There are books you finish and put back on the shelf without thinking much about them again. You enjoyed them, maybe recommended them to someone and eventually forgot most of what happened.

Then there are books that make you close them and just sit there for a few minutes.

You don't immediately reach for another book. You don't even know exactly what you're feeling. Something has stayed behind, and you need a little time to figure out what it is.

These five books did that to me.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I didn't expect such a short book to leave me feeling this way.

The sadness in White Nights is quiet. There isn't some huge tragedy waiting to destroy you. Instead, there is a lonely man who suddenly meets someone and, for a few nights, begins to imagine that perhaps his life might finally change.

You can almost feel how much those nights mean to him.

And that's what makes the story painful. You slowly realise that maybe he isn't only falling for a person. He is falling for the feeling of no longer being alone.

Sometimes we become attached to someone not because they are going to stay in our lives, but because, for a little while, they made our loneliness easier to bear.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

I had a strange relationship with Meursault while reading The Stranger.

There were moments when I understood him, and other moments when I wanted to put the book down and ask, "Why don't you feel this the way everyone else would?"

That's probably what made the book so unsettling.

Camus gives you a person who doesn't behave the way you expect a person to behave. You keep waiting for the emotions you're familiar with, but they don't come. Eventually, you stop judging him for a moment and start questioning yourself instead.

How much of the way we live is actually our own choice? Why do we grieve in a certain way? Why do we think love should look a certain way? Why do we consider some reactions normal and others unacceptable?

We inherit so many ideas about how a person is supposed to live that we rarely stop to ask where those ideas came from.

I finished The Stranger without feeling that I had understood everything. But perhaps that was the point.

Some books don't leave you with answers. They leave you slightly less comfortable with the answers you already had.

1984 by George Orwell

I expected 1984 to frighten me because of surveillance and propaganda. It did. But that wasn't the part that stayed with me.

What really disturbed me was the thought of someone eventually having control over your mind. Not simply telling you what you can say, but slowly deciding what you are allowed to believe.

We usually think of freedom as something physical. Being able to go where we want, read what we want, say what we want. But what happens when someone else starts deciding what you should think?

That possibility bothered me more than I expected. The frightening thing about losing freedom may not be knowing that you've lost it.

It may be believing that you still have it.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I thought I was reading a novel about a crime. What stayed with me was everything that happened after it.

Raskolnikov has committed something terrible, and for a while you keep wondering what will happen when other people find out. But Dostoevsky seems much more interested in something else, what happens when you have to live with yourself.

Other people may not know what you've done. You know. And sometimes that is enough.

There is something almost painful about watching a person try to escape his own thoughts. He can hide from people, make excuses, convince himself of things, but he cannot really get away from himself.

That was the part I found most powerful.

We sometimes imagine punishment as something imposed from outside. But guilt can be much more private than that.

Sometimes you are both the person who committed the act and the person who keeps returning to it in your own mind.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

This book confused me more than once.

I lost track of names. I had to stop and remind myself who belonged to which generation. More than once, I thought, "Am I ever going to get all of this straight?"

And yet I kept reading. Somewhere along the way, the confusion started to feel strangely appropriate.

Generations come and go. People fall in love, make mistakes, hurt each other, repeat old patterns, and then leave the same unfinished things for the next generation.

What stayed with me wasn't just the story of the family. It was the feeling that we are often less independent than we like to believe.

We tell ourselves that we won't make the mistakes our parents made. We promise ourselves that we'll be different. But how much of ourselves did we actually choose?

How much came from our childhood, our families, the people around us, and the things we saw growing up?

Sometimes we carry things for years without even knowing where they came from.

That's why One Hundred Years of Solitude eventually felt like a mirror to me. Not a very comfortable one, but an honest one.

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Looking back, I don't remember these books only for their stories. I remember how they made me feel.

White Nights made loneliness feel more complicated. It made me wonder whether sometimes we miss a person or simply miss how we felt when they were around.

