Eight Books That Will Lead You Down a Rabbit Hole

There is something particularly literary about obsession. After all, being inside a good book can feel like being tugged down a rabbit hole, without an end in sight. To read a novel is to absorb the thoughts of another, to limit your point of view to the pages in front of you—to see, in your mind’s eye, what is depicted or suggested but not literally there. Whether characters obsess over knowledge or love, self-glorification or self-abnegation, their single-minded focus draws us in with what James Baldwin called a “Niagara force,” hurtling us onward and downward until we reach the final sentence.

These eight books explore different dimensions of obsession: self-destructive single-mindedness, the pursuit of an idea whose bounds seem beyond rational explanation. They reveal obsession to be at once a perilous tic and a necessary tool for managing what could otherwise spin into chaos. Most of all, they show that without a bit of obsession, there would be no stories to tell.

Michael Kohlhaas, by Heinrich von Kleist (translated by Peter Wortsman)

A Romantic poet, dramatist, novelist, philosopher, andsteal his horses, after all. It was “his sense of justice,” Kleist writes, that “turned him into a thief and a murderer.”