Two of my biggest identities are being an avid reader and a chronic planner. I thrive on structure and organizing things into categories. If you are like me, you’ll know that the purest form of happiness and peace sometimes comes from neurotically cataloging things. After having a sort of nostalgic epiphany, I decided to model my reading list like a college syllabus this year, or at least give myself a few themes and a general sense of what I want to learn from books (fiction and nonfiction alike). I’ve been on a mission to revive my intellectual curiosity and meaning in the books I read, so mindfully choosing a curation of books based on a specific season or theme has been massively helpful.

Obviously, in classic me fashion, I’m making a new syllabus each season because if you’re not consuming media seasonally, what are you doing? Everything is so fun when you’re living according to season, I promise.

Anyway, here is the syllabus I made for myself for autumn (September-November), with a bunch of stills from some autumn movies. Also, are some article recommendations for you if you like literature!

Also also, if you live in the southern hemisphere, here is my spring syllabus for you:

AUTUMN SYLLABUS 2025

Reading during the colder months sometimes feels like a sacred ritual between yourself and your ability to shut off the world around you. It unfolds between a candle lit on your nightstand, the sound of leaves crackling outside, a steaming hot mug of tea or coffee. Weirdly, it becomes so much easier to dive into the pages of a book the colder it gets. Call it hermit season, call it self-discovery season—whichever it is, I always find a new favorite book every fall that I always reread into oblivion.

During the autumn months, I love stories that feel haunting and atmospheric, stories that feel like a literary manifestation of an actual ghost. Whether this is because the book is actually scary, or leaves an eerie imprint in my mind, I reach for books in which the atmosphere feels larger than life. The setting must be its own character, its own creature.

My themes and specific characteristics in books that I am searching for this month are petrichor in literary form, poetic prose, gothic literature, unsettling and weird literature, meditations on melancholic feelings, vignettes, atmospheric settings, mild horror, Shirley Jackson, reflections on spaces around you and its consequent reflections on your mind, the liminal space between life and death, epistolary books.

Here are the books that you should read each month of 2025’s fall, divided by week. I’ve incorporated some books I am planning on reading for the first time, along with some books I would absolutely reread and strongly urge you to as well.

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Also, I tried out a new formatting style for book recommendations because this is a long overdue post for women in translation! While making this list, I realized that I tend to read an entire author’s bibliography if I enjoy them, and this is especially true for translated literature (because this means I enjoy the translation, which means I’ll enjoy the other translated books as well). I did do a very similar post two weeks ago on the importance of reading world literature to diversify your reading list for my how to get smart again series, so you can think of this post as a subcategory of that.

This one in particular, is all about highlighting and doing a deep dive into some brilliant female writers from non-English speaking countries and their equally brilliant translators that transform works of art into a digestible English format for us; this allows us to read about cultures and experience the English language and syntax in a way that is slightly different from books typically written in English (this is why I argue that translations are so important, because they need to be able to capture the nuance and tone of the language it is written in, before translating it to English).

One thing I love doing in tandem with reading a book, especially translated literature, is reading author interviews and essays written about said books. Since I organized this by author, I have also added in various essays and interviews with these authors because I think it is important to read these in order to fully understand their books and authorial intent, especially when it is in a language you are not familiar with.

In each author section, I will include:

• a quote or two that I love

• writing style & brief biography

• preferred reading order

• some essays and interviews of them

clarice lispector

Clarice Lispector is a Ukranian born Brazillian writer, famous for her stream-of-consciousness prose and fragmented introspection. I have often described the experience of reading her books as running through a waterfall or cascade of words instead of actually sitting down and flipping through the pages. Her prose is deeply immersive, and this can no better be seen than in Agua Viva, which literally translates to The Stream of Life. The cadence of her writing is hypnotic, and you’ll no doubt finish reading her books in a dreamy haze, almost as if you were pulled in by a siren call.

SUGGESTED READING ORDER:
The Hour of the Star
Near to the Wild Heart
An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures
A Breath of Life
Agua Viva

“I’m restless and harsh and despairing. Although I do have love inside me. I just don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it tears at my flesh, like barbs. If I can hold so much love within me, and nevertheless continue to be uneasy, it’s because I need God to come. Come, before it’s too late. I’m in danger, as is everyone who’s alive.”

— Agua Viva

A Lost Interview with Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector: Madame of the Void

The True Glamour of Clarice Lispector

han kang

Korean author Han Kang’s writing is highlighted by the poetics of her words, yet the unrelenting and unembellished manner in which she does not shy away from violence and cruelty of human nature keeps readers grounded. Her careful meditative and reflective prose cushions the blow of her unflinching honesty, and this creates unputdownable book after unputdownable book. The most memorable book of hers for me was Human Acts, which is about the horrific 518 Gwangju Uprising in 1980—a student led protest in the face of the military dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, disguised as a presidency. One of the best books I’ve read in the last few years, it made me pick up the book in Korean, and it ended up being the first Korean book I’ve read in maybe fifteen years. I am so proud that she won a Nobel Prize last year.

SUGGESTED READING ORDER:
The White Book
Human Acts
Greek Lessons
The Vegetarian
We Do Not Part

“Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.”

— Human Acts

Han Kang versus the Korean establishment

'I want to be hopeful'

Yung In Chae: "Why Han Kang's Nobel Matters"

Han Kang interview: 'I never imagined The Vegetarian would find so many readers'

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“He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship and saw the white promontory of the colonial district again, the motionless buzzards on the roofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balconies, only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.”

Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez

I made this collection last week while going insane waiting for my biopsy results (fitting) and am sharing it in hopes that at least one of these resonates with you! As I go through the last of my health scares, I am hoping that rereading some of these articles will make me feel a bit better, so I am sharing them with you too. Here are around twenty articles about getting older and growing up, loneliness, true happiness, journaling, and falling in love.

(tip: if you do not have a subscription and wish to go over paywall, you can type in archive.is/newest/ in front of any url!)

Nostalgia Reimagined | Aeon

This is one of my favorite essays of all time. De Brigard explores nostalgia as a function of memory but also a function of the brain’s imagination; nostalgia does not always have to be true or autobiographical. I reread this a few days ago, and it takes on a whole new meaning in light of artificial intelligence being able to manufacture videos and transform pictures into something that has motion. It is scarily easy to create false memories in our minds. Nostalgia is quite literally defined as ‘acute homesickness’, and perhaps in the decade where we are perhaps most prone to major changes in life, it is a word that is deeply relevant and prevalent in our daily lives.

A Thin Line Between Mother and Daughter | Salon

(trigger warning: eating disorders)

Weirdly, my relationship with eating was fine until I hit my twenties. I turned twenty at home, a month after the pandemic started, and after I suddenly dropped a couple of pounds, my brain was capsized by societal beauty standards. I began to hate the reflection I saw on any mirrored surface and thus began this strange relationship I have with food. Jennifer Egan recounts her deeply personal relationship with food and her struggles with an eating disorder while exploring the societal background and changes regarding the ideal female body and eating habits through the decades—how this is generational and almost genetic or evolutionary.

Attitudes toward food are taught and learned, but once food becomes entangled with notions of good and evil, it can be nearly impossible to extricate. Nor can one give it up altogether. Eating disorders have become part of our culture, and they’ll multiply and reproduce with lives of their own.