The Stranger made me suspicious of some of the things I had accepted as "normal."

1984 made me think about freedom in a way I hadn't before.

Crime and Punishment made guilt feel much more personal.

And One Hundred Years of Solitude made me wonder how many parts of ourselves we carry from people who came before us.

That's probably why I keep coming back to fiction.

A good book doesn't always make you happier. Sometimes it makes you uncomfortable. Sometimes it leaves you sad. Sometimes you don't even know why a particular scene keeps coming back to you weeks later.

You think you're spending a few hours inside someone else's story, and then one day you realise that some part of that story has followed you into your own life. Maybe that's when a book becomes more than a book. When you finish reading it, but it hasn't finished with you.

Which book has done that to you?

Sometimes, before going to sleep, I think about how quickly a day disappears.

It feels like a full day. There were phone calls, messages, work, conversations, small problems to solve, and countless little things that needed attention. By the time the night arrives, there is a strange satisfaction of having been busy.

But then another thought comes.

If I were given this same day again, would I want to live it in exactly the same way?

That question is uncomfortable because being busy often feels like progress.

We live in a time where our attention is constantly occupied. The first thing many of us do after waking up is check our phones, and the last thing we do before sleeping is look at a screen again.

Throughout the day, we respond to other people's messages, follow other people's opinions, and consume other people's thoughts.

But our own thoughts can wait.

We rarely stop to ask what we are actually building. Whether the things taking our time and energy are leading us towards something we truly value.

The strange thing is that many of our daily actions are not really choices anymore. They are habits.

We open apps without thinking. We scroll because there is always something new to see. We spend time worrying about things that will probably not matter a month from now.

Then one day, someone asks a simple question:

And sometimes we don't have a clear answer.

Being busy is not a measure of a meaningful life. A person can fill every hour of the day and still remain exactly where they were.

The real question is not how much we are doing.

It is where all this effort is taking us.

A year can pass very quickly. The calendar changes, the days move forward, but if our direction remains the same, we may simply become more experienced at standing still.

Maybe what many of us need is not more time.

Maybe we need a little more silence.

A few minutes without notifications, without noise, without anyone else's expectations. Just enough time to sit with ourselves and ask whether the life we are building is the one we actually want.

Because the most difficult thing is not getting tired from running.

It is discovering, after years of running, that we were never heading where we wanted to go.

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When the rain started today, my heart had already placed an order for one thing: pakoras.

That perfect rainy-day combination.

But apparently, fate had something else planned. Instead of pakoras, there was a Club Sandwich, a brownie, and a cup of tea waiting for me.

For a moment, I was disappointed.

Then I thought about how often life works this way.

We make our little plans. We imagine how things should happen. We create a picture in our minds and then life quietly replaces it with something different.

We often spend so much time missing what we didn't get that we forget to appreciate what we actually have.

Maybe happiness is not always about getting exactly what we wanted.

Maybe it's about being present enough to enjoy what is already in front of us.

A rainy evening.

A warm cup of tea.

A good conversation.

A favourite book.

Or sometimes, a Club Sandwich that wasn't part of the original plan.

Life rarely arrives in perfect packaging.

Sometimes the moment becomes special not because it was what we expected, but because we learned to accept it.

Today's rain reminded me of something simple:

Happiness is often less about what we receive, and more about the way we choose to receive it.

I used to think fiction was simply a way to pass the time, a collection of made-up stories that entertained people for a few hours. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The longer I read novels, the more I realised that fiction isn't really about plots. It's about people.

A good novel invites you into lives you would never otherwise experience. You spend days with someone who has lost everything, someone quietly carrying grief, someone desperately in love, or even someone whose choices are difficult to forgive. For a while, their thoughts become your thoughts. Their fears become familiar. Their world begins to make sense, even when you don't agree with it.

That's a strange thing to experience.

