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Reading Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis felt like stepping into a hall of mirrors where the reflections kept changing, sometimes grotesque, sometimes heartbreakingly intimate. At first, I thought I was reading a parody of the author’s own life: the narrator is named Bret Easton Ellis, a writer infamous for his excesses, his celebrity, and his brutal novels. There was an almost comic sharpness to the way he exposed his own vanity, drug use, and fractured relationships. But as I turned the pages, the tone shifted, and I found myself caught in something far darker.

The book becomes a hybrid: part memoir, part horror story, part satire. Ellis describes settling into suburban family life with his wife and son, only to find the past clawing its way back. Strange, supernatural events unfold: a possessed house, unexplained deaths, ghostly presences. I could never tell if these hauntings were real or simply projections of guilt and fear. That uncertainty was what disturbed me most.

What struck me deeply was the way Ellis used horror not just to scare, but to reveal. Behind the poltergeists and the violence, I felt the ache of a man terrified of fatherhood, of love, of responsibility. The suburban calm was just a mask stretched over dread.

By the end, I was unsettled but oddly moved. Lunar Park isn’t just about being haunted by ghosts—it’s about being haunted by one’s own past, one’s mistakes, and the fear of not being able to change. Closing the book, I felt like I had witnessed a confession disguised as a horror novel, and it lingered with me long after.

Reading Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm was for me an experience both thrilling and deeply unsettling. At first, I thought I was entering a typical science-fiction thriller, but very quickly I realized the novel was much more: a confrontation with the fragility of human dominance over nature.

The story begins with mysterious and seemingly unrelated incidents: whales attacking boats, deep-sea crabs crawling onto coasts in destructive masses, unexplained collapses in the ocean floor. As I turned the pages, I felt the unease building—what if these were not random events, but signs of an intelligence rising from the depths? Schätzing gradually reveals the existence of a collective oceanic entity, an intelligence that sees humanity as a destructive intruder and responds with calculated vengeance.

What struck me most was not only the suspense but the sheer plausibility of it all. Schätzing grounds his narrative in marine biology, geology, and environmental science, so much so that I often forgot I was reading fiction. I found myself oscillating between awe at the scale of his imagination and dread at the ecological warnings hidden within.

The human characters—scientists, politicians, ordinary people—become both narrators of and pawns in this vast ecological drama. Their helplessness mirrored my own as a reader: no technology, no political maneuvering could mask the reality that humanity had underestimated the ocean’s power.

By the end, I closed the book with a heavy awareness. The Swarm is not simply a thriller; it is a warning disguised as entertainment. It left me questioning how long our fragile balance with nature can hold—and whether, if pushed too far, the ocean might truly answer back.

Reading Bertolt Brecht’s Baal felt like standing too close to a fire—at once hypnotic and destructive. The play follows Baal, a poet and musician whose raw talent is matched only by his self-indulgence and cruelty. Instead of being celebrated as a misunderstood genius, he comes across as someone who consumes everything around him: friends, lovers, even himself.

What struck me most was the way Brecht refuses to romanticize the artist. Baal is charismatic, yes, but also repellent—driven by desire, incapable of restraint, leaving ruin wherever he goes. I found myself both fascinated and unsettled, unable to look away from his downward spiral.

The imagery is stark and often brutal: drinking, wandering through taverns, seductions that quickly turn sour, and the slow erosion of his vitality. By the end, Baal is not a tragic hero but a man hollowed out by his own appetites.

For me, the play was less about one individual and more about the myth of the artist as untouchable. Brecht seems to ask: what happens when talent is worshipped without responsibility? Baal left me with unease, but also clarity—the reminder that brilliance without humanity burns everything to ash.

Leer El ser y la nada fue para mí como entrar en un laberinto sin salida clara, un espacio filosófico que me obligó a cuestionar incluso lo más cotidiano. No es un texto fácil; cada página exige atención absoluta, pero en esa dificultad descubrí también una intensidad única. Sartre escribe con una precisión que a veces se siente como un golpe: directo, inevitable.

Uno de los conceptos que más me impresionó fue la distinción entre el “ser-en-sí”, el mundo de las cosas, cerrado y completo, y el “ser-para-sí”, el de la conciencia humana, siempre abierto, inacabado y condenado a elegir. Comprendí de una manera casi dolorosa lo que Sartre quiere decir cuando afirma que estamos “condenados a ser libres”. La libertad no es aquí un don, sino una carga: no podemos escapar a la responsabilidad de lo que hacemos y de lo que somos.

Igualmente perturbador me resultó su reflexión sobre “la mirada del otro”. Descubrí en esas páginas una verdad incómoda: cómo nos convertimos en objetos cuando dejamos que los ojos ajenos nos definan. Me vi reflejado en esas situaciones en las que uno se adapta demasiado al juicio externo, perdiendo autenticidad.

El ser y la nada no es un libro que consuele; es un espejo que devuelve una imagen cruda de lo humano. Y, sin embargo, sentí al leerlo que en esa crudeza había también una forma de claridad.

