On my first reading, I didn’t know how closely the stories would be related to each other and so when the first two stories featured enormous piles of kiwis, I wondered what was driving Ogawa’s obsession with the dark, furry fruits. Though Revenge is technically a collection of short stories, the tales intersect in ways that insist a different set of rules apply. A bold hall of mirrors that has you bumping into yourself until the end. It’s the most disorienting book I’ve read, and, with each subsequent reading, I never feel myself on firmer ground. Maybe it’s all three, but the sentence means something different depending on the space you’re projecting it onto. As a reader you must decide, from sentence to sentence which house it is you’re reading about. Hell is the story of not one but three haunted houses, all existing in the same space and time. I force it on all of my students and recommend it to everyone who will listen. I should just go ahead and commit to putting this book on every list I ever make. She blurs herself into her hallucinatory descriptions of these women, posing the question: What is the difference between what we observe and what we experience? The terrifying conclusion could be just as unsettling: no such line exists. It’s hard to parse where the line is drawn between Ndiaye and the women in green she watches with a detached, almost surveillance-level point of view over the course of this book. Ndiaye’s book is no exception and it freaked me out. I don’t think it’s an accident that most of the books on this list are brief. Below are six titles that have done just this for me. Whether I’ve worked my way out of the maze or not by the end, it is these disorienting texts that interest me the most.

Some fiction does you the service of providing answers, some allows you room to interpret, and some stays open until the very end, lingering in uncertainty. I become engrossed in figuring out some new version of logic and regaining my equilibrium. Maybe reality appears to unhinge and allow in more possible varieties of event than had previously been expected. Maybe a certain expectation had been set as to the type of story I was being told, and it becomes clear that the story is shifting its course. Maybe the narrator changes the way they’re speaking and that alters my relationship to how literally I’m supposed to take their words. This often coincides with the methods of communication getting scrambled in some way. I love the feeling of being knocked off-kilter, unsure of what’s to be trusted. Why is this the measure of a book’s worth? Why is the best-case scenario being able to leave one’s self behind? What happens when we, as readers, lose ourselves to a story that has also become disoriented in some way? Where do these circles of the Venn diagram overlap?Īs a reader, my favorite way of losing myself is by investing myself in a storyline that falters in its security. See also: “gripping reads,” “page-turners,” a book you “can’t put it down.” The specific experience of “losing oneself,” though, has a dissociative implication. In the realm of book blurbs, “losing oneself in a story” is one of the most unavoidable clichés.

Warped reality rooms