Nietzsche & Nabokov, philosophy and literature, where the musings of great thinkers meet the artistry of storytelling. Whether you are seeking answers to life’s big questions or simply craving a new perspective, this part of The Soul Index is where you let your mind and imagination roam freely.
Before Katy Perry and her all-female crew mission swept the headlines with their brief, 11-minute commercial cruise to the edge of space, there was another, far more enduring way of commuting into this vast unknown. This age-old mode of transportation…
Across shifting centuries, certain paths stay alive because people continue to return. Many are guided by books on Norse paganism that preserve fragments that never faded. To learn its ways today is to begin quietly, often with reading. Each page…
Severus Snape, the best anti-villain of all time, stirred something deep inside me. Unlike other Potterheads who disliked him in the beginning, I ‘always’ felt drawn to his character. I related to him. Mysterious. Dark. Unseen loyalty. Poker face. The…
I listened to stories about loss before I’d read about them. Devastation falls short of grief, incredibly so with books on miscarriage. If all this grief is displaced love that has no place to go, reading its statistics feels cold…
Think back to a book that touched you, maybe there was a meal tucked in somewhere, shaping the scene. Novels about food work in the same way, and the most loved foodie novels capture those moments of taste and feeling.…
Some books that predicted the future feel less like novels and more like time travelers smuggled into our bookshelves! History, after all, has a strange sense of humor. You might assume that only politicians, scientists, or economists capture what’s going…
A name can be both a gift and a limitation. Throughout history, writers have chosen to set aside the one they were born with and take on another, a name that could move more freely through the world. For some,…
Younger man older woman romance books were once a niche trope. Given preference for partners in a mixed-gender relationship, it is always the men who turn out to be older than the women: only 14% couples have an older woman…
Have you ever noticed how the old stories never really leave us? The gods of the north walk quietly through modern culture, hidden in films, novels, and even the language we speak. The earliest stories were carried from hall to…
Sometimes language slips away when you need it most. You reach for a word and it hides, or the page stares back blankly. Every poet has lived inside that silence. What often helps is not a grand idea, but a…