There’s an empathy deficit in the world, and everyone seems desensitized to everything. I know that may be completely unrelated to the title of this post, but empathy and reading are inextricable.

Why is reading such an important activity? And how can you be a better reader? I read because I love reading, but I also read to continuously hold myself accountable in broadening my perspectives and understanding of the world and not allowing myself to ever become narrow minded or grossly individualistic. I’ve written time and again on the importance of reading—how it’s essentially food and nutrients for your brain, and it’s a surefire way to develop and hone your critical thinking skills. With better critical thinking skills comes a deeper sense of empathy and understanding for the world and its people, which is possibly the most crucial thing to have right now in 2025.

A noticeable and tragic trend is that there seems to be an exponential decline in human decency. I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly when this started because it can’t have been that bad forever. Maybe it’s because nothing feels real anymore. Creative media made completely by generative AI is rampant, everything is online first and offline second, and my first means of communicating with a friend is through a text rather than even a call. Algorithms on social media feeds only regurgitate posts making the same point as you, endless cycles of self confirmation biases that leads to a skewed view of the world. The internet seems like one big cesspool of every user practicing the law of schrodinger’s douchebag because one is apparently allowed to make awful statements if they’re ‘just kidding’ or ‘using dark humor’. Everyone alive right now is stuck in the same room together on the internet, losing sanity, and of course, empathy and compassion are the first qualities to go.

We’ve reached debilitating levels of instant gratification and dopamine rushes as a society, and no one is willing to detox. Detoxing isn’t anything drastic; it doesn’t mean throwing your phone in the ocean and going off grid. Nor does it mean deleting all of your social media accounts. It means not asking for relationship advice from ChatGPT. It means opening an actual good book instead of scrolling short form content filled with summaries primed for ten second videos. It means trusting your brain enough, being thorough and careful enough with forming your own opinions over trusting strangers’ opinions on a tweet. The need for an immediate answer to everything, whether right or wrong, has bled out the shades of gray on every spectrum, I think. Everything feels rudimentary, bereft of nuance, sitting on a black and white binary.

I truly do think one of the best remedies for this is allowing ourselves to use our brains again and developing and honing critical thinking skills. Confining all activities requiring thinking to a social media feed or Google AI or ChatGPT, all three of which are atrociously biased, holding everyone caged in solipsism, which leads to a lack of empathy and self awareness. I think the easiest and most simple way of getting all of these important qualities back is just reading, and reading better. While my love for reading has not changed since I could understand words on a page, the way I process and analyze books has. Of course, this is through many years of English classes, reading books of varying levels of difficulty, and just growing up in general, but there are things that I have actively started implementing as well.

table of contents:

1. things to implement to be a better reader

2. making a reading syllabus (with two examples)

3. my method of finding good quality books and essay articles

4. tips on annotating and taking notes

5. a list of books & essays that transformed my way of thinking

[this is a supplement post for my how to get smart again series for paid subscribers—check out the upcoming posts here. if you think this is something you’d enjoy, please consider upgrading your subscription! you can check out the weekly syllabus posts and the first six parts here]

1. things to implement to be a better reader

- Actively want to learn new information. A book, or the experience of reading a book, purely depends on the way you approach the material. The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to keep your eyes open for new things. In fiction, this could include but not be limited to: vocabulary, sentences you really like, metaphors, and specific subgenres. In nonfiction, this could be a historical period or event briefly mentioned in the introduction of an essay, a person you want to do a deep dive into. You should always keep a small notebook with you at all times to write down these new things, and you should also try writing mini research essays.

- Find themes that group books together. I’ve started making various syllabi, especially for reading. I find that doing so helps me find connections and themes within literature, and reading these books offers a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of a certain idea or concept. I like taking a week or two to think of a theme and read various books that correlate to it. This should not only be limited to books, but you should incoropate I’ve briefly stated how I find common themes to make a syllabus and some short examples to get you started in the section below!

- Read a wide range of texts. Your body is only as good as the nutrients you put into it, right? Same goes for your brain. If you constantly feed it mindless short form content, the capacity of your brain and attention span will be confined to the ten seconds you allow for it to have before moving on. If you read books that don’t let you sit with it and inspect between the lines, you’ll be bereft of the ability. If you only consume one sort of genre or text type (whether it just be thrillers or romance, or just fiction), it’ll be the same as someone who just eats fruits or a one food diet. I think it’s totally fine if you venture outside of your comfort zone and decide something is not for you, but don’t pigeonhole yourself to just one thing!

Additionally, always remember that books aren’t the only way you can read, and thinking so creates a narrow mindset. The ways in which you can be a reader is everywhere—in articles on the internet, magazines at your local bookstore, even on labels on food jars. Some of the best things I’ve read are essays on the internet or a poem in a magazine.

- Consistency is key. I’ve realized that I read the most books and digest them the best when I incorporate reading into my routine. Every morning, I make sure to read for half an hour as soon as I open my eyes before doing anything (especially checking my phone), and I read for an hour before going to bed. Reading in small chunks builds up, and I always end up reading at least two books every single week (that’s around a hundred books a year—of course, if the book is lengthy or dense, I take longer).

- Annotate, make notes. One of the most important things about reading is actively engaging with the pages. There is really no ‘right way’ to analyze, but here are some things I pay attention to: further implications of actions, characterizations, interactions, tone, literary devices, references to other things (historical events, cultural references, etc), and anything that I think is done on purpose. I write more about annotating tips in the fourth section of this post.

- Discuss books. I always think one of the best yet dismissed ways of bettering yourself intellectually is simply talking about a book with someone, or even sending an essay article to a friend and talking about it. Reading stops becoming a passive activity when you share thoughts about it with someone else, because you’re learning something that you cannot get by just engaging with the text and your own thoughts. This is why I often read a book with someone because there’s nothing I love more than rambling about something that I love.

