Luster
by
A month is too long to talk online. In the time we have been talking, my imagination has run wild. Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well. But everything is different IRL.
“Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself awy from the computer, to read a magazine or book. Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find the prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could have only been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries. Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so. Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too.”
― Uncanny Valley
― Uncanny Valley
“in my frenzied state of despair, I understood: there was stability in living in the past.”
― My Year of Rest and Relaxation
― My Year of Rest and Relaxation
“Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.”
― My Year of Rest and Relaxation
― My Year of Rest and Relaxation
“I can't burden them with my shit. Mom will absorb it all as a personal failing. Neither of them has the tools to deal with this. I'll have to figure it out on my own.”
― Permanent Record
― Permanent Record
“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something—a thought, I guess—as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings—that time could be contained, held captive.”
― My Year of Rest and Relaxation
― My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Nikhil’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Nikhil’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Nikhil
Lists liked by Nikhil












