It becomes much harder to believe that people fit neatly into categories like good and bad. Real life isn't built that way, and neither are memorable novels. Everyone has a history. Everyone is responding to something you cannot see.

I sometimes wonder if this is why people who read fiction often seem a little slower to judge. Not because books make them morally superior, but because stories remind them that every person is more complicated than they first appear.

The changes fiction brings are rarely dramatic.

You don't finish a novel and wake up as a different person the next morning.

Instead, it works quietly.

Months later, you notice yourself listening more carefully during a conversation. You catch yourself trying to understand someone's reasons before criticising their actions. You become curious about people instead of certain about them.

No single book does all of this.

But book after book, page after page, something begins to shift.

Without making a grand announcement, fiction expands your imagination, sharpens your language, and deepens your emotional vocabulary. More importantly, it teaches you that understanding another person is often more valuable than winning an argument about them.

If you've never read fiction, there's no need to start with an ambitious reading list or a promise to finish fifty books this year.

Just choose one novel that genuinely interests you.

Read a page today. Read another tomorrow. Don't worry about how quickly you finish.

The habit matters far more than the pace.

Months from now, the biggest difference may not be the number of books you've completed. It may be that you notice the world differently. Conversations become richer. People become less predictable. And life, somehow, feels a little larger than it did before.

Sometimes the smallest habit—turning a single page each day—is enough to quietly change the way you think for years to come.

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Tricia and Ethan are newlyweds. They end up stranded at an open house during a blizzard, a grand, isolated estate that hasn't been lived in for years. It doesn't take long to figure out why.

The house belonged to Dr. Adrienne Hale. A psychotherapist. A bestselling author. A woman who disappeared three years ago, just one week after the release of her last book and was never seen again.

Then Tricia finds the hidden room. And inside it, cassette tapes. Dozens of them. Recordings of Adrienne's therapy sessions. Private. Sealed. Never meant for anyone else's ears.

She starts listening anyway.

This is where the book is at its absolute best.

Adrienne's voice on those tapes is compelling. Sharp. Observant. The kind of woman who notices everything happening in a room and writes it down carefully afterward. Her sessions with her patients, their secrets, their histories, the slow unraveling of something dark inside the facility, crackle with real psychological tension.

McFadden builds the thriller around one simple idea from the very first page, everybody lies.

And the ending: The twist is technically there. The clues were planted. Looking back you can find every one of them.

Unpopular opinion:

A great thriller ending makes you gasp before you understand why. This one makes you understand before you feel anything. McFadden turns the familiar promise of marriage and home into something deeply ironic, a happy ending built on perfectly shared guilt. That's a clever idea. But clever ideas need emotional groundwork to detonate properly. And the groundwork here wasn't deep enough.

This is McFadden doing what McFadden does, fast, readable, structurally tight. Adrienne alone is worth picking it up for. But if you've already read The Teacher, Housemaid and felt what Freida is truly capable of, you spend Never Lie waiting for that same gut punch.

This is a 3 Star read for me.

Genre: Psychological Thriller · Mystery & Suspense · Domestic Thriller · Crime

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

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Eden Fox comes home from her evening run and her key doesn't fit the lock.

That's it. That's the moment. Right there in the first chapter,  before you've even settled in, Alice Feeney pulls the floor out from under you.

When the door finally opens, there's a woman standing inside. Wearing Eden's dress. Her rings. Standing in her house. Claiming to be her.

And then Eden's husband appears behind this stranger, looks her in the eye and says, “I don't know you” and slams the door in her face.

One house. One husband. Two women. Someone is lying.

Eden Fox is an artist on the edge of her big break. She has the house, the husband, the life. And then in one ordinary evening. All gone. All of it. Replaced by a woman who looks just like her and a husband who acts like Eden never existed.

Six months before that — Birdy. A reclusive Londoner. A terminal diagnosis she's still processing. An inheritance she never expected, a clifftop house in a tiny village called Hope Falls. She goes to start over. She finds something she was never supposed to find.