- Keep a reading journal. I’ve kept reading journals ever since I was a kid to write down quotes, thoughts, and brief analyses of parts I think are worth remembering in a book. I free write any thoughts I have about a book immediately upon completion. I do not attempt to make this sound intelligent or philosophically profound—I try to write exactly what I think the moment I finish it. I think the first hour after finishing a book is the most important as its content or events are the most crucial. This is always handwritten; my main purpose for writing these book reviews in the first place is to get into the habit of thinking about what I just read, so handwriting it makes the most sense. These reviews range from one page to sometimes nine or ten.

2. how to make a reading syllabus

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Classic literature is a broad yet intimidating genre that oftentimes feels both tedious and sometimes even performative to begin reading. The fact that the very definition of ‘classic literature’ is a book that is old enough to even have stood the test of time to call it one, is mildly harrowing. I think this baseline assumption that every book within this genre is thus difficult and esoteric is one of the first misconceptions that makes reading classics feel unapproachable for many, especially those who did not read when they were younger or have exclusively read contemporary literature.

In this vein, it is both misleading and foolish to brush off classic literature as one monolith. Sure, we know exactly which books belong in this genre—The Odyssey and The Great Gatsby, for example, but one was written around 750 BC and the other one was written almost exactly a century ago. Saying that “all classics are the same” overlooks the incredible diversity and variety that exists. Here are some myths and massive over-generalizations remain about classic literature that I would like to debunk:

• Not all classics are universally good, and not all popular classics are ‘easier’. I’d say that Jane Austen books are not entirely beginner friendly because her prose and exposition is oftentimes tedious (lots of dense descriptions in a style that you have to get accustomed to in order to enjoy her books). In my opinion, Middlemarch by George Eliot has the kind of writing that people expect an Austen book to have.

• Classics are funny. Off the bat, I’d like to use Shakespeare as an example (spoken by a proper Shakespeare freak). Shakespeare had a sense of humor—he pretty much wrote a dick joke into each one of his books. I used to be so fascinated by Shakespearean insults that my childhood best friend and I would email each other lists of the ones we found on the internet. That was, until the phrase “a plague sore” got caught in our elementary school email server filter and I was called to the principal’s office in the fifth grade.

• Classics are not ‘super serious’—they’re just books that were considered ‘contemporary’ at some point in history, so there’s no reason to think of them as different from any of the books that are being published in this decade.

• Classics aren’t all just boring books written by boring old white men. Yes, many are boring books written by old white men, but there are so many that are not, and I hope this list will show you some of that diversity.

One of the things I like doing the most after reading classic books is searching up essays and dissertations written about them. The best thing about these books is that they have been read by countless amounts of people from all over the world, which means analyses and resources on them will be just as abundant. I also love reading about the author and the history of whatever literary movement they were involved in. I think it gives me more of a comprehensive and cohesive understanding of literary history and even just history in general. Literature, like art, is always a reaction, so it’s always great to learn about history in tandem with reading classics. The humanities is always interconnected and have a galaxy of intersections.

Classics do tend to feel denser and more difficult compared to many contemporary fiction books, simply because they were written in a different style that was popular during the time of its publication, whenever that was. I do like annotating as I think writing my own marginalia and reading between the lines is immensely helpful in knowing exactly what I’m reading (so I don’t forget immediately after reading).

For reference is an old post I did on annotations, but I think I’ll write a longer and more detailed guide for this series in a month or so!

In this guide, you’ll find three different ways to approach classics:

1. lots of hyper specific recommendations (my god tier list, classics for the beginner, classics for the aesthetic lover, classics for the reader short on time, classics for the romantic, lesser known classics etc)

2. century specific

3. region specific (but check out the post below for the full list)

I’ve tried to not have a lot of overlap between the three categories so I can include like…100+ books, but there are only so many books in the world and I have only so much time on my hands.

hyper-specific recommendations

ELLE’S GOD TIER LIST
(my favorites of all time that I’ll reread forever)

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Persuasion by Jane Austen

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Immorality by Milan Kundera

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Till We Have Faces by C.S Lewis

FOR THE BEGINNER
(you want to read classics but you’re intimidated and have no idea on where to start)

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

A Room with a View by E.M Forster

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

FOR THE ROMANTIC
(you started reading again during the pandemic, but mostly contemporary romance books you saw on booktok)

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what is longform journalism and why should you read it?

Much of my reading comes from published books that I can hold in my two hands, but it also comes from longform articles. Longform journalism is essentially an article that is a long read, typically ranging between 2,000 to over 10,000 words. The content can vary, from investigative reporting to personal essays, from interviews to short fiction published in magazines and newspapers.

Articles almost always cover one subject and that one subject in depth; the lengthy word count allows for more detailed, developed pieces of writing that have room to expand and truly breathe. Most pieces include context which I would usually have to search separately, but delves into its history and social implications that creates a richer reading experience.

In the last year or so, I’ve begun reaching for longform essays often. It’s long enough to feel as satisfactory as a good nonfiction book, but it is also short enough that I can read it on my commute to work or other places. They are also just massively underrated outlets for reading—they are incredibly diverse in content and style and very informative. Articles pack the same depth of analysis and research as nonfiction books while being more accessible due to their short length.

I constantly strive to keep myself educated and knowledgeable even if I’m not in a classroom setting. Ever since I have made it a mission to start educating myself as much as I can on various topics, I’ve also tried to find as many good magazines as I can to read from. Longform articles fill that education void for me, so I always try to make it a habit of reading at least one article daily, even when I don't have time to read actual books. It also increases my attention span (something I direly need to do because social media doomscrolling has been killing it). I treat these essays and articles like brain food, so it's always fun to learn something new.

where do you find articles & essays?

This list is constantly ever expanding because there is a cornucopia of fantastic news sites and magazines, but I will try to include as many sites as I can remember. I do love reading physical copies of magazines, although it is impossible to have a subscription to all of them. Currently, I have a subscription to The Paris Review and London Review of Books that I got as a package deal for the memorial day sale.

Currently, the sites I reach for the most are: Aeon (all free articles, amazing depth and expertise and diversity), The Paris Review (especially for their amazing specific column archives and author interviews), and London Review of Books (for their book reviews and author profiles).