Loved, Yet Lonely | Aeon

Kaitlyn Creasy writes about the deep set loneliness that seems inextricable from a good portion of our twenties. Why do we feel lonely even though we know that we are loved? Even if when we are surrounded by people? There is a difference between physical isolation and loneliness, although many conflate the two. Creasy explores this difference, stating that loneliness can always coexist with other social states and emotions such as love or camaraderie. I think about the distinction between loneliness and solitude/aloneness often, so much so that I wrote an essay about it last October. Here is my journal entry about it:

On Keeping a Notebook | Slouching Toward Bethlehem (essay collection)

The is one of the essays that changed my life. Joan Didion is one of my (and probably everyone’s) favorite essayists, and this one resonated so deeply with me. Didion writes about the purpose of keeping a notebook and how it is different from keeping a diary—a notebook should be for recording external observations such as various overheard conversations or random facts that you pick up throughout the day. A notebook should ideally feel like written notes about other people and your surroundings, but in reality, it should be about an evolution of how you perceive the world around you.

“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

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He is also someone who has largely influenced my reading taste in the last year, especially pivoting my book choices from contemporary literary fiction to 20th century modern classics, which I am somewhat grateful for but somewhat upset that I enjoyed books that I was so sure I would hate. All of his picks below are books that I have either enjoyed or have on my to-read list, so I’m excited to follow along as well.

This also feels like a good time to mention that we are hard at work, planning a joint post on NYRB classics (because that’s pretty much all we’ve been reading in the last few months). Griffin also wrote about his top 10 books way back in November of last year for my on the shelf segment! Check it out here:

Introduction to 20th Century Modernist Literature

(guest syllabus by )

My first real encounter with Modernism was in 2019 and it destroyed my life. I’m being dramatic. I rebuilt, of course. I was a Sophomore in college at the time and had somehow managed to get around the prerequisites for a Senior-level James Joyce class; one day, during my readings, Joyce’s Ulysses attacked me, as if from behind, knocked me out cold and for four months I was in a dream-space with the same refrain on loop in my head, “How is this possible? How was this legal to write?” (and it wasn’t exactly “legal” to write, it turns out — but that’s a tangent for another time), poring over pages upon pages upon pages in my room, pen in hand, in the park, sitting on docks over the lake, reading from lamplight in the corner during family gatherings much to the dismay of one grandparent who was particularly concerned that the university had me reading “nonsense”.

I’m not going to claim to fully understand Ulysses — can anyone? Even on my second re-read (currently ongoing), I’m still putting the pieces together — but then again, a logical understanding comes secondary to modernist texts such as this, or Finnegans Wake, or Woolf’s The Waves, or Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Some might disagree with this; certainly there’s a small army of academics worldwide interpreting the material and understanding it with a remarkable and clear, and logical, depth. But my personal love for this moment in literary history is the vagueness, the mystery, the bizarre humor.

Imagine, for a moment, a purely unconscious language: one which perfectly alligns with the linguistic (and non linguistic) mechanisms of your brain thinking, working, sleeping. Imagine you have a book in that language, in your hands, that you could sit with for hours and read, sometimes laugh along with, sometimes pore obsessively over; a language that links the unconscious of the moment at hand to the unconscious of a full life’s arc. There have been times, occasionally, over the last five years as I’ve read as deeply into the modernist canon, where I could see through the words which I was struggling to place into existence in my mind, to find some sort of understanding with them, as if the ink itself had become a portal to something as eternal as the sun and the moon and a wide constellation of stars I never knew existed.

Here’s a snippet of an essay by Virginia Woolf called “Modern Fiction” (month 2, week 2 in the syllabus below) that phrases it perfectly:

“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.”

Here’s an example. At the end of the second-to-last chapter of Ulysses, after the two protagonists, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Odysseus reborn and Telemachus (his son) reborn, Bloom returns home and climbs in bed beside his wife, Molly, who’s faking being asleep. Here’s the description as Bloom drifts off into sleep after a long 737 pages of wandering the streets of Dublin:

Does it look like nonsense to you? It did to me too — though by this point in my first read, I was used to the nonsense. Because it is nonsense, in a way. But nonsense can be useful, especially in art. The trick with the above, in my opinion, is to read it out loud, to yourself, and you can almost feel the emulation of what it means to drift into sleep after a long day of chores and errands, work and dilly dallying around town. And also I can’t help but laugh while reading through the list of fellow travellers: isn’t that worth something? Sure, it may be nonsense, but who doesn’t love a little bit of nonsense now and then?

But then, at the bottom: “Where?”, and there’s a dot. This could be a period — a large period, sure. It could be the Earth… It could be the moon in the sky. It’s on that point that we leave Leopold Bloom forever.

Legend has it that when the first proof copies of Ulysses were being read through, one out of a handful of test reader asked Joyce if he had intended to leave a period hanging at the end of this chapter and Joyce supposedly asked to look at the page, pulling out a pen. He circled the period and continued to draw until it became a large circle. He never explained what this meant. But I think I know. I can’t quite explain the feeling. Whatever the dot expresses, the feeling exists beyond the cold rationality and mechanization that ripped apart the world in the early twentieth century — here’s a startling example of a piece of art intent on reaching beyond that cold rationality. This dot startled me on my first read, I still remember the feeling of first encountering it: I felt suddenly as Alan Shepard must have, looking back on the Earth from the moon, that lonely pale blue dot floating aimlessly in the universe. Except this was made of ink. And suddenly everything I had ever read became the Earth. And here I was, a reader suddenly, starkly, standing on the outside of it all.

Here’s a reading syllabus I put together which can hopefully help understand the transition from the nineteenth century’s murmurings of a changing world with the rise of industrial reproduction (month one) to the beginning of the twentieth century (month two) when artists were grappling with a world having become something new, mechanical, cold, and lifeless. Then, in month three, we’ll take a look at what happened after. I include a number of texts which can hopefully form a tether for us to understand how we got from there to here, a resounding present moment with its own, unique flavor of cold rationality and inhumanity, and its own simmering response to a changing world struggling to be born.

MONTH ONE: murmurings of a changing world

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Totally unrelated to the syllabus (you can skip this part—I just got deeply sentimental listening to Landslide while writing this introduction): Since it’s Elle’s birthday on the 13th (gemini princess), I’m adding this little quote I adore from Everything I Know About Love about best friends.

“My mess only takes proper shape with that familiar and favorite piece of my life standing next to me. We know the names of all our grandparents and our childhood toys and we know the exact words that, when put in a certain order, will make each other laugh or cry or shout. There isn’t a pebble on the beach of my history that she has left unturned. She knows where to find everything in me and I know where all her stuff is too.”

To know me is to know how much I love my best friend; anyone who knows me in any capacity knows her by extension. Elle has been my level head and moral compass and reading buddy and other half for the last ten years. I find so much comfort in the fact that among all the uncertainties and changes in life, our friendship will always be my north star.

Okay. Enough of that. Here’s what you actually opened the post for: the syllabus itself.

Introduction to Modern Nonfiction Literature

(guest syllabus by )

In college, I double majored in creative writing and history. I am one of those girls who eventually made the slow crawl towards marketing (but never say never to a PhD in history)! Yet that background, as well as the things that made me love those subjects in the first place, might make me uniquely poised to recommend a beginner’s syllabus for nonfiction that sits at the intersection of imagination and information.

A sentence can soar just as much in a true work as an untrue one; a writer of nonfiction can infuse just as much creativity onto the page as their fictional counterpart. Oftentimes, I think, people are just hesitant in knowing where to start.

As you approach traditionally published nonfiction, whether for the first time or as a repeat visitor, the first thing I’ll offer is perhaps something of the obvious: not all nonfiction books will be for you. In the same way that everyone has preferences within the diversity of fiction genres, nonfiction contains just as many multitudes.