Two women. Two timelines. One house watching both of them from the cliffs with its enormous window-eyes.

Every character in this book is hiding something. Not dramatically. Not with big speeches. Just… quietly. In the way real people hide things. In the gaps between what they say and what they actually mean.

And the chapters are SHORT. Dangerously short. The kind of short where you tell yourself just one more. And then another. And then it's 1 AM and you have no idea how that happened.

And that ending? It doesn't arrive loudly. It arrives the way the truth usually does — quietly, suddenly, and about ten seconds too late.

Bookstagram recommended it and i found it everywhere on Goodreads. Actually, it's my first Alice Feeney book. It will not be my last. I already have Rock Paper Scissors and Daisy Darker sitting in my TBR and I know exactly what's about to happen to my sleep schedule.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Genre: Psychological Thriller · Domestic Thriller · Mystery & Suspense

Some books entertain you. This one gets inside your house, changes the locks, and dares you to prove you belong there.

QOTD

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Then she saw him.

Zain. He was still the same guy. Maybe a little bit older. Maybe he is still working that job. But he wasn’t alone. He was looking at a girl in a simple pink Jora.The way he was leaning in, hanging on her every word... it was the look Zoya had thrown away a thousand times.

Zoya walked toward him, her designer heels clicking like a countdown. She expected him to jump, to offer her a chair, to be her safety net one last time.

‘Zain?’ she whispered.

He turned by tilting up his face. His eyes met hers. For a second, she saw the boy who had waited outside her gate for hours. But then the time changed. The interest was gone. It had been replaced by a polite coldness that froze her blood.

‘Hi, Zoya,’ he said, his voice steady. ‘This is Ramsha. My better-half’

He didn’t ask how she was. He didn’t ask if she was happy. He simply turned back to Ramsha, his attention snapping away from Zoya like she was… nothing.

Zoya stood there surrounded by the elite of Lahore and realized she had spent about 7 years looking for a Dream. And the only man who truly loved her had finally found a woman.

She walked towards the door when she remembered the night:

‘I’m just saying, Zain, you could try harder’ Zoya had snapped, pacing the small, humid balcony of his Gulberg flat.

Zain had looked up from his sketchbook, his eyes soft. He had a normal job, a low paying for her standard. He didn’t want to conquer the city, he just wanted to draw it. ‘I am trying, Zoya. I’m trying to make sure you’re happy. I bought those jalebis you liked from the old city. I’ve been saving for that ring.’

‘A ring isn’t a future, Zain. It’s just metal. I need a man who matches my speed. Someone... impressive.’

That night, he had proposed for the fourth time. She had said yes but with a condition that ‘We’ll be engaged but lets be open. I’ll be looking forward to seeing if I’m not doing it earlier, maybe someone better is waiting before I settle.’

Zain had winced. His dignity was fracturing in his eyes but his interest in her was so absolute, so parasitic that he had whispered ‘If that’s what it takes to keep you, okay.’

After a week, Zoya stood in the doorway, her ironed lawn suit crisp, her laptop bag slung over her shoulder like a shield. She was the rising star of her marketing firm, a girl who looked at the horizon and saw a throne. When she looked at Zain, she saw a recliner. ‘I found him, Zain,’ she had said, standing in that same Gulberg flat. ‘He’s successful. He’s ambitious. He’s everything you can’t match’.

Zain hadn’t begged this time. The stray dog look was gone. He had looked at her with a quiet, terrifying high-dignity.

“You’ve been checking up on better men for five years, Zoya. You broke up with me several times. You cancelled your engagement twice. Maybe I’m not the best but I am myself. You just couldn’t see me. Go. Enjoy your life. But one request, don’t come back next time, please.”

She walked out into the dark parking lot, turned toward the marquee and watched through the mirror, Zain reached out and tucked a stray hair behind the Ramsha’s ear. It was a gesture which made Zoya’s skin itch. She remembered the hundreds of times she had used that devotion. The weight of her career feels like a cage. She thought of all the men who had used her, and then she thought of Zain, who had simply wanted her.

