What do I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman and Colorado Kid by Stephen King have in common? They are two books that are unsatisfying by design.

Yes, you heard me right, the authors of both books went into it fully intending on never giving you an ending. Both books create a captivating mystery and fail to solve it, leaving you with something worse than a book hangover - a brain worm that will never go away. Why, you ask? Let's dig in.

King was trying to define what mystery was and step outside of that box, because most real mysteries never get solved - and each person lives in their own head, so the motivations of anyone can never be fully understood. Harpman's family fled the Holocaust when she was a child, so she wanted us to ask why? Not just how. It's more about the life lived within the story, not about what caused it.

But I'm not really here to talk about author motivations. I want to talk about it from the reader's perspective in the context of the year I'm writing this - 2026. The year of the release of AI into the world with no guardrails. The birth of the loss of human creativity.

Both of these books leave us with no ending, no solution to the mystery. And yes, the why matters, but the result is that our brains are forced to wonder, forced to continue thinking beyond the story, forced to think critically. Yes, this is another essay about critical reading. Why? Because everything leads back to critical reading. Yes, everything.

*Want me to prove it to you? Ok. Where would you start if you wanted to enslave an entire country - body, mind, and soul? Well, to really get them on board you'd have to start young, wouldn't you? Start when they begin to decipher the world and ask questions. Feed them lies about how this is the good place, all other places are bad and we are just lucky to be here, and anyone who doesn't feel lucky must just be on the bad people's side. Give them constant entertainment so they don't notice, they don't ask, they don't wonder what else their lives could be. Guilt them for disobeying. Start when they begin to understand media. Never teach them to think, watch, read, for themselves. Does this sound familiar? Do you understand?

In the mystery I Who Have Never Known Men (which I think must definitely have inspired the series Silo by Hugh Howey) a girl is in a cell with 39 other women. They don't know why they're there, and can't really remember how they got there. They do know they had lives before, but any attempt to escape, yell, touch each other, or even have big emotions results in the cracking of whips by the men outside the cell, who never interact with the women other than to watch them every day, every minute. I can't say I could spoil anything for you because the book is mainly about how the main character, and the only one who has no memories before the cell, is different from the rest. She's definitely autistic, but the main point is that since she knows no other life, she doesn't fight to get back to something that no longer exists. She fights for the current moment to mean more, to be better, to move forward.

We never do find out why she was in that cell. And I think that the beauty of that is that you will continue thinking, deciphering, imagining, long after you finish. You're not just consuming for the sake of consumption, grinding away at your daily dopamine quota to survive the agony of late stage capitalism and the fall into dystopia. You are feeding your neurons, which take this small story and make it blossom into a million new neural pathways. I bet that if you hooked up an EEG to your brain and compared it to reading a different book, you'd see much more happening after you finished than normal.

In the rise of the age of AI eating everything humans every created that was beautiful and churning out slop for the sole purpose of cheap consumption, most people seem to have forgotten that the beauty is in the journey. That we all can create, simply for the sake of creation. You can be an author without every selling a book. You can be a painter without ever making a dime on a painting. And when we admire someone else's art, we are getting to see a piece of their soul, exposed to the world. What else differentiates a sentient being from a fish, a rat, a tree? I think, therefore I am.

Don't fall for the AI propaganda. Keep thinking babes. You are human, and you have value just for existing, and you are a maker, a creator of art, just because you can. Go make something for the sheer joy of it. And I will love it, because it was you who created it. Not because it's good, but because it's a piece of you.