Reading J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was, for me, like listening to a voice that refuses to be tamed. Holden Caulfield, the narrator, speaks in a way that is restless, erratic, and brutally honest. At first, I was unsettled by his tone – sarcastic, dismissive, often bitter – but as I moved deeper into the book, I realized that behind all the cynicism stood a young man terrified of growing up, desperate to find authenticity in a world he calls “phony.”

The novel follows Holden in the days after he leaves his prep school, wandering through New York City. He drifts from hotel rooms to bars, from awkward encounters with old acquaintances to tender moments with his younger sister, Phoebe. What touched me most was not the plot itself, which is minimal, but the rawness of Holden’s emotions: his grief over his brother Allie, his loneliness, his fragile longing to protect innocence.

The famous image of the “catcher in the rye” – someone standing in a field, saving children from falling off a cliff – struck me as both heartbreaking and beautiful. It made me pause and reflect on my own fears of losing what is pure in life.

Salinger’s style is deceptively simple, but it lingers. I finished the book with a strange mix of sadness and warmth, as if Holden’s voice was still echoing in my head.

Reading William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was like trying to follow a chorus where every voice sings in a different key. At first, I was disoriented by the shifting perspectives—each chapter told by a different member of the Bundren family, and even by those around them. But slowly, I began to feel the rhythm of their fractured storytelling, and it drew me in.

The novel follows the Bundrens as they journey to bury their matriarch, Addie, in her hometown. On the surface, it is a story of duty and family loyalty. Yet, for me, it quickly became something much deeper: an exploration of grief, pride, selfishness, and the strange ways love and obligation collide.

What unsettled me most was how raw and unfiltered the voices were. Some spoke with bitterness, others with confusion, some with heartbreaking simplicity. I felt closest to Darl, whose eerie sensitivity made me uneasy, as if he could see too much. And Dewey Dell’s quiet desperation left me with a knot in my chest.

Faulkner’s language is challenging—sometimes fragmented, sometimes poetic—but I realized that the difficulty mirrors the experience of grief itself: chaotic, contradictory, impossible to pin down.

When I closed the book, I didn’t feel closure. I felt dust, sweat, and exhaustion, as though I had walked with the Bundrens myself. As I Lay Dying isn’t comforting, but it is unforgettable. It showed me that even in dissonance, a haunting kind of truth can emerge.

Reading Friedrich Schiller’s William Tell felt like stepping into a landscape painted with both beauty and danger — towering mountains, quiet lakes, and the tense air of oppression. I knew the broad strokes of the legend: the expert marksman forced to shoot an apple off his son’s head. But Schiller’s play gave me more than just that moment of high drama; it gave me the heartbeat of a people longing for freedom.

William Tell is not a rebel by nature. He is a man who loves his family, his land, and a quiet life. Yet, when the tyranny of the Habsburg governor Gessler crosses a line too far, Tell becomes an unlikely symbol of resistance. Reading his transformation, I found myself asking: when would I draw my own line? When would I be willing to risk everything?

The famous apple-shot scene gripped me with its unbearable tension — not just for the act itself, but for what it represents: precision under pressure, trust between father and son, and the silent promise of vengeance. Schiller’s language carries both poetic grace and moral weight, making each exchange resonate beyond its historical setting.

What struck me most was how the play balances personal honor with the collective fight for liberty. It reminded me that revolutions often begin with deeply personal acts of defiance.

William Tell is more than a tale of a heroic archer; it’s a meditation on justice, courage, and the quiet moment when an ordinary person becomes a legend. And closing the final page, I felt a little braver myself.

Reading Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony was like watching a slow, methodical nightmare unfold in broad daylight—horrifying not because it was loud, but because of its stillness. From the first page, I felt a cold pressure building, an invisible weight pressing down as I entered this remote island where justice is no longer debated, only executed.

The story centers around a bizarre machine used to carry out punishments by inscribing the condemned man’s crime into his flesh. I was disturbed not just by the grotesque detail, but by how calmly it was all described—clinical, almost reverent. The Officer, who worships the old brutal order, explains the machine with the pride of a museum curator. I felt trapped in that moment, caught between fascination and revulsion.

What affected me most was the silence of the Condemned Man, and the passive discomfort of the visiting Traveler. He represents, perhaps, us—the reader, the modern outsider, appalled but ultimately unwilling to intervene. I kept asking myself: Would I have spoken up? Or simply walked away?

Kafka’s prose is precise, cold, and deceptively simple. That simplicity made the horror feel more intimate, more plausible. There are no villains, no heroes—just people upholding systems, clinging to rituals, avoiding responsibility.

By the end, when the Officer submits himself to his own device, I didn’t feel relief. Only a deeper unease. The machine breaks. The system collapses. But nothing is truly resolved.

In the Penal Colony didn’t terrify me in the usual way. It made me question the machinery—literal and symbolic—that we all live inside. And it reminded me that some of the darkest truths don’t scream. They hum quietly, and persist.