She opened her Instagram and typed the words that felt like a funeral:

She sat in her BMW and looked back at the marquee. The lights were bright but the man who used to be her sun had finally found a new world to warm. Zoya drove away, a successful woman with a Dream life, finally realizing that the horizon is a beautiful place but you can’t live there.

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You see, Officer, I am a man of honor. But I am too small. I am weak against the force of my own will. I couldn’t control the lust. Not for sex… no… the lust of the living. The hunger for the breath in my lungs to keep moving. You understand, don’t you? Of course not. You have a job. You got paid. You have food.

I haven’t eaten in two days. Two days of my stomach having teeth.

Don’t look at my suit if you can’t look through it, you empty creature. You see the grey polyester and think of citizen. I see a cage.

I came here an hour ago. I walked every aisle, searching for a crumb of grace. But nothing is free in this world. Nothing for a small creature like me. Not without putting down my soul.

So, I took the bread.

It was beautiful, you see. It invited me. It whispered. The smell... the taste... It was a symphony. To you, it’s just a small piece of bread. To me, it was life itself.

But then... him.

Look at him. So handsome. So young to be a manager. A nice guy, right? But he isn’t the man of higher self. He thought I was a street dog. He barked at me, Officer. His words were jagged, disrespectful, biting at my heels like I was a stray beneath his feet.

I didn’t want to hurt him. I am a man of honor. I just... I pushed him. A defense of my higher self. He stumbled. He hit the stand back there, a hollow sound like a bell ringing in a dark room. Then he just... just laid down. He decided to rest on the cold floor.

When he didn’t get up. It was complete silence here. I realized no one was looking. I was alone with my dignity and a man who wouldn’t move. So I did the noble thing. I pushed the siren. I called you here.

“I want you to arrest him, Officer”. Arrest that man lying on the ground. He insulted me. He insulted the man I am. I’m not the criminal here. I’m the victim of his disrespect.

The teenagers were filming with their phones. I looked into the lenses.

“I am not a criminal,” I whispered to them. “I am a man who kept his dignity high... even with an empty stomach...”

The handcuffs snapped. The metal was colder than the floor. They pushed me into the van. It smelled of charcoal and old rain. I pressed my face against the glass.

I am not a criminal.

The siren started. A high, screaming note. It didn’t come from the roof of the car. It came from inside my ribs.

I am not… a victim.

It is a heavy, final sound, the click of a bolt that signifies the end of the world you knew and the beginning of a life measured in inches. We have all felt that phantom click. We feel it when a relationship we poured our soul into turns cold, or when a career becomes a cage. We build fences to keep the wolves out, but we rarely ask what happens when the wolf is already inside the house.

In The Locked Room by Freida McFadden, The story strips away the comfort of figurative language, exposing the skeletal remains of fear in a windowless cell.

This is not a book you read. It is a book you survive.

Nora wakes up in the dark. Silence is her only companion, a thick, cloying thing that tastes like dust and old terror. And whispers:

It is a prayer. It is the sound of a soul trying to anchor itself to reality when the tide of madness is coming in. It makes you realize how much of ourself is tied to things we take for granted. The morning tea. The sound of a gate creaking open. The ability to walk toward a horizon and never hit a wall.

We live in an era of constant noise. We fill our minds with the content by doomed scrolling of a thousand strangers. But what if the noise stopped? What if you were stripped of your phone, your friends, and your freedom? What would you find when you looked inside?

Freida McFadden forces us to confront a jagged truth, many of us are living in unfurnished souls. We have neglected our inner lives to such a degree that if we were locked in a room with only our thoughts, we would be in the company of a stranger.

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We are taught to fear the dark alleyway and the hooded stranger. But The Locked Room suggests the true monsters are the ones who know our coffee orders. They are the ones who smile at us across the biryani platter while calculating the weight of the chains.