Reflecting on that context, I’m going to venture out with the second general statement I’ll offer: if you like to read, there will be nonfiction you’ll enjoy. Hell, if you’re reading this sentence on this newsletter corner of the internet, I think it is important to note that the blood coursing through Substack is tried and true as well as innovative nonfiction.

There are a thousand and one ways I could write a nonfiction starter syllabus. I could go for something centered on the writing styles of the ladies of the 70s (think the best work of Didion, Eve Babitz, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag) or the best works of true crime fiction (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil as well as In Cold Blood as the front runners, of course). Then there are the ways I could ask you to reflect further, deeper, on what it is to live in this world right now through some stellar memoirs by black women (Becoming and Hunger and The Yellow House) or books from scientists that seek to confront our changing climate (starting from The Sixth Extinction and The Uninhabitable Earth). But I’m losing the thread.

Instead of nursing my own interests (much), I’ve chosen to tackle this syllabus by breaking the months into broad categories, with weeks themed around them. As you adapt this to you and your own interests, chuck away a week that doesn’t speak to you or double down on one that does. The wonderful thing about a syllabus, whether from a class, or one of the lovely ones Elle has already written, or one you set for yourself, is that they are designed to spark interest, reflection, and conversation.

The categories I have chosen here are geared towards the reader just diving into nonfiction, working from least to most challenging. Memoirs, I believe, are a natural starting point for those more attuned to fictional writings because of their storytelling aspects and the common use of first-person narration. Month two delves into all things niche nonfiction; every book is in a completely different style, on a completely different subject. Finally, the wider world offers a somewhat challenging uptick, but one that may succeed in just barely scratching the surface as you begin accessing the stories of others on a historic and worldwide scale.

MONTH ONE: memoirs

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“It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.”

Anyone who knows me knows that I love perfumes, and I’ve historically been the go-to person among my friend groups whenever they need a perfume recommendation. I also think there is something so special about trying to describe scents, because they differ based on your skin chemistry with the perfume. Your sense of smell is also actually directly connected to the amygdala and hippocampus, which are the two regions that control your emotions and memories. I think that’s why I think of perfumes as something precious, something that requires a lot of thought to purchase (also because most of them are very expensive).

As such, I truly believe that one of the loveliest and most romantic things to describe are perfumes. Like literature, each scent interprets differently for everyone and attaches itself to a personal constellation of memories. Talking about perfumes is quite literally the olfactory form of translating and analyzing a text.

Scents hold so many memories, that sometimes, I will smell something specific and have a vivid flashback, transported back to somewhere from years ago—a mundane day at the park with my parents when I was seven, on a school bus in middle school, or even think of friends I fell out with years ago. I’ve given perfumes away because I associate them with memories I don’t want to be reminded of anymore (perfumes that are terminal for me).

Here is my summer perfume rotation for this year (eleven bottles) with some candles I like burning in the summer (seven candles) which I think is a great blend of floral, clean, light gourmand, bright, and romantic. More of the underrated, niche perfumes I own are beyond the paywall! I tried something new and made moodboards of each perfume from Pinterest pictures.

CASAMORATI dama bianca

NOTES || kumquat, lime / violet, italian iris, lilac, egyptian jasmine, lily-of-the-valley / vanilla, malt, white musk, sandalwood, cedar

An angelic powdery kumquat-vanilla scent with a purple floral note that chases you through the day on the dry down. Lira (Casamorati’s lemon vanilla pound cake scent)’s spring counterpart. A delicate breeze through a flower garden in mid April, citrus covered in icing sugar and baby powder that falls into a pillowy vanilla white musk base. All notes draped in diaphanous, billowing linen, Dama Bianca is a soft, ethereal presence in the springtime whispering about precipice of summer.

(layer with Diptyque’s L’eau Papier for more muskiness, and with Indult’s Tihota for more sweetness.)

PARFUMS DE MARLY delina

NOTES || lychee, rhubarb, bergamot, nutmeg / turkish rose, peony, musk, vanilla / cashmeran, incense, cedar, haitian vetiver

Princess in a bottle. Delina is an hyperfeminine fruity floral that doesn’t whisper at all and follows you throughout the day in the same capacity. The sweetness of the lychee and tartness of the rhubarb slowly simmers in a pot of candied pink flower petals, creating a jammy concoction dashed with vanilla. A romantic ode to running through a rose garden in the springtime with a picnic basket full of pink fruit, covered in a cashmere blanket. A compliment chaser in the warmer months.

NISHANE wulóng chá

NOTES || bergamot, orange, mandarin orange / oolong tea, nutmeg / fig, musk

Iced oolong tea sipped in a sleek glass cup on a temperate spring day under a citrus tree, wearing a loose linen shirt and a perfect pair of blue jeans. Wulong Cha is a classic green tea scent done flawlessly; the coolness of the tea notes are well balanced out by the brightness of the citrus notes, although subdued and waxy enough to blend in seamlessly. The absence of any woody notes and the creamy fig musk base creates an airy clean hotel lobby scent.

(I prefer spraying this on clothes, as I like the scent of it before it reacts with skin)

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Two of my biggest identities are being an avid reader and a chronic planner. I thrive on structure and organizing things into categories. If you are like me, you’ll know that the purest form of happiness and peace sometimes comes from neurotically cataloging things. After having a sort of nostalgic epiphany, I decided to model my reading list like a college syllabus this year, or at least give myself a few themes and a general sense of what I want to learn from books (fiction and nonfiction alike). I’ve been on a mission to revive my intellectual curiosity and meaning in the books I read, so mindfully choosing a curation of books based on a specific season or theme has been massively helpful.

Obviously, in classic me fashion, I’m making a new syllabus each season because if you’re not consuming media seasonally, what are you doing? Everything is so fun when you’re living according to season, I promise.

Anyway, here is the syllabus I made for myself for summer (June-August), with a bunch of stills from some summer movies. Here are some article recommendations for you if you like literature!

Also, if you live in the southern hemisphere, here is my winter syllabus for you:

SUMMER SYLLABUS 2025

The world has become drenched in green and I get drenched in sweat by walking five minutes, which means that summer has arrived. My hair becomes a humidity indicator in the summertime, morphing into a curly untamable mess. I know I say this every season, but summer is truly the best reading season.

It’s so versatile; the slow metamorphosis of nature, from pastel tones to vibrant green in June, to the inescapable world drenched in every shade of green in July and the low hum of bugs on a hot summer night, to the late summer melancholy of August. The books I read in June are completely different from the books I read in August, when I am patiently waiting for the weather to cool down a little in anticipation for autumn. Oddly to me, summer is the only season that doesn’t feel monochrome or linear to me (spring is optimistic, autumn is cozy, winter is gray).

Summer also feels like the only season that is filled with expectations, one that needs a plethora of adjectives in front of it. Despite our attempts to generalize and aestheticize and label the season to the exact sort of one-tone vibe that one believes fits their personality (“hot girl summer”, “tomato girl summer”, “girlhood summer”), summer stubbornly simply stays unpredictable and contradictory and terribly hot. I think we would all be in a better place if we just let summer be what it is: a season filled with a languid sun that is stubborn to set, a world that comes alive in the daytime and distills into a soft dusk where time stretches into slow sunsets for us to finally breathe.