For those with no subscriptions: I am not promoting this, but you can search archive sites for free, or by putting http://archive.is/newest/ in front of every article URL!

Here is a big list of around 40 newspapers, magazines, and sites that have excellent long-form articles and never let me down.

Aeon: The best free magazine out there. Aeon covers essays about philosophy, psychology, science, society and culture. Every article is so well researched and written. So many of my favorite articles of all time are from this site, and everything feels like brain food. Here is an article about sulking, one about nostalgia, and one about female friendships.

Nautilus: A science magazine that ventures into adjacent fields such as anthropology and geology. Most articles are very readable even for someone who has no background in science past high school (me) and connects many of their topics to humanities subjects as well. Here is their 2025 summer reading list.

The Paris Review: A high-brow-ish literary magazine that covers art and literature. The Paris Review also regularly interviews authors and these always end up being in depth and so meaningful. I particularly love the Hue’s Hues column, in which Katy Kelleher (one of my favorite journalists ever) writes about specific colors and their associations and histories. I also love these annotated author diaries and the Feminize Your Canon column. There’s so much to love about this magazine, and I always find more underrated gems the more I dig!

Orion Magazine: Here is Orion’s objective—“It is Orion’s fundamental conviction that humans are morally responsible for the world in which we live, and that the individual comes to sense this responsibility as he or she develops a personal bond with nature.” Not quite a nature magazine, but much of its essays are imbued in nature. Here is a June essay on dandelions I loved.

The Cut: I have a guilty pleasure for the devastatingly embarrassing essays that go viral on Twitter. Here are some you can read when you’re bored (and that makes you think ‘you could not torture this out of me’): “The Case for Marrying an Older Man”, “Should I Leave My Husband? The Lure of Divorce”, “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger”

Literary Hub: Not only is Lithub favorited and bookmarked on my phone, it feels like a catch-all for anything literature related. It crafts beautiful and hyper-specific reading lists, recommends great books, and publishes unique and interesting literary essays. They publish really great articles regarding writing and the craft of writing as well.

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I read because I love reading, but I also read to continuously hold myself accountable in broadening my perspectives and understanding of the world and not allowing myself to ever become narrow minded or grossly individualistic. One of the key reasons why I would advise you to prioritize reading diversely is because I believe that doing so fosters empathy, which is one of the most important traits to have as a citizen of the world. Removing yourself from the myopic confines of your immediate environment in order to understand and empathize with different people across the world—this is a quality we are witnessing slowly bleed out. I know I talk a lot about the decay of humanity with the rise of AI, but society’s move towards solely relying on ChatGPT for answers (I saw a tweet about someone’s therapist telling her to use ChatGPT for advice) is making us more self centered and isolated from others. The simulated, manufactured empathy from generative AI machines has started to override real, human empathy that can only be born from talking to people and being a part of a real life community.

For part five of my how to get smart again series, I repurposed my world literature list that I wrote a year ago to make a better, longer one for my how to get smart again series. There are books that are directly written in English, but most world literature, obviously, exist in their native languages. Thankfully, translated literature is more easily accessible now than ever, and good translations exist. There are some publishers (mostly independent) that prioritize finding literature gems from other countries and cultures, such as New York Review of Books, Graywolf Press, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Archipelago Books, and so on. I’ll do a whole post on indie publishers because (not to be too tangential, but) reading from independent publishers is also an important element in reading diversely.

If the books are translated, I urge you to also look up and acknowledge the translators as well because translating nuance and cultural implications from one language into another is never an easy feat. I like to keep a list of words in different languages that do not have direct one word translations to English—and I don’t think we realize in our day to day lives that language is not just about speaking, but a culmination of history and culture and traditions of the people that lived before us as well.

I tried to find as many books I read or heard good things about, but some countries have a very limited amount of translated literature (and I didn’t want to put ones that I wasn’t 100% sure was a good book, from a credible source). I have not read all of these, but these are all ones that I have heard good things about from friends and people whose reading taste I trust. I think there are about 200 books on here from 50+ countries, so I hope you enjoy. This is in alphabetical order (minus Korean literature, and I get to put that first because I’m Korean).

As always, I’ve linked Goodreads pages for your convenience. If you have any recommendations, feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll check them out and add it in!

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[this is part 4 of my summer series for paid subscribers—check out the upcoming posts here. thank you so much for your support! decided i have a lot more to write about so i am extending it!]

I dig rabbit holes. Usually this consists of me finding a Wikipedia list page that leads to hundreds of links, such as the last survivors of a historical event, literary movements, and delving into one specific case that interests me the most. Sometimes the rabbit hole will be influenced by an article I read or a line in a book and I’ll spend a few hours looking into the subject at hand.

My “how to get smart again” series revolves around my feeling and fear of that my brain has been regressing and melting—a sentiment echoed by at least 32,000 of you, which truly proves that this is perhaps a societal malaise in a way. But it also revolves around the optimistic (rare for me, yes) sentiment and proven fact that this problem is easily curable because our brains are highly adaptable and malleable. Your brain, no matter how much you don’t use it, will never be ‘permanently ruined’. Just like how we begin exercising when we begin to feel unfit, the same goes for our brains. All we need to do is focus on feeding our brains good food.

This series has been an array of posts about how I’ve been adhering to certain rules to allow my brain space to breathe and grow amid the global pandemic of using artificial intelligence (namely, ChatGPT) for everything. I also think that ironically, information is too accessible and thus oversaturated, and finding good pieces amid the billion search results has become increasingly more difficult. Ironically, in this light, accessibility to a good education has decreased. And personally, I think this over-accessibility has made me lazy with regards to my own intellectual curiosity and wish to learn, as I keep thinking that this sort of information will always be accessible, propagating a sort of procrastination on a way.