Every human being is a locked room. We show the world the lobby, the bright lights and the polished floors. But behind the unmarked door at the end of the hall, there is a cellar where we keep the things we are too afraid to name it, to say it.

We are a trapped generation. We are trapped in cycles of debt, trapped in the performance of the Hustle, and trapped in the fear that we are running out of time.

When we are in the locked room. Be it a bad marriage or a basement, we begin to rewrite our history. We make the monster seem kind. We make the cage seem like a home. We lie because the truth is too heavy to carry in a space so small.

If you pick up this book - The Locked Door by Freida Mcfadden, don’t just look for the who-done-it. Look for the What-would-I-do. Check the hinges of your own life. Are you staying in your current situation because you want to, or because you’ve convinced yourself the door is locked? Sometimes, the most terrifying thing about a locked room is realizing the key was in your pocket the whole time but you were too afraid of the light to use it.

We’ve all felt it. It’s the moment the social mask slips. For a heartbeat, you see the jagged edges of the human ego protruding through the polite conversation. We spend our lives performing. We have work-selves, family-selves and the digital taxidermy we post online.

But what happens when the play goes on for too long? What happens when the actor forgets where the stage ends and the real world begins?

This is the haunting quiet question rotting at the floorboards of Agatha Christie’s Three Act Tragedy.

When you pick up this book, you aren’t reading a mystery. You are attending a performance.

Sir Charles Cartwright, a famous actor who has retired to a house called The Crow’s Nest. He is a man who only feels alive when he is being watched. He is the original influencer. He suffers from the restlessness of the modern soul, the desperate need for an audience to validate that he actually exists.

Then, at a dinner party, a guest dies.

There is no struggle. No blood. Death is as polite as a cough. Yet, it shatters the glass house of the elite. Christie’s writing here is surgical. She captures the way we use manners as a shield: -

That line should make you shiver. She isn’t just talking about a murderer hiding a crime. She’s talking about the way you hide your insecurities behind a title and expensive clothes. We are all, in some way, living in a three-act structure, waiting for the applause that may never come.

Enter Hercule Poirot - A Belgian detective.

Poirot is the ultimate teacher because he doesn’t look at fingerprints. He looks at the texture of the people involved. He understands that a crime is just the final, rotting fruit of a long-nurtured seed of vanity.

In our world, we reward the so-called Dramatic Gesture. We love the grand speech, the public apology, the loud success. But Christie warns us:

To them, you are not a human being. You are a supporting cast member. You are a prop. Have you felt it? That friend who only calls when they need a sympathetic audience? That relative who only invites you over so you can witness their latest achievement?

This is the dark logic of the ego: eventually, it must consume the people around it just to keep the spotlights burning.

Think about that. If you are always acting, who are you in the dark?

Three Act Tragedy is a mirror for our age of personal branding. We are so busy acting in our lives for the benefit of others that we have lost the ability to be sincere. We’ve become caricatures. We prioritize decorum over truth and create a vacuum where evil can hide in plain sight.

It is much easier to kill someone in a room full of polite people. No one wants to cause a scene.

There is a profound sadness in the character of Egg Lytton Gore. She represents the hunger of youth, the desire for life to be a grand adventure. She wants to be on stage.

“It’s a very dangerous thing to have a theatrical mind.” A theatrical mind justifies anything in the name of a good story. It turns tragedy into content.

The Method Poirot offers us isn’t just for solving murders, it’s for surviving a chaotic world. When the plot twists of life hit, the heartbreaks, the job losses, the betrayals, just don’t join the drama. Pause. Observe. Look for the inconsistencies in the performances around you.

The most sophisticated person in the room is often the most broken. The simplest truth is the one we are working hardest to ignore.

In the end, Three Act Tragedy teaches us that while the world may be a stage, you don’t have to be an actor. You can choose to be human. You can choose to go off-stage where no one is watching and finally breathe some real air.