Personally, summer always starts off on a hopeful note for me, carrying the legacy of the boundless optimism I have in spring. In June, I love reading short and light literary fiction or classics filled with love and romance. In July, as the humidity skyrockets, I veer towards hazy books set in the mid-century or something that reminds me of childhood nostalgia. And in August, which I always call my “late summer special” month, I find myself wanting books to haunt me like a ghost, to drown every word I read in melancholy (or let it drown me, possibly).

My themes and specific characteristics in books that I am searching for this month are NYRB classics, essay collections about loneliness, minimalist writing, melancholic plots, relationship fiction with no happily ever afters, hazy mid-century books set in the Californian desert, the rose colored glasses of childhood nostalgia, books that feels like water cascading, quiet stream of consciousness.

Here are the books that I am planning on reading for the three months of 2025’s summer, divided by week. They’re a good mix of new books, rereads, and books I finished halfway that I want to return to. Feel free to follow along and discuss!

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Also, I only read literary fiction and essay collections these days, so there won’t really be any other genres in this list. All of the summaries are from the book itself. I’ve linked the Goodreads page and listed the publication date and publisher for your convenience! And the trailers for the movies are also linked as well.

The list includes 12 new books and 6 new movies coming out this month.

BOOKS

The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward
June 3 | Norton | Literary Fiction

Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life. Clara, a celebrity author in desperate need of validation, believes Serene is their mother, while Dempsey, isolated and content to remain so, believes she is a con woman. As they clash over this stranger, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts—together.

Lili is Crying by Helene Bassette
June 3 | New Directions | Literary Fiction

The book explores the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette’s stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love—of desire run cold—and the promise of renewal. The novel is moving and maddening in turns—the characters trapped in their own cruelty and sorrows—but in its spareness it feels true: “Show me a woman who has actually chosen something.”

Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse by Alice Bolin
June 3 | Harper | Essay Collection

In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.

Bonding by Mariel Franklin
June 12 | Picador | Literary Fiction

Mary is single, jobless, and on her way to Ibiza. There, at a party, she meets Tom, a brilliant chemist on the verge of launching a new drug that claims to cure the anxieties of modern life. Back in London after a heady trip, Mary begins going out with Tom and working for her sort-of-ex Lara, who has created innovative dating app designed to revolutionize the industry. As tech and pharma collide, she is forced to question what love and success mean in a world that is hurtling out of control.

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I mentioned on my “how to get smart again” post that I’ve been making that I’ve been making syllabi based on theme or time period, and many of you asked me to share those too, so here is the one I made for 19th century classic literature.

If you are looking to get into classics, the best place to start is looking into 19th century literature. I say this for two reasons: 1) the language is not much different to modern day language, compared to 17th-18th century literature that veers more towards Middle English or Early Modern English, and 2) the 19th century was a transformative century for literature in general, and the richness and depth that comes from its books is unparalleled. You can see this in the stark difference between books written in the early 19th century (Jane Austen’s bibliography) versus the late 19th century (The Picture of Dorian Gray).

Introduction to 19th Century Classic Literature

By the 19th century, English had pretty much standardized its grammar and vocabulary. There is not much difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English apart from its vocabulary, which was in large part due to the Industrial Revolution—a key milestone in 19th century. The rapid growth and industrialization of the European continent propagated a plethora of new vocabulary and concepts to describe into words, most which were created with Latin and Greek linguistic roots. On top of this, the globalization of the world and expanding trade routes (on top of colonization, unfortunately) caused many foreign words to be adapted into the English language as its own.

Thematically, many books published were a response to the meteoric modernization and technological advances that were occurring, or the Enlightenment in the earlier decades of the century. The industrialization and urbanization inevitably led to a larger disparity in wealth and class, and much of the literature produced during this time critiqued this, reflecting on social inequalities and injustices. The industrial society that many countries were becoming was oftentimes a direct contention of artists and writers, who felt that the overwhelming emphasis on technology and mechanization was dehumanizing, stifling human connection and imagination, and destructing nature in general. The social impact of it, including the aforementioned wealth disparity and growing exploitation, especially of children, were also portrayed in many of the books.

The broad key movements of the 19th century are: Romanticism (Frankenstein, The Scarlet Letter, Byron’s poetry), Realism (Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, Huck Finn), and Modernism (Heart of Darkness, Portrait of a Lady—important to note that this movement flourished more and carried over into the early 20th century). There are other notable movements, such as Transcendentalism, Naturalism, and Aestheticism, but then this post would be way too long. You can check out some literary movements for yourself here—it makes for an excellent three hour rabbit hole.

I put two short books or one long book a week so depending on your reading speed, you can adjust the time it takes to finish the whole list! If you are a slow reader, you can double the time to make it a six month syllabus—it’s completely up to you. I tried to put a good mix of very famous classics and less famous classics that are all very interesting and worth reading alike. I also arranged it so that it goes from most readable to the densest (at least in my personal opinion), so anyone who wants to get into reading classics can sort of ease into it!

MONTH ONE

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One of my favorite things to do when I need to kill time is to find an interesting Wikipedia page to read for hours. The links within the pages and the “see also” section will have you opening tab after tab, digging rabbit hole after rabbit hole. If you are like me and are very easily entertained at random facts that usually add no real meaning to your life other than the fact that now you know said random fact, here are some Wikipedia pages to keep you occupied.

Many of these are lists of a specific topic (list of last survivors of historical events, list of literary movements, list of common misconceptions), but others are just really weird or fascinating pages I’ve stumbled across that have kept me delighted for hours or days. Or random historical events that I’ve been obsessed with for years. I have way too many of these so I’ll post a good assortment of pages every single month!

The categories are: lists, historical events, cults, true crime cases, and fascinating miscellenea. I’ll post new lists, historical events, and fascinating miscellenea every month, the other categories may vary.

list galore

• Wives of Henry VIII — short list but all wives are worth reading about, and congratulations to Anne of Cleves for outliving the man who spread terrible rumors about her.

• Literary movements — specific interesting movements to check out: gothic fiction, dark romanticism, decadent movement, postpostmodernism.

• Common misconceptions

• Missing treasures — specific interesting ones: Faberge eggs, crown jewels of Ireland, Amber Room

historical events

• Defenestrations of Prague — three separate incidents in which people in then-Bohemia were thrown out the window (definition of defenestration).

• Western Schism — in which two bishops both claimed to be the pope for a little bit.

• Caesar's Comet — in which a seven day comet was seen in 44 BC that Romans interpreted as the deification of the recently killed Julius Caesar.

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I recently did my annual Goodreads spring clean, which I always do the week of my birthday. This usually entails me going through everything I read in the last year and reevaluating the rating of each book. This year, I actually bumped a lot of 4.5 star books up to 5 stars and a few 5 star books down a rating, so I deemed it time to write a fresh post of all my updated five star reads.

This doesn’t mean that I hate literature—I just like having a way to truly distinguish what books I loved throughout my life. I only give five stars to books I think are absolutely perfect, which results in me being very stingy about giving perfect ratings.

Here is how I decide if a book is a true five star for me:

• Has plot and writing I consider perfect.

• At least two quotes that I write down in my quote glossary.

• Stays in my mind for more than a week (as in, it needs to haunt me for a little bit).

• Feels magical when I’m reading it. these five star books remind me of why I read and why I love reading.

• Elicits strong emotions & makes me feel something.

• I consider rereading the book before I pick up a new one.

• I text my friends about the book immediately after finishing.

• Feels timeless, like they’ll stand the test of time and age.

elle’s five star book list, part i

The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

“Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.”

