What the books
are actually about.

A twenty-six-year-old is offered a role two levels above her experience. The salary would change her family's decade. The team she would inherit is already burned out, and she knows it.

Is ambition a character trait, or a response to the fear of being left behind?

• —Which is harder to admit: wanting the promotion, or wanting what the promotion would prove?
• —Where does Macbeth's ambition actually begin — the prophecy or the letter to his wife?
• —Is Gatsby ambitious, or is he trying to reverse time?

Two accounts of the same meeting, given by people with different amounts of power in the organisation. Everyone in the room privately knows which account is accurate. The process does not.

Why do fair processes so reliably produce unfair outcomes?

• —What does Atticus Finch prove, and what does the verdict say about proof?
• —Why does Atticus's defeat feel like a defence of the system rather than an attack on it?
• —Is the Count of Monte Cristo a justice story or a warning about private justice?

Recommendation systems decide what you see, what you want and which version of the news you believe. The arrangement is comfortable, and it is not voluntary in any ordinary sense.

Is a cage you chose still a cage?

• —Huxley's world abolishes pain. Orwell's abolishes truth. Which is closer to the present?
• —What does Orwell suggest happens to a person who has no word for dissent?
• —Where in your own week is a decision made for you by an interface?

A curated self, edited daily, measured by numbers. The performance is not fake — it is a version, and versions start to compete with the person.

If you perform a self long enough, which one is the mask?

• —Dorian Gray's portrait keeps the truth. What is your portrait, and who is allowed to see it?
• —Why does Jekyll need a chemical solution to a moral problem?
• —Which version of Jane Eyre would be recognisable today?

A death, and then the ordinary horror of admin: passwords, subscriptions, an account still recommending things to a person who no longer exists.

What is the difference between remembering someone and keeping them?

• —Why does Woolf put the deaths in brackets?
• —Has a digital archive changed what mourning is?
• —What would you want to leave behind that is not a message?

Two people in the same job, one of whom is being supported by their parents and does not know it. Every conversation about risk, holidays and ambition is being held on different foundations.

Why is it easier to talk about money than about class?

• —Which detail in Pride and Prejudice tells you most about money without mentioning it?
• —Why can Gatsby's money never buy him the thing he wants?
• —Where does Middlemarch describe a decision that is really a class decision?

A public apology that is mostly about the apologiser. A message that should have been deleted, kept for years. The way a family renames an event so nobody has to be guilty of it.

Is confession ever really for the person who was hurt?

• —Why does Raskolnikov's theory fail him?
• —Why does Hawthorne give the guilty man a good reputation and the guilty woman a visible mark?
• —What does Poe's narrator want from the reader?

The job you leave to do your own work. The country you move to. The relationship you end because staying would cost more than going. Every departure has a bill, and it usually arrives later.

Is freedom the ability to leave, or the ability to choose what you stay for?

• —What does Odysseus keep choosing over immortality?
• —Why is Huxley's dystopia harder to argue with than Orwell's?
• —Which refusal in Jane Eyre costs her most?

A family version of an event that everyone has agreed to remember wrongly. Nostalgia for a decade you did not live through. A photograph that has become the official memory of a day nobody enjoyed.

Is a shared false memory a lie or a form of care?

• —Why does Morrison delay the central fact of Beloved?
• —Can nostalgia ever be a political emotion?
• —What does Gatsby's green light become by the final page?

Burnout renamed as resilience. Anxiety treated as a character flaw. A colleague who is 'dramatic' until the thing they warned about happens, and then nobody mentions it again.

Who in a crisis gets to define what counts as sanity?

• —Why is Gilman's narrator more reliable than the doctor?
• —What does Hamlet gain, and lose, by performing madness?
• —Is Plath's narrator ill, or accurately describing her world?

Horror is the genre we use to practise fear safely: haunted houses, true crime, the film you watch with the lights on. The pleasure is control — you can stop it at any time.

What do we actually want from a frightening story?

• —Why is Lovecraft scarier when nothing is described clearly?
• —What does Poe's narrator want from the reader in The Tell-Tale Heart?
• —Is the governess in The Turn of the Screw the victim or the threat?