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In the early dampness of February 2026, I was gifted a copy of It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover. The cover was pink. The buzz was sugary. I expected a consumable romance, the kind of easy, disposable prose you read to forget your own life.

Instead, I found a case study in how we let ourselves be hunted.

Colleen Hoover is often dismissed for her simple prose or her penchant for the dramatic. But the critics are missing the point. The simplicity isn’t a flaw, it’s the camouflage. It mirrors the way abuse actually enters a room with a smile and a bouquet of lilies.

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In any other narrative, Ryle is the Goal. He is a neurosurgeon with charm. He is the Dream Man. Hoover builds him up with a precise, cruel intent, she is setting a trap, and we, like Lily, walk right into it.

You don’t fall for a man who hits you. You fall for the man who makes you feel like the only girl in the world.

In a culture where we are raised on the toxic diet of “Sabar”, where endurance is the highest virtue a woman can possess, Hoover’s writing is dangerous fuel. By the time you realize what is behind it, you’ve already bought the ticket.

We have to stop calling it losing control. It is an assertion of power. It is a choice.

The most haunting parts of this story aren’t the scenes with Ryle, they are the echoes of the father. This is where the grit meets the soul. We like to think we are modern. We tell ourselves we are post-patriarchy because we work jobs and wear denim. But we are all just carrying around the ghosts of our parents’ marriages.

Lily didn’t just fall for Ryle. She fell for the familiarity of the cycle. She fell for the scent of a home that was always on fire.

Is it love if it’s just a repetition of childhood trauma?

We praise Lily for breaking the cycle, but we rarely discuss the sheer violence of that choice. In our society, breaking a cycle is a form of social suicide. It is the act of looking at your mother, who stayed, who endured, who withered for the sake of the last name and saying “I refuse to be like you.”

That is the most painful thing a daughter can ever do. It is a betrayal of history. It is deciding that your peace is worth more than the collective honor of a family that would rather see you bruised than divorced.

We are obsessed with who Lily ends up with. We treat Atlas like a lucky charm, a reward for surviving the war. But survival isn’t a game where you win a person at the end.

Survival is the quiet, ugly work of picking up the pieces of your own soul and realizing some of them are missing forever. Some pieces stayed in that apartment with Ryle. Some pieces were buried with the father.

Doing everything right for a man who treats your heart like a stress ball will only make you submissive and, eventually, dead inside. We don’t need a guide on how to find an Atlas. We need a manifesto on how to be okay with being alone in the dark until we find our own light.

And for most of us, being “ours” is the most terrifying thing we’ve ever had to be.

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For years, we’ve treated this classic literature book of George Orwell’s as a political manual. But reading it todays feel different. It feels less like a warning about a dictator and more like an autopsy of the modern human spirit.

The most haunting element of Orwell’s world isn’t the physical pain, it’s the systematic destruction of the inner life. Winston Smith’s rebellion didn’t start suddenly, it started with a diary. He wanted a space where his thoughts weren’t indexed, tagged, or monitored.

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In our era, we have almost entirely surrendered that space. We live on explore pages. Every food, every minor frustration, and every thought is digitized and fed into a machine that calculates our value based on engagement. We’ve turned the so-called Thought Police into a crowd-sourced activity.

Orwell’s Newspeak was designed to make thought-crime impossible by removing the words needed to conceive of it. In my view, we are living through a soft Newspeak. Our communication has moved toward the binary. We speak in “likes” or “dislikes,” “canceled” or “clout,” “red” or “blue.”

When we lose the vocabulary for nuance, we lose the ability to see the “other” as a person. We begin to think in slogans. As Winston realized

The tragedy of the ending, the famous “He loved Big Brother“, is the most misunderstood part of the text. It isn’t just about brainwashing. It’s about the relief of giving up. It is exhausting to hold onto the truth when the rest of the world insists on a lie. It is draining to be an individual when the “Party” offers the warm, mindless embrace of the collective.