Calvino’s mind is a labyrinth of alternate realities and whimsical lines of poetry, and he manages to spin fables and folklore out of astronomy in this book. It’s absurd and funny and moving in the sense that I felt like I was made of stardust and my existence stretched across the cosmic expanse of the universe. Cosmicomics gives you the feeling of floating outside of your grounded body, among all of these primordial beings and particles that Calvino has imbued with emotion and humanity, perhaps more than we have as actual humans.

Affinities: On Art and Fascination by Brian Dillon

“A meditation on the power and pleasures of the image, from paintings to photographs to migraine auras, by one of Britain's finest literary minds.”

Why do we have an affinity to some things? Why do we lean towards certain tastes or styles? Dillon’s essay collection is a loose amalgamation of vignettes on images, photographs, and various small niches of art that have stayed with him. He puts his own affinities under a microscope, while also exploring what the word itself means. This isn’t a classic essay collection in the sense that each chapter is a cohesive and complete essay, but rather little fragments that feel like postcards pertaining to the image.

Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector

“I know that my phrases are crude, I write them with too much love, and that love makes up for their faults, but too much love is bad for the work.”

Reading Clarice Lispector’s works often feels transcendental, and this was no different. But this one especially felt like running through a waterfall or a cascade of words. Agua Viva is more melody than prose, more of a fragmented rumination on feelings than something conventionally comprehensive. The cadence and rhythm of Lispector’s writing in this felt oddly hypnotic, and I felt like I was watching her stretch and fold sentences, making literature malleable in her hands. It was kind of a spiritual experience in a way.

Cold Enough For Snow by Jessica Au

“Maybe it's good, I said, to stop sometimes and reflect upon the things that have happened, maybe thinking about sadness can actually end up making you happy.”

A mother and a daughter reunite after years apart in Japan and attempt to reconnect with each other and themselves. Communication between the two is oftentimes saw-edged and their relationship is nothing short of complicated. They view each other from a distance just like we do as readers, each moment fragile. A haunting, elegy about loneliness, memories, and family. I love any book about mothers and daughters, and this was no different. Short but dense, and packed with meditations and philosophies on the way we live.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

“For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.”

I read this back in 2020 during the pandemic, when everything felt claustrophobic and trapped; in reading The Waves I found myself floating alongside the dreamy prose, like the ebb and flow of water—unanchored and boundless, which was such a kindness. What I found most profound and life-changing about the book is the somewhat reluctant cognizance that we are a part of a cycle, a chorus, a rhythm interconnected to those of nature around us. A brilliant portrait of growing up and getting older, of friendship and isolation, of sunrises and sunsets.

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Check this out too:

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

This isn’t exactly an article, but I always tell people it’s a great starting point for anyone wanting to learn more about art and aesthetics itself. All of his essays are linked above, but it really helped me to buy the actual book and read it. His essays were originally a television series, which is also online if you want to watch while you read.

In Dark Times, I Sought Out the Turmoil of Caravaggio’s Paintings | New York Times

The work the artist made near the end of his life changed my understanding of both beauty and suffering.

Teju Cole explores Caravaggio’s later life through his paintings, and writes in tandem how it deepened his understanding of beauty and suffering. Caravaggio, who painted during the Italian Baroque period, is famous for his expressive paintings and the intersections between beauty and suffering. Cole explores this specific quality of Caravaggio’s paintings and how there’s a timelessness to it that can be applied in turmoil in the current day.

Read with an article on Caravaggio’s dramatic life and paintings

Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk | The Paris Review

The Hue’s Hue column is probably my favorite column of all time, as Katy Kelleher takes a color and writes a profile on it, from its history to examining its uses throughout time. One of the most fascinating one she has written about is a profile on the color Periwinkle.

When the periwinkles are blooming, it’s hard to have eyes for anything else. The delicate mist is an impossibly soft color, like clouds descending into twilight, like the snowfall in an Impressionist masterpiece.

Some of my other favorites: Verdigris, Chartreuse, Marian Blue

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also, post is too long– please read on app or desktop!

This year, I’ve been making a conscious effort to be mindful in the way I consume media (although I really dislike that phrase). I had a realization at the tail end of last year that my Twitter doomscrolling tendencies have started to affect the way I read and watch and listen to media. In an attempt to remedy this, one of the things I have started doing is prioritizing listening to full albums from start to finish instead of throwing songs into a playlist. When I have time, I like making quick notes about each song and the trajectory of the album in general in my notes app. I do this while going on a long walk where I turn off my data so I don’t get any notifications for a bit.

In light of this, here are some full albums I really enjoy that I think are perfect for late spring and early summer, and my favorite tracks from them. And here is my big spring soundtrack that I’ve been adding to since four-five years ago.

[also so very sorry for the long absence—I was going through a pretty rough month but expect a lot of exciting paid content coming every few days in the next two weeks!]

Submarine - The Marías

favorite tracks: Hamptons, Real Life, Blur, Sienna,

Pride and Prejudice (2005) soundtrack

Just keep this on in the background as you read or work all throughout the season. It transforms my office cubicle into a meadow filled with flowers. The ultimate playlist to romanticizing your life.

Rumors - Fleetwood Mac

favorite tracks: Songbird, Silver Springs, Go Your Own Way, The Chain

Charm - Clairo

favorite tracks: Pier 4, Sexy to Someone, Terrapin, Echo, Glory of the Snow

Infinitely Tall - Charlie Burg

favorite tracks: Chicago (Take It or Leave It), Summer Moon, Blue Waves Blues, Callback

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You - Big Thief

favorite tracks: Change, No Reason, Certainty, The Only Place, Time Escaping

Small Talk - Soda Blonde

favorite tracks: Tiny Darkness, In the Heat of the Night, Love Me World, Choices

Collapsed in Sunbeams - Arlo Parks

favorite tracks: Too Good, Bluish, Green Eyes, Caroline

Everything I Know About Love - Laufey

favorite tracks: Valentine, Everything I Know About Love, I’ve Never Been in Love Before, Slow Down

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Spring is the only season in which I like going out more than I like staying in (not to sound like Goldilocks, but summer is too hot, fall is too cozy, winter is too cold). I read a lot on the balcony like a plant eager to photosynthesize, I take a lot of walks along the beach path, I cook a lot, sign up for a bunch of pottery and workout classes, rediscover new hobbies, and of course—open my windows every morning. Spring has a quality that is so easy to romanticize for me, the ephemeral interlude between the thaw of a bitter winter and the dense heat of summer.

For me, spring is all about sunshine, pastel tones, and flowers—the antithesis of winter, so I try to find such qualities in literature as well. I always find myself revisiting most of Jane Austen’s books across the seasons, as well as reading more contemporary literary fiction and nature-related books. My birthday falls in spring, so I also gravitate towards meditative nonfiction books that hopefully contribute to and even change the way I see the world because every good book should do that just a little bit.

My themes and specific characteristics in books that I am searching for this month are contemporary literary fiction, cool essay collections, memoirs that feel self-help-y in a non actual-self-help way, fiction about love and relationships, beautiful prose, nature-related books, regency era classics, books written by women, modern classics published in 1940-1980.

I posted a reading syllabus I made for myself earlier this month for the spring seasons (see below), but I wanted to post some individual recommendations as well with some mini reviews.

These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
“Life often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.” These Precious Days is an amalgamation of everything I love in books: beautiful writing, memoir essays, this subgenre, Ann Patchett, and that feeling when your heart hurts in a good way and the bridge of your nose stings.

