JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

What started as pragmatic laziness—leaving big books at home and traveling with slimmer ones—has led me to a different way of reading. The active ritual of reading one book extremely slowly, patiently, in the same place, over an unreasonably long time, has changed the way I see. It’s a measured meting out of a book, like nibbling one piece of chocolate each night in the same chair over a year. It’s a refusal to hurry up or to turn reading into a life hack; it’s the anti-summer reading, the anti-binge read. It’s site-specific, intensely slow reading, for no other reason than to bask in what’s good.

Read The Case for Taking Forever to Finish Reading Books.

The other night I was bored, a condition I’ve learned to appreciate since I climbed out of the anxiety pit. I started organizing my files, and among the stories I saved from the Paris Review and other sites I found several by Ottessa Moshfegh, the author of Eileen. For months I’ve been looking for a copy of her story collection, Homesick for Another World—turns out I have most of the pieces (but will still buy the book when I find it). I started reading a story called The Weirdos, and before I knew it I’d finished eight stories.

They’re short, intense, and the opening paragraphs just seize you like face-sucking xenomorphs.

On our first date, he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients’ theories of light, how it streams at angles to align events in space and time, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens using mirrored bowls of water.

If you require fictional characters to be nice and “relatable”, don’t even look at Homesick. I found most of the people repellent but fascinating, and in the 10 to 15 minutes it took to read each story, I imagined I was those people. It’s amazing, being in someone else’s skin, especially someone you would have nothing to do with in real life. That’s one of the reasons I read fiction.