If you’ve listened to my podcast closely, even back in the early days, when it was virtually nothing, nothing— if you listened all the way till the endings, you’ve surely heard our unique signoff, spoken by my co-host and “bookworm sidekick” Cassandra, a name which obviously is drawn from Greek mythology, her story is one of the most tragic in the ancient canon—a tale of knowledge without agency, truth without belief, voice without authority. (But a voice that you ignore at your own peril.)Anyway, on to “your mind becomes its own kingdom” and its relevance to modern literature. (Or, any type of truth-seeking, really):“Your mind becomes its own kingdom.” How does that connect with books, actually?Well, it suggests a space of sovereign imagination—a realm where you rule as both monarch and subject, where the boundaries of reality become permeable, and where internal landscapes hold as much weight and consequence as the external world.In this kingdom, thoughts aren’t passive observations but active forces. Memories aren’t simply recalled; they reshape themselves with each visit. Fantasies don’t remain safely contained in daydream—they bleed into perception, alter decision-making, construct alternative realities that feel as solid as the physical world. The mind, in other words, stops being merely a processor of experience and becomes a generative space where new worlds are born, where obsessions can metastasize into entire cosmologies, where a single idea can colonize consciousness and remake it entirely.This has particular resonance in an era of hyperconnectivity and information overload. When the external world bombards us constantly with stimuli—notifications, news cycles, social media feeds, streaming content—the mind as kingdom becomes both refuge and prison, its own universe, perhaps. It’s the one space we ostensibly control completely, yet it’s also the space most vulnerable to invasion by outside forces, most susceptible to being colonized by others’ narratives, most prone to rebellion from within.How this applies to modern books:Contemporary literature increasingly explores this interior sovereignty and its fragility. We see it in:Psychological thrillers where unreliable narrators construct entire realities within their minds that may or may not correspond to objective truth. The reader must navigate these mental kingdoms, never quite certain what’s real. Authors like Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, and Ruth Ware build narratives where the protagonist’s mind isn’t just the lens through which we see—it’s the territory we’re exploring, complete with its own treacherous geography.Speculative fiction that literalizes the mind-as-kingdom metaphor. In N.K. Jemisin’s work or in books like Inception-influenced narratives, mental spaces become actual places that can be entered, explored, conquered, or defended. The mind isn’t metaphorically a kingdom—it quite literally is one, with its own laws of physics and politics.Literary fiction exploring mental illness, trauma, and neurodivergence where characters exist in mental kingdoms that operate by different rules than consensus reality. Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrators, for instance, inhabit interior worlds so fully realized that the external world becomes almost secondary. The mind’s kingdom can be baroque, labyrinthine, hostile to its own inhabitant.Dark academia and campus novels where intellectual life creates alternative kingdoms. In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Mona Awad’s Bunny, characters become so immersed in their studies, their artistic pursuits, their insular communities that they essentially secede from ordinary reality. Their minds construct kingdoms with their own hierarchies, values, and dangers.Autofiction and fragmented narratives where the author’s mind becomes the explicit subject—books like Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation or Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, where consciousness itself is the landscape being mapped. These aren’t books about events that happen to people; they’re about the kingdom of thought, how it orders experience, creates meaning, builds and destroys worlds.Fantasy that treats worldbuilding as a cognitive act rather than just setting. In Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi or Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea, the elaborate fictional worlds function as exteriorizations of mental states. The strange kingdoms characters navigate are simultaneously physical spaces and psychological territories.The modern reader, then, becomes an explorer of these kingdoms—not a passive tourist but an active participant who must learn each kingdom’s language, customs, and dangers. We’re asked to inhabit mental spaces that may be radically unlike our own, to accept alternative logics, to surrender our own mental sovereignty temporarily to enter another’s.This is particularly powerful in an age where we’re increasingly aware that everyone...
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