Academia, true academia, increasingly feels like a sector that is pushed more and more towards irrelevance in this age of, to put it bluntly, anti-intellectualism. Reading is being pushed as an alternate form of a mindlessly binge-able television show (and I’m not saying that reading should not be enjoyable, but reading should not really be a mindless activity either), and logic or reason is being overwhelmed by a stubborn refusal to educate oneself with facts. Even any sort of media with depth is often brushed off as “too deep” or god forbid, “too pretentious” (which has a brilliant essay about that you should check out as a preface), when the common misuse of that word actually signifies the proof of anti-intellectualism.

Anyway, I’m digressing and rambling too much. The purpose of this post: making a case for writing mini essays for anyone who makes looking up random interesting Wikipedia pages, or enjoys reading the articles in the footnotes of an article. Or anyone who enjoys learning, in general. I wanted to create something for myself that allows me to keep record of the things I am interested in and the things I research for fun, in some sort of cohesive form. Hastily scrawling notes down in my research notebook is usually the first thing I do because I just really enjoy handwriting things. Making mini essays out of these 1) improves my writing and analytical skills, 2) allows me to archive a somewhat completed form of research, and 3) forces me to really slow down and digest the information given to me, which in turn betters my ability to discern what is good information from bad.

Below you will find:

1. what I define as a mini essay and its importance

2. how I structure these essays

3. how to get started & find what you are interested in

4. some niche research topics to get you started

what is a mini essay? and why should you start writing them?

A mini essay is basically a short, low-commitment, imperfect essay. I think we have been aversely conditioned to interpret the word ‘essay’ as a sort of herculean task—we toil away for dozens of hours, only to be met with harsh feedback from an instructor. And most of all, we oftentimes define writing essays as something we are forced to do. Away from the institutional academia of it all, however, writing essays is a great way to exercise and measure the breadth and depth of your knowledge.

By writing mini essays, you are doing an array of beneficial things for your brain: you are organizing what you learned in your head while figuring out what information is important enough to record. Additionally, I always say that writing is a muscle, and you won’t be good at it unless you feed yourself (reading) and exercise (actually writing).

In terms of why I stared writing mini essays, I was greatly inspired by Joan Didion’s essay on keeping a notebook in her collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This is one of the essays that changed my life. In it, 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.

I wanted to do this with the information that I learn, as I think so many interesting and meaningful new things just brush past me and it becomes lost in the abyss of everything else I will never remember again. I think I have a mild fear of wondering what if I don’t remember something important because I forget to write it down? Or because I don’t look it up?

the structure:

There’s no template or rigid structure I use for my mini essays, but I make sure it is cohesive enough for it to be understood by someone who has no knowledge on said topic. I always imagine trying to explain whatever I learned to my little sister—this way, I can check if I understand it as well (the simpler you can break down information, the further proof it is that you truly understand something).

I do have a few things I always make sure to include: some sort of loose definition in two sentences at the start, background, personal analysis, and a few sentences on further implications if applicable. I also like to write tangents on related topics or concepts that I think are inextricable with what I am writing (and if I find the related topic interesting enough, I’ll write a linked essay). The definition usually ends up looking something like a very rudimentary thesis statement.

For example, if I am writing about a painting, I’ll research about the artist, maybe read a few biographical essays on him, and also look into the specific movement the painting belongs in. I think it’s important to know the background and history from where a certain piece of media is derived from. Below is an essay I wrote two months ago where I loosely pieced together two smaller essays I wrote (one on Klimt’s The Kiss and one on Magritte’s The Lovers). You can see the basic bones of the essays themselves, from its history to a few elements of the painting I paid attention to by analyzing.

I usually don’t write anything personal in the mini essays because I think that negates the whole purpose of keeping a research notebook or writing mini essays. These should just pertain to the research and your findings. They sometimes end up looking like a literature review when whatever I’m researching is more of a general idea or concept, and I like that too. (I also just sometimes find writing about myself or incorporating personal experiences into every essay I write a bit self aggrandizing). Obviously, in my post above, I wrote about a lot of personal anecdotes, but that would usually go into my journal separately.

Speaking of literature reviews, I like putting in little interludes in my mini essays with summarizing interesting journals or articles I find on the topic. Usually I will look on Google Scholar or even Wikipedia footnotes. If you are a college student, look on JSTOR! This is probably the thing I miss the most about being a college student—and like most things, I didn’t even know I missed it until it was gone.

how to get started & find out what you are interested in

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[this is part 3 of my summer series for paid subscribers—check out the upcoming posts here. thank you so much for your support!]

I recently read this article by Christine Rosen about the importance of handwriting, not only for the purpose of record-keeping but to maintain cognitive skills and information retention. In the age of rapid digitalization, we are losing one of the longest traditions in every human culture: handwriting. No longer is pen and paper the first two things we reach for when we want to remember something; instead, we instinctively grab our phones and open our notes app. Of course, I love the Apple Notes app. I think it is incredibly useful, but there is something about the physical process of penning down the jumble of thoughts in your brain straight onto a piece of paper using your unique handwriting that is so crucial to who you are as a person.

The diminishing art of handwriting or even the act of putting pen down on paper, can be felt everywhere. From the digitalization of standardized tests to typing everything out in our notes app, we are slowly beginning to lose our tactile functions and repeat the movement of our fingers on a computer keyboard, again and again, carpal tunneling into the abyss. There are proven studies on how handwriting actually improves cognitive function; not only does it keep our brains active, there’s a sort of slowness and mindfulness to handwriting that does not exist when rapidly typing away on a computer. When we were taught how to type, one of the points that was repeatedly emphasized was speed—in my third grade class, typing was always a competition to see who could complete the challenges on the typing practice website the fastest. When we focus on speed, we often forgo the thought process and consciousness in exchange for it.

If I don’t handwrite anything for even a week, the pen begins to feel jarring in my hand, my letters becoming disjointed and jagged and the the usual glide of the ink becoming a foreign concept. Handwriting, like any other physical action, is muscle memory and something that is important to exercise every once in a while. There’s a groundedness to writing by hand that you don’t get when you are typing—instead of seeing everything in copy-and-paste Times New Roman, you’re seeing the thoughts in your brain being transferred into something that you can immortalize and own. Handwriting provides a sense of identity that becomes lost in a sea of fonts when digitalized.

