Books That Break the Mold

Our lives tend to take on a certain form and remain that way. For better, for worse, for both. Over the last month of traveling, I became obsessed with the many small ways my life reformed around this nomadic existence. The days mostly felt slow, a collection of wrong turns down winding streets, language barriers, dizzying wine, and idyllic scenes. Most moments felt incremental and intentional, and this was at times lonely, at times euphoric.

I don’t have to tell you that there’s something comfortable in our routines. In The Age of Magical Overthinking, linguist Amanda Montell meditates on how easy it is to live the same life every day. We may want change, but it’s hard to make it happen because we love to predict what’s next and next and next. Knowing is cozy. Knowing is, in a way, so fall. As in: curled up under a blanket, drinking tea, reading with a fire spitting happily in the corner.

Surely, if we eat the same avocado toast with two eggs every morning around nine a.m., everything will be alright, won’t it? Yes, maybe, perhaps. But also — what about the dizzying wine and wrong turns? What about the you you become when all routine and convention has been stripped away?

Images: Tumblr, "Together and Apart" by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, Tumblr

These are questions writers often ask in their fiction. There is the traditional novel, which moves forward through space and time. Chapter by chapter, event by event. Everything leads up to the climax, the falling action, the denouement, and, finally, that last page. The end. Then there’s “experimental” fiction, stories that predict the most obvious form they could take and intentionally defy it.

When I first tiptoed into the literary fiction world in college, nothing scared me more than experimental fiction. Reading is a muscle like anything else, and this type of storytelling requires a very specific type of fictional gains. You need to understand how lit fic operates on a basic level before its funhouse mirror version can have its full effect. For a long time, getting through titles like Naked Lunch and Pale Fire felt like running a marathon with ankle weights on. Then something changed.