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Armin
“A charming and light-hearted novel about unlikely female friendships and the power of a blissful escape.” A pretty self explanatory spring book choice—the prose is so perfect for warmer seasons, and is also set in Portofino, which is so dreamy. The story details four women who rent an Italian castle and go through personal reflections and transformations, escaping the dreariness and bleakness of their usual day to day lives. April feels exactly like this book for me—sweet and lovely, signaling the true thaw of winter.

Middlemarch by George Eliot
“George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community.” Middlemarch is a masterclass in empathetic and sympathetic portrayal of characters, and its beauty lies in its subleties and mundanities of ordinary life. Packed with political criticism, ordinary financial struggles, romantic lines that made my heart hurt, sarcastic humor, and a strong authorial voice. A study of what it is to love and to be loved.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
“A blackly humorous story of loneliness, deception, and life in old age by one of the most accomplished novelists of the twentieth century.” One of my favorite things about NYRB classics is that they find and publish underrated classic gems that have fallen through the cracks as decades pass. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is such a heartwarming portrayal of life, exploring themes of loneliness, aging, and the heartbreak that comes with aging.

Outline by Rachel Cusk
“A novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.” Spring always feels like a transitional time to me, and so does this book. Nothing truly happens in this book, and the narrative is prose and minimal. But its experimental narrative style seamlessly blends fragments of stories, and it felt incredibly immersive for me. This book is quite unlike anything I have read before—my favorite of this trilogy is the third book though.

Emma by Jane Austen
“Beautiful, spoilt, vain and irrepressibly witty, Emma organizes the lives of the inhabitants of her sleepy little village and plays matchmaker with devastating effect.” Most of Austen’s books are fit for spring, but this one is specifically emblematic of the season for me (maybe it’s the influence of the 2020 adaptation as well). An underrated romantic comedy that is written in extravagance and lavish prose much like my favorite cossetted protagonist. “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more” is one of my holy trinity Jane Austen quotes.

Spring by Ali Smith
“The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.” This one is pretty self explanatory, but Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is so perfect. While my favorite is still Autumn, Spring is also such a good book to read. Smith always provides a perfect blend of stories of human connection and intertwining narratives with political commentary.

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I watched La Chimera yesterday, and was blown away by how incredible and thoughtful each shot was. I love feeling that way after watching a movie, so here are some really great movies with such beautiful cinematography, in which each frame could truly be a photograph or painting. I had so much fun putting this list together. I tried to include a lot of movies I consider underrated or ‘less popular’, although I don’t think any are like Super Obscure Arthouse.

(This list is also in large part inspired by Severance, because although it’s not a movie, the cinematography in that show is actually breathtaking.)

This post is too long for email, so please read it on your desktop or the app!

Also, here is my Letterboxd!

La Chimera (2023)
director: Alice Rohrwacher
cinematographer: Hélène Louvart

Just out of jail, rumpled English archaeologist Arthur reconnects with his wayward crew of tombaroli accomplices – a happy-go-lucky collective of itinerant grave-robbers who survive by looting Etruscan tombs and fencing the ancient treasures they dig up.

Haunted by his lost love and mystical visions, British archaeologist Arthur returns to Italy from prison to resume a career of tomb-raiding, trapped between real life and fantasy, between past and present—forever chasing the elusive red strings of fate. One of those movies that feel like poetry in film form.

Roma (2018)
director: Alfonso Cuarón
cinematographer: Alfonso Cuarón

There are periods in history that scar societies and moments in life that transform us as individuals.

In 1970s Mexico City, two domestic workers help a mother of four while her husband is away for an extended period of time.

Roma is more of an experience than a movie. I watched this for the first time on a rainy day in February, and it changed my life a bit. Alfonso Cuarón is one of the most celebrated directors for a reason; every scene of this movie is precise and meticulous and has a purpose. Such a privilege to have seen it.

Barry Lyndon (1975)
director: Stanley Kubrick
cinematographer: John Alcott

At long last Redmond Barry became a gentleman—and that was his tragedy.

An Irish rogue uses his cunning and wit to work his way up the social classes of 18th century England, transforming himself from the humble Redmond Barry into the noble Barry Lyndon.

I watched this in one of my college courses and could not tear my eyes away for even one second, like I was somehow being hypnotized by the screen. This is the closest a film gets to being aesthetically perfect—every frame of this could absolutely be a painting of its own. Kubrick is meticulous in his directing as always, and this movie is no different.

Nosferatu (2024)
director: Robert Eggers
cinematographer: Jarin Blaschke

Succumb to the darkness.

A gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.

Nosferatu is gothic perfection. Every shot in this movie was perfect and so well thought out—the costume design, the setting, the direction—and the scene where the shadow of the hand glides across the sky of the town was one of the most incredible things I’ve watched. So atmospheric and gorgeous; a must watch on a gloomy rainy night.

Loving Vincent (2017)
director: Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman
cinematographer: Tristan Oliver, Łukasz Żal

The truth is, we cannot speak other than by our paintings.

A young man arrives at the last hometown of painter Vincent van Gogh to deliver the troubled artist’s final letter and ends up investigating his final days there.

There isn’t anything like this film, and I mean in the literal sense. Loving Vincent has 65,000 frames, and each one is handpainted by 125 painters. The animation and visuals alone make this worth watching, and the dedication from everyone involved is, in my opinion, one of the greatest feats in cinematic history.

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If you missed my winter post—I’m trying something new this year by making a reading syllabus for myself. The reason for this is mainly because I want to finish reading all the books on my shelf, but I also like having a schedule that I can stick to—it gives my life structure (I am a chronic planner if you can’t tell). After having a sort of nostalgic epiphany, I decided to model my reading list like a college syllabus this year, or at least give myself a few themes and a general sense of what I want to learn from books (fiction and nonfiction alike).

Obviously, in classic me fashion, I’m making a new syllabus each season because if you’re not consuming media seasonally, what are you doing? Everything is so fun when you’re living according to season, I promise. And it’s springtime, which is my favorite season (I swear it’s not because my birthday’s in April), so this is extra exciting!

Anyway, here is the syllabus I made for myself for winter (March-May), with a bunch of stills from some springtime movies. Also, here are some article recommendations for you if you like literature!

SPRING SYLLABUS 2025

The dreariness of winter subsiding and pre-summer warmth filtering in through my curtains always makes March a hyper-productive month. I finally creep out of my hermit shell just as winter removes its stubborn clutch on the Northern Hemisphere. Early March is always a borderline disorienting time because I forget just how badly I need the early sunrise and single cardigan weather and how heavily they influence my mood. Nature reawakens in thick brushstrokes of vibrant pastel hues, and leaves suddenly seem greener as well. I always say that the true start of the year for me happens in mid-March—and the one month between mid-March and my birthday in mid-April usually sets the scene for how the rest of the year is going to go.

Spring is the only season in which I like going out more than I like staying in (not to sound like Goldilocks, but summer is too hot, fall is too cozy, winter is too cold). I read a lot on the balcony like a plant eager to photosynthesize, I take a lot of walks along the beach path, I cook a lot, sign up for a bunch of pottery and workout classes, rediscover new hobbies, and of course—open my windows every morning. Spring has a quality that is so easy to romanticize for me, the ephemeral interlude between the thaw of a bitter winter and the dense heat of summer.

For me, spring is all about sunshine, pastel tones, and flowers—the antithesis of winter, so I try to find such qualities in literature as well. I always find myself revisiting most of Jane Austen’s books across the seasons, as well as reading more contemporary literary fiction and nature-related books. My birthday falls in spring, so I also gravitate towards meditative nonfiction books that hopefully contribute to and even change the way I see the world because every good book should do that just a little bit.