I attended elementary school in the late 2000s, where we had to neatly trace and replicate cursive letters—the ornate sweep of the cursive G, the loopy swirls of the letters J or D—in order to obtain something called a ‘pen license’, which was just permission to write in pen. To eight-year-old me, this was something incredibly coveted yet intimidating, the fact that I was writing with something so permanent (obviously, I had not yet encountered the concept of a digital footprint). When I open my journal from late 2008 to mid 2009, I can see the exact moment I got this pen license. I trace the pen marks embedded onto the yellowing paper, the cursive handwriting now foreign to me. But there is a certain confidence that is tangible even through paper all these years later.

I already wrote about why I journal, but my love for compulsively writing and recording everything goes beyond that. Journaling has been the biggest part of this habit, but I have had trends and phases of different types of notebooks I’ve kept over the years. For part 3 of my “how to get smart again” series, I thought I’d try to write a comprehensive guide and reflection to all the different types of notebooks I’ve kept over the years and why I will continue to do so, despite having a laptop and a smartphone. I’m someone who has to compartmentalize her brain into as many subcategories as possible for it to feel neat and tidy, so I have many notebooks.

I’m going to divide this into four parts: 1) notebooks I use in my daily life (planner for time blocking, catch all notebook, etc), 2) notebooks I use for reading (quote journal, reading journal), 3) miscellaneous notebooks and old notebooks I used to keep but don’t anymore for whatever reason. I also tried to include pages from different years so you can see the evolution of my notebook ecosystem as well!

catch-all notebook

This is my most important notebook and the one I finish the fastest. I always buy a dotted hardcover Moleskine notebook for this—it allows me to have some structure while providing a versatility to formatting each page however I want. I also call this my miscellaneous content notebook, where I plan everything from meal prep for the week to books I want to buy that month, to even planning for any trips. Anything that does not belong in my daily planner (time blocking) or my journal (thoughts) go into this notebook.

As someone who enjoys trying to make everything in her life look pretty and aesthetically pleasing, my one rule for my catch-all notebook is that I should not spend any extra time trying to beautify it. I of course attempt to maintain some semblance of neatness, but I aim to keep it as minimal as possible as the variety of content already sometimes feels disorienting. This notebook is an extension of my brain, so I want to transfer the insides of my brain exactly the way I want to see it (of course, this can and should look different for everyone).

daily planner [for time blocking]

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this is a part of my spring into summer reset series. You can read part 1 for free here, and the rest is paid! Here is the lineup:

The humanities isn’t dead. I can promise you at least that much. Yet, it is difficult to ignore the copious amounts of articles being published every day, reporting the decline in humanities majors, the increase of cheating in college, or how humanities may not survive the era of artificial intelligence. In the age of generative artificial intelligence hijacking and taking over actual art, humanities sometimes feels like a vestigial afterthought in today’s society.

The convenience epidemic of immediately going to ChatGPT or whatever AI site as the first line of defense has diminished our ability to create. Why would we, if we can ask a machine to generate new content for us at the click of our fingers Never mind that it’s causing irreversible damage to our brains and the climate. It saved you two seconds of having to use your brain. It saved you ten seconds from having to think of a reply to an email. It saved you an hour of brainstorming for an essay due for class.

My post on how to get smart again, which resonated with so many of you, was largely born from a personal reason that I wrote about a few days ago in my postcard. For the last few years, I’ve been struggling with anticipatory grief while watching my grandpa slowly slip away due to Alzheimer’s. While the disease is very widespread, it is a uniquely terrible experience to see someone you love and are so familiar with, morph into someone you don’t really recognize anymore. He was a professor for most of his life and always pushed himself to learn new things. When I was younger, he used to tell me that one of the best things about life was that you never run out of new material to learn and absorb, that even at his old age, he still felt young in the face of new information. After he retired, he took up painting because it was something he had always wanted to try out.

“my grandpa is sick and i’ve been feeling numb. we went to go see him, a man who dedicated his life to academia, who was a professor for fifty years, now someone who has a tabula rasa for a mind. i’ve been watching him slip away for a few years now, i’ve been losing him before i actually lose him. it’s the pretense of grief, the anticipation of the devastation that will happen because such is life; death exists because life exists and there always must be an equilibrium of sorts, right? at the nursing home, i locked myself in a bathroom stall and tried to manufacture the feeling before i felt it, anticipating it like some earthquake simulation. but i’ve never really lost anyone close to me and i imagine that trying to know exactly how it feels is exactly how a blind person feels trying to imagine color.”

One of the last conversations I had while he was somewhat lucid was oddly about the book that I was reading for a college class, which happened to be The Brothers Karamazov. I never even knew he had read it, but apparently he had in his early thirties and it was a favorite of his. Good books spark good discussion, and we ended up talking about the book for an hour or so, and it was one of the most memorable conversations I’ve ever had in my life. We ended up exchanging book recommendations and I was prepared to visit him the next summer armed with a plethora of books that I was so sure he would enjoy. I never got to give it to him because his Alzheimer’s took a sharp turn for the worse by the next spring.

When I visited him with my family a few weeks ago, he could not talk. I found myself missing my grandpa, the one I had known and loved growing up, while he was right in front of me. There is something so specifically horrifying about cognitive decline. The concept that you lose who you are before you completely disappear from the world, that you can be physically present while not being cognizant—I think that honestly may be my biggest fear, especially exacerbated by watching my grandpa for the last few years. If I can do anything to slow down this deterioration, if there are any preventable measures that I can take, I’ll do anything.

The brain is a muscle. Much like every other muscle in our body, not using it, not exercising it, will cause it to atrophy, cause early cognitive decline. Think about how weak your legs feel after sitting down for a long period of time, working overtime at an office job. Or after a week’s struggle with the flu. That is essentially what is happening to your brain when you don’t use it or feed it enough. Something about that thought terrifies me, the thought of purposely shortening the lifespan of my brain just because I can’t be bothered to think for two minutes. I think that thought alone should terrify everyone.

