- Till We Have Faces — C. S. Lewis Do not expect Narnia. Lewis retells Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Psyche's ugly older sister, Orual. Orual believes the gods have wronged her and essentially spends the novel assembling her case against them. The brilliant conceit is that her complaint is the story. As she tells you how unfairly she has been treated, you slowly acquire enough information to see things she cannot see about herself: love becoming possession, rationalization disguising jealousy, self-sacrifice containing domination, resentment constructing an internally impeccable worldview. It's almost a novel about motivated cognition. The title eventually becomes the thesis: how can we encounter reality—or God—until we "have faces," i.e. until we've stopped hiding behind the stories we've constructed about ourselves? Lewis himself repeatedly called it "far and away my best book." And it really is unusually unlike stereotypical Lewis: psychologically ambiguous, mythic, pagan-Christian, and considerably less interested in handing you explicit apologetics than in showing how a mind deceives itself. Why read it: if the idea of C. S. Lewis writing a novel about self-deception, epistemology, eros, religious experience, and the unreliability of one's own moral narrative sounds interesting, that's basically what this is.

Testing the hypothesis

crying is so beautiful

headwinds of fear, getting pulled along cavitation-bubbled currents of greed, or occasionally looking up to find myself in a meadow of seagrass, surprised to find there's nowhere to go