My themes and specific characteristics in books that I am searching for this month are contemporary literary fiction, cool essay collections, memoirs that feel self-help-y in a non actual-self-help way, fiction about love and relationships, beautiful prose, nature-related books, regency era classics, books written by women, modern classics published in 1940-1980.

Here are the books that I am planning on reading for the three months of 2025’s spring, divided by week. Some are rereads, or books I finished halfway that I want to return to. Feel free to follow along and discuss!

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For paid subscribers, I’ve listed eight books for each astrology sign, and tried my hardest to include a lot of underrated literary fiction / classic / essay collection gems! I’m really proud of this list and think it would be worth (?? I can’t really be unbiased about this one) the paid subscription—the annual subscription is 50% off right now, by the way, until this Sunday!

As always, I’ve linked the Goodreads pages for each book.

Here is one for MBTI types:

ARIES • Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz

TAURUS • Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai by Nina Mingya Powles

GEMINI • Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung

CANCER • Half a Lifelong Romance by Eileen Chang

LEO • Timecode of a Face by Ruth Ozeki

VIRGO • Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

LIBRA • Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados

SCORPIO • The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzberg

SAGITTARIUS • Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

CAPRICORN • The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

AQUARIUS • Saltwater by Jessica Andrews

PISCES • Ways of Seeing by John Berger

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If you ever ask me why I love reading so much, I will tell you to read any of these books. Then, you’ll understand.

i'll give you the sun by jandy nelson

This is the only young adult book that has made it to my list. I read this on my eighteenth birthday while furiously cramming for a test, bravely fighting the worst bout of senioritis the world had ever seen (written verbatim on my spring semester report card by a teacher). Here is what I wrote as my review on my first birthday as an adult, almost seven years ago:

“Some things just remind me that it is such a wonderful and happy thing to be alive. Maybe it's because I read this today, on my 18th birthday (I’m an adult now!), but this book just made me so ridiculously happy to be here, eighteen years later, despite everything.

This had absolutely no elements of magical realism or fantasy, but it felt even more magical than it would have if it had been one. Jandy Nelson's writing is unique in the way that it's lyrical and poetic but not too much. It felt electrically charged because I could feel every word permeating my skin. It was just so genuine and heartwarming and grounded and just made my heart hurt and ache and expand in the best way.

What a magical way to start my adult years. Hopefully, the rest of them will feel the same way I felt while I read this book. If not, a reminder for future me: take a deep breath. Feel the soles of my feet touching the ground, listen to the sound of my heartbeat. Find solace and appreciation in the quiet days that feel meaningless and during long nights that feel especially lonely. It’s going to be okay.”

the waves by virginia woolf

I read this back in 2020 during the pandemic, when everything felt claustrophobic and trapped; in reading The Waves I found myself floating alongside the dreamy prose, like the ebb and flow of water. I felt unanchored and boundless, at least for a few hours, and it was such a kindness. This was the first novel where it didn’t feel like I was reading words at all. Woolf’s language echoes and reverberates within me, extricating emotions I didn’t even know I had. While I love To The Lighthouse almost equally, The Waves has an intimacy and vulnerability that her other books do not, woven through the narratives of six childhood friends, grieving the loss of another friend.

It is difficult to try and explain what this book is in the same manner as I would with others. What I found most profound and life-changing about the book is the somewhat reluctant cognizance that we are a part of a cycle, a chorus, a rhythm interconnected to those of nature around us. A brilliant portrait of growing up and getting older, of friendship and isolation, of sunrises and sunsets.

in the dream house by carmen maria machado

This was one of the easiest five stars I have ever given a book. Machado’s writing transcends what words can describe. In the Dream House is unlike anything else. The writing is beautiful, raw, and haunting, and stylistically innovative. A triumph. The memoir is written in a way that resembles a manifestation of real memories—fragmented, dreamlike, hazy vignettes, not quite poems or lyrics or prose but somewhere in between.

Machado limns the architecture of the dream house with devastating vulnerability and a propulsive cadence. She constructs this house and then tears it back down; she lives in it as its resident and then haunts it all at once. This is not straightforward like a conventional memoir. However, the overarching tone of her narrative, paired with the short vignettes, feels less like baroque excess and more like intricate puzzle pieces to piece together.

Machado’s ability to speak to the readers beyond the pages and toss the stone into the archival silence makes it feel like the loudest scream I’ve ever heard. Like one of the chapter titles, this book is an unexpected kindness. I could talk forever about the more grounded side of this memoir—the brilliant research, the usually overlooked conversation of abuse in queer relationships, and the social commentary on power dynamics and politics. It truly felt like a privilege to even be able to read such a wonderful piece of work.

self help by lorrie moore

Jo March (2019): “Women…”

Self Help, although a short read, is a mighty one. shrouded in Moore’s signature razor-sharp wit and humor, the stories are simply moving, gut-wrenching, and brilliant. Her writing style has a unique balance between clinical and lyrical and it brought a muted sort of melancholy—the kind that creeps up on you and then eventually overwhelms you without realizing it. The prose is never too light yet never too solemn. While some parts were so viscerally devastating (What Is Seized absolutely broke me), Moore’s darkly funny narrative makes it bearable and entertaining. Many of the short stories are ironically written in a ‘self-help’ format. None of them are ‘helpful’.

At the core of Self Help are stories about lonely women. None of them have fully formed character profiles; we intrude on their lives during the most pivotal and vulnerable moments when their lives are on the precipice of changing forever. A woman becomes the other woman, another deals with terminal cancer and mortality, a third battles depression. Of mothers and daughters, of daughters and mothers.

“A series of pictures here of mothers and daughters switching places- women switching places to take care of one another. You, the daughter, becoming the mother, the Ceres, and she the daughter, kidnapped to hell, and you roam the earth to find her, to mourn her, leaving the trees and grain to wither, having no peace, you have no peace.”

play it as it lays by joan didion

I know that Joan Didion is more known for her essays (The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem), but Play It As It Lays is arguably the star of her bibliography. Devastatingly nihilistic and fast-paced, Play It as It Lays begins at a psychiatric hospital, where Maria, the main character, is institutionalized. The postmodern classic follows along this line as it depicts Maria’s mental spiral into self destruction, drugs, and apathy.

Maria’s life is bleak and complicated. Her acting career is almost nonexistent. her husband left her. She lives and depends on barbiturates. She is terrifyingly cynical and fatalistic, showing brilliantly through the hypnotic and almost hallucinatory vignettes in which the plot is told. Reading this book was bleak and harrowing, especially through the eyes of Maria, whose mind is submerged in layers of numbness and detachment. She dissociates by driving aimlessly on California freeways, and her introspection is both claustrophobic and detached. In this vein, Play It As It Lays depicts not only one woman’s spiral but also the counterculture and ennui of an entire generation in postwar America.

Didion keeps readers captivated by changing the setting from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and finally to the Mojave Desert. Although the plot is loosely tied together and at times confusing, Didion’s signature sharp wit and beautiful writing kept my eyes glued to the pages. She makes Maria’s story and narrative (as well as other characters’) so evocative with her typical eloquent and visually stimulating prose. This entire book just felt like a kick in the gut for me and has haunted me since I finished reading its last pages a few years ago.

beautiful world, where are you by sally rooney

Conversations with Friends is my personal favorite Rooney but her third novel was the one that changed my life. I bought this book for six people in the past twelve months because I truly think it’s almost impossible to finish reading this book and feel unaffected by its enormity. Beautiful World, Where Are You is the literary manifestation of a Hopper painting. Seemingly antithetical, this book is lovely melancholy—a late summer breeze on the precipice of autumn.