A week or so ago, I came across a viral tweet (that I unfortunately cannot find despite scrolling) of a Tiktok screenshot in which a girl is advising people to use ChatGPT to send messages to crushes. You can adjust the tone too, she captions, and I immediately cringed upon seeing it. The fact that we have begun depending on nonhuman avenues for deeply and exclusively human activities such as conversation, sets a deeply dangerous precedent for our future. Are we witnessing a seismic societal shift in which people are so lazy and apathetic that they cannot put in the effort to formulate a single response? In this vein and in my opinion, generative AI has been the biggest cause of the nonchalance epidemic, causing what was before a generalized ailment of the heart to metastasize in ways it otherwise would have not.

The overwhelming accessibility and cornucopia of information has pulverized our capacity for critical thinking, instant gratification wearing away a previous patience to attempt to seek out answers for ourselves. If we truly believe that the internet can provide us with a streamlined instruction manual for life’s answers, if we blindly trust a machine to form basic thoughts and feelings on our behalf, then of course caring about something is going to seem like a useless and superfluous endeavor.

If we don’t engage our brain or exercise it, it will simply begin to wither away. Research found “a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading. Younger participants exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants”1. posted a note quoting an article where frequent AI users underperformed on every cognitive test. Not only does it decrease brain engagement and dumb you down, but it also affects your decision making abilities. If you are constantly asking a machine to find answers for you, the simple act of thinking for yourself, deciding for yourself, will slowly become entirely foreign to you. By using ChatGPT, we are blindly following a machine—with no heart, no brain, and one that definitely does not know you better than you know yourself. And with the overuse of artificial intelligence, your understanding of yourself will slowly wilt away into an abyss as well.

In a world where laziness almost seems encouraged with the proliferation of AI (why am I seeing AI results on Google when my intention of googling is quite literally, not using AI? Why am I unintentionally causing global warming? Why am I reading AI results before going through links for sources that I decide to trust?), it seems to fall on the individual’s shoulders to keep intellectual curiosity and individuality alive. This falls in tandem with my very real fear that my brain is no longer ever going to be at the capacity it was when I was in school. It’s incredibly difficult to be disciplined enough to be responsible for your own learning and intelligence, and this is the struggle that I have been facing head on for the last few years post-grad.

Not only that: it is impossible to create good craft without studying previous great works of art. I strongly believe that you cannot write well without reading good books, just like how actors who truly value and study film are usually better at their jobs. You cannot create something out of vacuum, and in order for your brain not to be a complete empty space, you need to fill it with substantial and important information that can serve as a foundation and inspiration to create something new, something as good. As someone who writes, one of my main goals when trying to maintain and expand my intellectual curiosity is to consume good media in a mindful way so it helps me better my writing skills (and quality of my posts / novels I write).

To address all of the above (long intro, sorry), I spent the last month making a list of books and movies I want to read and watch (or reread / rewatch if I find value in revisiting it). Like I said in my first how to get smart again post:

Something I’ve decided to do this spring and summer is to fix my brain. And by this, I just mean fixing my attention span and trying to get rid of the habit of mindless multitasking or choosing media that doesn’t require thinking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that everything we do in life has to have some deeper meaning or serious metaphor behind it; not every book we read has to be a Pulitzer winner and not every movie we watch has to be an obscure arthouse darling. And I hate the word ‘brain rot’, but sometimes I do think that is what’s happening to my brain.

But I want to give myself the space and freedom to think, to reflect on the various material and media that I consume with my eyes and ears. Not every book or movie has to be critically acclaimed and award winning, but I want to purposely choose media that forces me to think and reflect for a bit because I don’t think I’ve heard myself think in a while. These are rules I will strictly be sticking to for three months just so I can reset my brain. My main goals for this are to 1) fix my attention span, 2) learn how to appreciate books, movies, and music as an art form rather than a means of consumption.

[this is part 2 of my summer series for paid subscribers—check out the upcoming posts here. thank you so much for your support!]

Below you will find:

1. my criteria for good, thoughtful books / movies.

2. websites I usually find them on.

3. my syllabus for the rest of the year of new and old media I want to revisit.

I post most of my reading (books / articles) & movie updates on my Instagram!

here is what I classify as a ‘mindful’ book or movie:

• it makes me want to write an essay on it.

• it makes me sit down and think about it for a while, allowing my opinions and analyses to evolve over that time.

• it is loved by many authors (books) or directors (movie).

• I feel like it was meaningful in some way, like I’m a slightly different person than I was before I watched it.

• it makes me want to rewatch it to focus on a specific part (usually prose for book, script or cinematography for movie).

here are the rules I follow to find them:

• Letterboxd or Goodreads pages of people who have similar movie tastes to me—from here, I try to find movies or books that they enjoyed and then cross reference it with ones that have good reviews or analyses of them (so I know that it has substance).

• looking at sites that have good book or movie reviews. See below for some that I frequent:

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Just a note: I have a 20% discount running until the end of November if you subscribe through this link! If you also love reading, watching movies, and podcasts / video essays, I post a weekly syllabus every Sunday and daily journal prompts every month. This is an entirely reader supported publication and am so thankful for your support.

[part i of my how to get my life back together series — if you like this, consider upgrading your subscription because the other parts will be for paid subscribers!]

In all honesty, my biggest concern and secret in the last two years that I’ve been out of school is that my brain has slowly been melting away. And by slowly melting away, I mean that I can physically feel my mind’s growing reluctance to concentrate, to truly think, and my attention span slipping out of reach. I sit at my job and create documents and spreadsheets that seem completely meaningless for eight hours a day. I get home and make myself dinner, stirring with one hand and scrolling on Twitter with the other. I turn on a rerun of a show that I can almost recite line by line (I am a chronic rewatcher). I’m currently reading a book together with my friend, and when he said “remember this part?” I did not.

In other words, I feel like my life has become mindless and thus a bit meaningless.