Today, the “Party” is the Algorithm. It tells us what to buy, who to hate, and what to believe. And the scariest part of my personal experience with this book? The realization that, more often than not, I want to be told. I want convenience. I want fake reality.

1984 isn’t a story about a dark future, it’s a story about the fragility of the Now. It reminds us that freedom is not a permanent state. It is a daily practice of memory and language. Orwell’s final message wasn’t “Don’t let this happen.” It was “Don’t let them take your mind.”

Because once you lose the ability to say that 2 + 2 = 4, even if the whole world is screaming 5, you haven’t just lost a math problem. You’ve lost yourself.

Do you feel that you’re still in control of your own opinions, or is the algorithm just telling you what to think next?

Note. If you’ve not yet read this masterpiece of literature, just do it now.

I’m sitting on the chair under the warm sunlight, looking at a story written over a century ago in England. It feels like I’m reading the news from down the street. It makes me angry that Thomas Hardy used Tess like a puppet to show how cruel the world is, but he wasn’t lying. I used to think that if I just followed the rules, being the perfect son, the reliable eldest child, the one who never stumbled, I would be safe. But reading Tess Durbeyfield’s story made me realize that doing everything “right” is often just a polite way of being submissive. And in the end, it makes you dead inside long before you’re buried.

Because we are all puppets to something, to our families who expect us to be heroes, to the bosses who hold our jobs or salaries, and to the person who says they love us till the version about us has been broken they imagined in their heads.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes with being the one everyone is leaning on. It’s that heavy, quiet look of an eldest child carrying a weight they didn’t ask for. Tess was a pure woman but purity didn’t feed her siblings. When her family’s horse died, it wasn’t just a tragedy, it was a debt she had to pay with her life.

She was sent to Alec d’Urberville because her family expected a miracle, a big launch into a better life. Instead, she found a man who realized that her poverty was his greatest weapon. Alec never faced a day in court, while Tess spent her life suffocating under a crushing, undeserved guilt for a sin she never committed. She was hunted, coerced, and sexually assaulted by a man who realized early on that her family’s poverty was his greatest weapon. She was left to pick up the jagged pieces of a shattered life, all while the world watched and judged.

Nowadays the scenery has changed but the script is the same. Alec didn’t just use force, he used the power of his Money. We see it everywhere, the sexual harassment that people endure just for the sake of an opportunity or a job. Money is still the ultimate shield. Tess lived a life with shame.

Then the safe part of the story or we can think. Angel Clare, he was a progressive guy. He talked about equality and souls. But his love was a house of cards. The moment Tess found the courage to tell him her truth, the day after their wedding, she offered him the most raw, painful part of her soul. She trusted him. He walked out. He didn’t love her; he loved the puppet he’d been playing with in his head. It’s the same double standard we’re still screaming about.

The middle of the story is just a cycle of being worn down. The predator came back, and this time he was even more predatory. He used her family’s hunger to wear her down.

Economic coercion now. A dark place where a No is treated as a Not yet by men who feel entitled to your body because they provide your paycheck.

Later, the progressive man came back, finally realizing he was a coward, but it’s too late. Tess was trapped. She was caught between the predator who violated her and the good man who left her when she needed him the most. So, she did the only thing she has left. She took a desperate stand. She refused to be the prize in their tug-of-war.

Her story ended at Stonehenge. Ancient stones. An ancient sacrifice. As the sun rose and the world closed in on her, there was quiet peace. For Tess, the only way to escape a world that treats women like sport was to leave it behind.

Tess didn’t die due to her sin, she died because no one was brave enough to believe her truth while she was still alive to hear it. We can’t change what happened then, but we can change what happens in our near-about today. If a person stood in front of you today, exhausted, honest, and broken by a world (that values money over people) would you be his/her Goodman, or would you be the one who finally listens?