“I’m looking for a fever dream of a book.”

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I’m looking for a fever dream of a book that has you and the protagonist questioning reality. It paints a vivid picture of the experience but does not devolve into a plotless whirlwind mistaking confusing the reader for being original.

Oh no, friend, you didn’t go and read House of Leaves, did you? Everyone who does always comes away either with their mind blown or with a newfound soapbox about how convention breaking doesn’t always mean better.

For your purposes, I have two recommendations. If you are looking for a fever dream of a book, you could do way worse than reading Fever Dream by the Argentinean horror novelist Samanta Schweblin, which gave me the only reading experience of my adult life that actually felt like a nightmare. It’s the story of a woman named Amanda, who we meet lying in a bed in the dark, certain that worms are inside her body, while a child next to her asks question after question. My caveat here is that because the novel follows dream logic, it doesn’t quite come together into something coherent at the end. There’s plot, but it’s hard to say exactly what’s going on in the final pages.

You might also try Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Piranesi is a sweeter and less menacing novel than Fever Dream, but there’s a touch of Borgesian opacity to it that lends it that surreal quality you’re looking for. It takes the form of a journal kept by a man called Piranesi, but who knows that this is not his name. He lives in a network of vast, flooded marble halls that extend for miles in all directions. As far as Piranesi knows, this is all there is of the world, and he is one of 15 people who has ever existed. Eventually he discovers otherwise — but before that, Piranesi lives in such radiant, terrible innocence that you almost hate for him to learn more.

I am looking for a book that poses a theory about how to improve your life in some way shape or form. Or maybe even, reflects deeply on life. It could be autobiographical or it could be a simple nonfiction essay-style book. What do you got?

Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read on this question. Odell’s thesis is that we should spend more of our time on actions that cannot be turned into productive acts to be sold back into the capitalist marketplace: less time with our devices, our work, our consumables, and more time with our physical landscapes, our communities, our planet. How to Do Nothing is her manual for how to unlock our attention from our screens and re-engage it in the places that she thinks matter more. It got me obsessed with watching how the change of the seasons keeps transforming a single branch of a maple tree on my block.

Hey! I am an avid fantasy reader and just finished Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series and am now tackling his Stormlight Archive. I love the way he tackles topics such as politics, fate, religion, and mental health. Something he lacks, however, is convincing romantic subplots. Can you recommend a fantasy novel or series that includes these components but with a wlw [women loving women] romantic subplot?

I have to suspect that you are a plant sent here to remind me that I haven’t recommended Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series to anyone for a while, so perfectly do those books fit your stated needs. As I will take any opportunity to talk Muir, I’ll allow it.

The Locked Tomb series takes place in a galactic civilization ruled by an immortal emperor who makes his followers worship him like a God, even though he is just a dude named John who loves puns. Harrow, one of the main characters, is a nun devoted to John’s necromantic death cult. She’s also a devious political operator who would be even more dangerous to her many enemies if the psychotic episodes she goes through didn’t leave her questioning her sense of reality. Gideon, Harrow’s bodyguard/mortal enemy/maybe true love (??!!!!), would prefer to be left alone to do some sword fighting and read her dirty magazines, but she keeps getting sucked into Harrow’s political plots and finding herself reluctantly compelled to save the day.

The shorter, funnier summary of this series is “lesbian necromancers in space.” They are some of my favorite books I’ve read in the past 10 years or so.

The three books so far are deeply romantic, gorgeously tragic, smart as hell, and written in this absurd baroque, irreverent language. Start with Gideon the Ninth, and then work your way through Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth. We’re still waiting on the planned final volume, Alecto the Ninth, but maybe it will be ready by the time you’re done with the others.