One of the biggest and most significant things I had to grapple with post-grad was the notion of not being a student anymore, that academic learning was not a required daily task in my life anymore. During the first few months after graduation, I felt like I was physically shouldering the burden of learning, on my own shoulders for the first time in my life. All my life, I had been accumulating knowledge and learning something every day in school, without even thinking about it. But out of school and at a job, where one day always seems to bleed into the next, the responsibility to remain intellectually curious fell on me. And I haven’t been that good at it.

Something I’ve decided to do this spring and summer is to fix my brain. And by this, I just mean fixing my attention span and trying to get rid of the habit of mindless multitasking or choosing media that doesn’t require thinking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that everything we do in life has to have some deeper meaning or serious metaphor behind it; not every book we read has to be a Pulitzer winner and not every movie we watch has to be an obscure arthouse darling. And I hate the word ‘brain rot’, but sometimes I do think that is what’s happening to my brain.

But I want to give myself the space and freedom to think, to reflect on the various material and media that I consume with my eyes and ears. Not every book or movie has to be critically acclaimed and award winning, but I want to purposely choose media that forces me to think and reflect for a bit because I don’t think I’ve heard myself think in a while. These are rules I will strictly be sticking to for three months just so I can reset my brain. My main goals for this are to 1) fix my attention span, 2) learn how to appreciate books, movies, and music as an art form rather than a means of consumption.

I want to remember my thoughts on the books I read and the movies I watch—so here are some things I have begun incorporating and want to incorporate in my life in the future—my own ‘how to get smart again’ guide. Here is what to expect for future posts, most of which will be for paid subscribers!

delete every social media app from my phone

I know there is a lot of discourse surrounding quitting social media (I’d like to point out that this platform I am writing on is also social media, contrary to what some people are saying), and I’ve always stayed out of it because I don’t necessarily view it as an all encompassing evil. I think Twitter is fun in small doses, I like looking at pretty pictures on Instagram, and Pinterest is a great source of motivation and visualization of things I want. But when I am constantly reaching for these apps and mindlessly refreshing notifications, the previously healthy relationship sours. It’s caused a massive hinderance on me living a real life and something about scrolling on social media makes me feel excessively drained, creating a wave of disappointment every time I see the weekly screen time update.

I think my age group is one of the last ones to remember a world where a good portion of life was offline and analog, and sometimes I find myself wishing for that. In the most cynical sense, it sometimes feels like the increasing digitalization of life incinerates any semblance of realness and tangibility of connections in its path. Sometimes, being on my phone too much makes me wonder if I am incapable of forming my own thoughts and opinions, which is a terrifying feeling. When I was younger, everything in my room was wholly mine and a product of my own imagination. Owning something in its entirety like that can only be born of a complete vacuum of outside noise, and it has been a long time since I’ve felt that way.

Going forward for the near future, I want to use my phone the way I used it when I was younger and had the hot pink Motorola flip phone—I want to simply use it as a means of communication with my family and friends, with the perks that I can take better photos than 2009. This Wednesday, while still recovering from an amalgamation of multiple sicknesses and on my hour long Twitter doom scroll, I made the abrupt decision to delete all social media apps other than Instagram off of my phone (because Instagram is a hellscape when I try to log into it on my laptop, and I do need to post on bookstagram), and my life has genuinely been so much better ever since. I’ve also scheduled do not disturb hours on my phone from 7am-10:30am, and try to stay off my phone for that time.

make a reading syllabus

If you are a chronic planner and thrive on structure, I promise you will benefit from this. Sometimes, the purest form of happiness comes from when I’m organizing things into categories and boxes that make total sense in my mind. Perhaps there’s greater room for reflection on why I feel so free and happy when I’m neurotically organizing and cataloging things, but it feels peaceful for me personally. To appease this part of my brain, one thing I’ve started doing this year is making various reading syllabi. I do this in two ways—by season and by theme. Some of the thematic ones I’ve made so far include modern classics, niche history nonfiction, NYRB classics, sad-girl-lit-fic (apparently this is controversial so sue me I guess), provincial classics, and short story collections.

This is one of the best things I’ve done for my reading life. It allows me to organize my to-read list in my head, and gives my life some semblance of structure. I also create my seasonal lists based on specific moods and themes I want to focus on that season. For example, in winter, I wrote down that I wanted to gravitate towards: poetic prose, meditations on melancholic feelings, writing that emulates the feeling of snow enveloping the outside world, underrated 20th century modern classics, wintry streams of consciousness, gothic literature, diaristic memoirs. And for spring: 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.

If you don’t want to put yourself through the effort of making these, I’ve posted my seasonal ones on my Substack already! Check them out here:

eat without watching anything

This has oddly been the hardest thing to implement in my life. I have such a habit of watching a show or a Youtube video when eating food, and I’ve realized that it sometimes stops me from even remembering what the food tasted like. Or I eat too fast, and I end up having stomach pains for the rest of the day. I also just love food way too much to half heartedly eat it like I have been most of the time these days.

I’ve been trying to get into the habit of eating without watching anything. If I’m really bored, I’ll pick up a book, but I think being bored is an important feeling that we’ve lost and I’d love to learn how to be bored again.

read an essay every morning

I’m starting to get into the groove of reading an essay every morning. This can be from one of my essay collection paperback books or a longform article (usually from Aeon, New Yorker, or The Paris Review). Longform journalism is essentially an article that is a long read, typically ranging between 2,000 to over 10,000 words. The lengthy word count allows for more detailed, developed pieces of writing that have room to expand and truly breathe. The content can vary, from investigative reporting to personal essays, from interviews to short fiction published in magazines and newspapers.

In the last year or so, I’ve begun reaching for longform essays often. It’s long enough to feel as satisfactory as a good nonfiction book, but it is also short enough that I can read it on my commute to work or other places. They are also just massively underrated outlets for reading—they are incredibly diverse in content and style and very informative. Articles pack the same depth of analysis and research as nonfiction books while being more accessible due to their short length.