The novel explores the relationships and dynamics between four people: Alice, Eileen, Simon, and Felix. The characters attempt to find the meaning of life through internal self-reflection and introspection, but also various external outlets: relationships, religion, jobs, family. Through Alice and Eileen’s emails, Rooney explores this on a macroscopic scale and how these struggles are also visible in society. I loved how human all of these four characters were throughout the novel. They simultaneously crave and reject romantic intimacy and continuously question their own emotions and intentions. They are also excellent at self-analysis (although it is often their downfall)—all of this reflects how we behave in real life. I loved how well she articulated these feelings in her novel.

Ironically, her characters do not believe in happy endings. They chase fleeting and elusive moments of happiness that are maybe illusions, but isn’t that enough?

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I never really shut up about how much I love essay collections, so this post is very long overdue. Most of my reading preferences last year were split between fiction and essay collections, as these are so convenient and easy to read on my commute to work or for half an hour after I wake up in the morning. I feel like there are so many underrated gems in this sub-genre, and I have read some of the most brilliant pieces of writing through essays.

For those of you who are looking for more recommendations or don’t know what essay collection to start with, here are some recommendations from yours truly. I tried my best to categorize them by subject (memoir, art, history, culture, philosophy, psychology, science, history etc) with a condensed synopsis and a mini review. And as always, I also linked the Goodreads page for each!

Let me know any good essay collections in the comment section because I’m always looking for good recommendations.

PERSONAL / MEMOIR

These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
“Life often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.” These Precious Days is an amalgamation of everything I love in books: beautiful writing, memoir essays, this subgenre, Ann Patchett, and that feeling when your heart hurts in a good way and the bridge of your nose stings.

Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn
“A celebration of love in all its forms.” An ode to love and its many variants and manifestations in our daily lives: from falling in love to friendships to grief. Just like the definition of love, this book will mean different things to everyone who reads it. If you liked Everything I Know About Love, you will love this book. It manages to describe moments in life in the electrifying and beautiful way it’s meant to be described.

Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai by Nina Mingya Powles
“Through childhood snacks, family feasts, Shanghai street food and student dinners, she attempts to find a way back towards her Chinese-Malaysian heritage.” A beautiful and comforting memoir that made me hungry and nostalgic for everything. Feels like a really hot bowl of soup my mom made on a cold winter day.

The Science of Last Things by Ellen Wayland Smith
“Ellen Wayland-Smith probes the raw edges of human existence, those periods of life in which our bodies remind us of our transience and the boundaries of the self dissolve.” The essays are an amalgamation of deeply personal ones and many interesting historical, scientific, cultural, and literary anecdotes and tangents. Through it all, she never leaves out the heart and emotions of things, which celebrates human connection and our ties to this world. It left me with this dull ache in my chest that coalesced into an insurmountable boulder of emotion at the end.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
“Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad.” I am not exactly sure if I can call this an essay collection, but I am including it anyway. Machado writes with devastating vulnerability and a propulsive cadence; this reads like folklore or fairytale anthology. This book feels like a manifestation of real memories—fragmented, dreamlike, hazy vignettes that are not quite prose but not quite poetry.

No Country for Eight Spot Butterflies by Julian Aguon
“Part memoir, part manifesto; a coming-of-age story and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples.” Told in short pieces and vignettes, this book is rife with political commentary and personal anecdotes from Aguon himself. Aguon’s fierce love for everything he talks about is evident, and leaves the reader with empathy, reciprocated love for the environment, and an urgency for change. If our way of experiencing feelings is layered like the Earth, Aguon’s writing stripped away the crust and mantle.

Timecode of a Face by Ruth Ozeki
“What did your face look like before your parents were born? Who are you? What is your true self? These are the questions in Ruth Ozeki's mind as she challenges herself to spend three hours gazing into her own reflection, recording every thought and detail.” Ozeki stares at herself in the mirror for three hours and pens a collection of deeply introspective essays that stem from the meditative activity—topics ranging from personal history, Japanese culture, the act of aging, and so on. One of the most unique essay collections I’ve ever read.

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I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again”.

—Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Back in time for a winter perfume rotation!

Anyone who knows me knows that I love perfumes, and I’ve historically been the go-to person among my friend groups whenever they need a perfume recommendation. I also think there is something so special about trying to describe scents, because they differ based on your skin chemistry with the perfume. Your sense of smell is also actually directly connected to the amygdala and hippocampus, which are the two regions that control your emotions and memories. I think that’s why I think of perfumes as something precious, something that requires a lot of thought to purchase (also because most of them are very expensive).

As such, I truly believe that one of the loveliest and most romantic things to describe are perfumes. Like literature, each scent interprets differently for everyone and attaches itself to a personal constellation of memories. Talking about perfumes is quite literally the olfactory form of translating and analyzing a text.

Scents hold so many memories, that sometimes, I will smell something specific and have a vivid flashback, transported back to somewhere from years ago—a mundane day at the park with my parents when I was seven, on a school bus in middle school, or even think of friends I fell out with years ago. I’ve given perfumes away because I associate them with memories I don’t want to be reminded of anymore (just this Christmas, I gave away my basically full bottle of Le Labo The Noir 29 because I got so massively hungover while wearing this a year ago, and I was still gagging when I smelled it—it was terminal for me, unfortunately, and the bottle needed a new home before it expired).

Here is my winter perfume rotation for this year (eleven bottles), which I think is a great blend of cozy, woody, warm, and sweet. More of the underrated, niche perfumes I own are beyond the paywall!

[This post is is too long for email and is best viewed on a computer / laptop screen. All notes are from Fragrantica]

BYREDO super cedar

I am not a big fan of dense, woody perfumes, but Super Cedar is a masterpiece. It’s very cedar-heavy, but the note is balanced perfectly with a hint of rose. The woody note is ensconced in wisps of musk and rose, allowing the perfume to dry down into the embodiment of a forest after it rains. One of my all-time favorite words is petrichor, which is the smell of rain on dry earth, and that is what this smells like after a few hours. This is best accompanied by a long wool coat and a soft white sweater at the tail end of fall. Super Cedar projects and smells better the colder it is, so I carry this one into winter with me. If you like Diptyque’s Fleur de Peau in the summer, this is the cold weather perfume for you.

KILLIAN angels’ share

Angels’ Share is so easy to fall in love with. It’s a cognac-soaked apple pie affair. The boozy note is not strong to begin with and dissipates completely in the first five minutes. All that you are left with is a delicious cinnamon vanilla apple pie. Some perfumes are so atmospheric and immersive that they paint a picture and a story in my head as soon as I spray them. Angels’ Share transports me to nighttime at a log cabin or a ski chalet, sipping hot apple cider by a crackling fireplace.

GIARDINI DI TOSCANA bianco latte

Bianco Latte is a classic vanilla scent that doesn’t feel overtly cloying or saccharine, which is important to me as someone who gets nauseous very easily. This is eating caramel-drizzled vanilla custard while in a cozy sweater on an autumn night. Soft coconut and coffee notes chase the creamy vanilla in the tail end of the dry down. Anyone who used Warm Vanilla Sugar from Bath and Body Works as a teenager will love Bianco Latte as an adult. In an attempt to create unique perfumes, the art of mastering a basic scent has been lost recently. Bianco Latte is the perfume equivalent of a perfect, good-quality pair of jeans that fit you like a glove. I have genuinely gotten a compliment from someone every time I wear this (including TSA at the airport).

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