I constantly strive to keep myself educated and knowledgeable even if I’m not in a classroom setting. Longform articles fill that education void for me, so I always try to make it a habit of reading at least one article daily, even when I don't have time to read actual books. It also increases my attention span (something I direly need to do because social media doomscrolling has been killing it). I treat these essays and articles like brain food, so it's always fun to learn something new, and it’s excellent to do over a cup of coffee in the morning.

I’m doing an updated longform essay recommendation / how to find guide in a week, but here is my old one for reference:

no short form content, criterion collection movies only

I know that this is deeply obnoxious of me to only watch Criterion movies, but this is my temporary three month remedy for two years of continuously scrolling on Tiktok and watching reruns of shows I’ve watched five times already. I think my brain has forgotten how to watch anything that can’t be consumed mindlessly (i.e requires actual thinking). Recently, I was watching an old arthouse movie and was horrified when I found myself checking the notifications on my phone fifteen minutes into the movie.

For three months, I am pausing my chronic rewatching habits and trying to watch at least one good movie a week. Obviously I do not need a Criterion subscription for that, but Criterion is excellently curated and has a good variety of movies that changes each month (and I already have the subscription), so I plan on picking movies from the platform. It’s also extremely easy to filter movies based on genre, decade, director and so on based on your preferences. I’ve also been wanting to watch more foreign language films and think about this quote from Bong Joon Ho’s award acceptance speech quite often, so Criterion is perfect for that.

I’ll do a longer post on a whole media wishlist I have planned for the three months later on in the series, but here are a few that are on my watchlist that I am excited to get to: Cléo from 5 to 7, Desert Hearts, Basquiat, Happy Together, Pygmalion, Daisies, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, Tampopo, Beau Travail, and The Rules of the Game.

one fiction, one non fiction a week

I’m a fast reader, and I have more time these days, so this is plausible for me. My great love is fiction, but I do love a good nonfiction book. One of my resolutions for this year was to read more ‘brain food’ nonfiction books (ones that are interesting and informative and feel like I’m physically feeding my brain). I plan on reading one fiction and one nonfiction book each week to have a good balance of information going into my brain.

I usually just read essay collections for nonfiction and I posted a bunch a few months ago:

Also, here is my best friend’s post on her favorite nonfiction books for those interested in getting into more nonfiction reads! was basically the sole reason why I started reading more nonfiction amid my sea of fiction reads. I have trusted her reading taste for the last decade of my life, and I really do blindly pick up (and ultimately love) many nonfiction books.

Breakfast for Dinner

25 books to convince you about nonfiction

If fiction is the umbrella term in which all untrue, imaginative stories live, nonfiction acts as the same for the true ones. So why does it get a bad rap…

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a year ago · 206 likes · 17 comments · Elle

find niche research topics

One of my favorite assignments in college was writing literature reviews for research paper or when I was working as a professor’s research assistant. I will sometimes read a good article (usually on Aeon, which publishes brilliant essays all for free) and go down a rabbit hole of reading about a specific topic, whether from various other related articles or academic journals. And since I’m someone who needs to write every single thing down in a notebook, I’ve been keeping a commonplace notebook for this exact cause.

Researching in itself can be such a versatile hobby and deepens your knowledge for whatever you already love. I love looking at footnotes or works cited in a good essay and finding more reading material on the same subject. A lot of the topics I research these days are mostly related to history or art history; I try to write a mini essay on an art piece every week because nothing makes me think more than looking at and analyzing one.

For reference, here is ’s brilliant post on research as a leisure activity, where she explains this better than I ever could:

personal canon

research as leisure activity

A few years ago, I came across a particularly evocative description of the website Are.na. I’ll describe Are.na in the plainest possible fashion first: it’s a website where you can privately or collaboratively save images, text, PDFs, website links, and more into “channels.” It’s kind of like Pinterest for artists, researchers, and academics. This is a …

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2 years ago · 5994 likes · 167 comments · Celine Nguyen

morning walk & an album a day

I am a die hard believer that there is nothing a good walk won’t fix. I even wrote about this back in December—I was on the verge of a breakdown about something so I took a long walk…and then it absolved the problem entirely embarrassingly quickly. Sometimes, it is quite humbling just how fast a good walk will make all of your worries seem much, much smaller. Maybe it has something do with the sunlight; maybe it has something to do with the act of literally touching (or being near) grass. Either way, this revelation has gotten me in the habit of taking a morning walk.

On this walk, I turn off my data so I can’t get any new notifications, download a new album on my phone, and listen to the songs in order from start to finish. When I’m feeling up for it, I also like making quick notes about each song and the trajectory of the album in general in my notes app. I usually find new albums to listen to through a song I liked or find older albums of a favorite artist. I feel like this makes me feel happy and put together, and keeping a running list of all the albums I’ve listened to in its entirety is such a fun list to keep.

Some albums I’ve discovered and loved through doing this are: Submarine by the Marías, Guard Dog by Searows, First Two Pages of Frankenstein by The National, Honey by Samia, and Roxwell by Matilda Mann.

Here are also some good albums for spring:

the importance of hands on hobbies

I was just talking about this with my friend the other day, how it’s so important to experience diversity with our senses, and yet, with the digitalization of everything, we pretty much just touch flat surfaces or type away with the same motions at our keyboards every day. There’s a reason why tactile stimuli is so important in babies, I’m guessing. I did a lot of art growing up, and taking a ten week long pottery course last year was one of my favorite things I’ve done in my twenties. I like the thought of creating physical things with my hands, whether that be a painting, ceramics, or knitting a scarf.

Having a real life, non digital hobby has been linked to so many mental health benefits and has proven to be an excellent way to unwind. I was really good about going on a 5k morning run every day last year which I want to start doing again. Also, instead of scrolling on social media, I’ve been drawing a lot at night (which makes me happy and stops me from being exposed to blue light an hour before I go to bed, giving me a better night of sleep). Also, focusing on the details of something like an art project is great for my attention span as well.

Some hobbies that you can adopt: knitting, painting, drawing, pottery, any sport, crocheting, woodworking, gardening, scrapbooking.