The word “horror” derives from the Latin “horrere”—to stand on end (as hair standing on end) or to bristle—and the old French “orror”—to bristle or to shudder.

Autumn is nigh. My horror-loving soul is bristling with excitement. In celebration of the coming season, I’m deep-diving into all things horror. What is it? Why do we enjoy it? How can we analyze it? We’ll look at the genre’s history, various philosophies and theories about it, and take a crack at analyzing some horror movies ourselves over the course of the next few months.

At the start of each entry in this horror series, there will be a brief outline. At the end will be a list of my sources, which can serve as further reading to feed your own curiosity.

With that, let’s dive in.

outline

• Brief History of Horror

• Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror

  • Art-horror vs. Natural horror

• Effects of Horror (emotional response)

  • A work is “horror” if it intends to cause an emotional reaction of “art-horror” (fright and disgust)

  • Mirroring-effect between character and audience

• Objects of Horror (monsters)

  • Dangerous and impure

  • Optional criterion: desire to avoid physical contact w/ object

• Fusion/Fission

• Conclusion

a brief history

Horror found its start long before ever formalized into a genre. The Greek tragedy, with its concept of catharsis, offered ancient audiences the first taste of the transmuted feelings of dread, fear, and release that we are now so familiar with. Horror proper found its roots later in the eighteenth century with the English Gothic novel, the German Schauerroman, and French roman noir.1 This is where audiences were introduced the foggy, chilling climes of the moors, castles, and manors, and so much of what have become mainstays in the genre. In the mid-1800s, Edgar Allen Poe carried the mantel of Gothic literature over to America.

One of the greatest contributors to the horror genre during this time was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (of Carmilla fame). Le Fanu’s 1872 collection, In a Glass Darkly, set off an era of ghost stories that lasted into the early twentieth century, spanning the works of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Algernon Blackwood, and more. This time period also saw the publication of many of our greatest horror classics, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

After World War I, English horror shifted from external-causing physical fright to psychological fear and realism, while the cosmic strain of horror was kept alive in America by H. P. Lovecraft.

Horror literature has always been deeply intertwined with film and theatre. As early as the 1820s, horror stories were dramatized, as in the case of the 1823 stage production of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Horror also found its home in cinema. The 1920s and 30s is widely known as a golden age for the genre. German Expressionism, a 1920s film movement in Weimar Germany, flourished. Filmmakers of this tradition favored visual distortions, jagged lines, harsh shadows, and exaggerated performances over realism in their work. The quintessential examples of this style include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922), which are now seen as horror history touchstones. With the 30s came an influx of adaptations, such as Frankenstein (1931) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931).

The 40s and 50s brought with it wartime fears, like radioactive mutation (Godzilla (1954)) and invasion (War of the Worlds (1953)). Through the 60s and beyond, we saw the rise of horror maestro, Alfred Hitchcock, in Britain, alongside gimmicky low-budget productions in America. Shirley Jackson was publishing her fiction at this time too (The Haunting of Hill House, “The Lottery”).

The 70s favored the occult (The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976)). Then along came Stephen King and his avalance of novels, which were quickly turned into films. The 80s was the decade of the slasher. The genre lost some of its steam in the 90s and 2000s, but there were still some breakout hits like Scream (1996) and Dawn of the Dead (2004).

This brings us to the present day. On the film front, we have fresh new voices like those of Jordan Peele’s (Get Out (2017), Us (2019)), Ari Aster (Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019)), and Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse (2019), Nosferatu (2024). On the literary front, we have a plethora of major horror names, consisting of both stalwarts of the genre and rising stars. Among them are Stephen Graham Jones, Mariana Enriquez, Gus Moreno, and more.

the philosophy of horror

The basis for this first write-up will be Noel Carroll’s foundational horror studies treatise, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. In this work, Carroll sets out to examine horror as a genre through the tradition of analytical philosophy.2 He takes a cognitive-evaluative approach, which looks at emotions as mental judgments or beliefs, rather than just purely physical reactions. (Hopefully this will all become clearer with time)

In future entries, we’ll learn about other theorists’ responses and arguments against Carroll’s cognitivist approach. But first, Philosophy of Horror.

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art-horror vs. natural horror

Carroll distinguishes between what he calls art-horror and natural horror. The latter, natural horror, is the horror one feels or expresses in everyday life, such as in the wake of a natural disaster, the death of a loved one, or when one exclaims that “the horrors persist but so do I.” Art-horror, in contrast, is the emotional response to the cultural products that fall within the horror genre (literature, film, theatre, dance, visual art, etc.) Art-horror is what we colloquially already describe as “horror,” but it is not to be confused with the moments of scary imagery that may be found in art where horror isn’t the primary focus (e.g. murder in Camus’s The Stranger, or Agatha Christie’s mystery novels where suspense/curiosity is the major motivation and response). Horror as a formal genre has been around for approximately two hundred years or so, beginning with works like Frankenstein and Dracula, all the way to the present day.

effects of horror

The identifying characteristic of horror is the emotion it seeks to arouse.3 Namely, horror (duh). Carroll therefore states that “members of the horror genre will be identified as narratives and/or images (in the case of fine art, film, etc.) predicated on raising the affect of horror in audiences.” In other words, something is horror if it arouses horror. This feels a bit like a tautology, but it does serve as a useful framework for us to work with. The intention of the product (book, movie, artwork) must be to frighten. If that isn’t the plan, then it’s not horror.4

Monsters, therefore, are not a sufficient condition of horror (though they are a necessary condition for Carroll). In other words, just having a monster in a story does not mean that it’s a horror story. After all, there are monsters in other genres too, such as in myths and fairytales. The difference lies in the characters’ reactions to the monster. In horror, the monster is viewed as abnormal, a disruption to the laws of the universe. In other genres, the characters view them as natural.

So, returning to the idea of horror as intending to horrify. Carroll writes:

The emotional reactions of characters, then, provide a set of instructions or, rather, examples about the way in which the audience is to respond to the monsters in the fiction—that is, about the way we are meant to react to its monstrous properties.

This “mirroring effect” is a key feature in horror. And it’s not just fright that we (and the characters) feel, but visceral revulsion as well. Thus, the horror monster is both frightening and disgusting.5 This compound emotional effect in response to the monster is what art-horror is.

Carroll is careful to separate the internal emotion from the physical state. After all, physical reactions to emotions are not universal, and may not even be consistent within the same person. For instance, I may go cold when scared, but you may go hot. Or, I might freeze in response to fear in the morning, but throw hands in the evening.

objects of horror

But what causes the reaction of art-horror? Art-horror is a direct response to the object of horror, i.e. the monster, which is threatening/dangerous (fear response) and impure (disgust, nausea, repulsion response). The third criterion, though common, is not necessary: the character’s desire to avoid physical contact with the object.6

But what does Carroll mean by “impurity?” He cites Mary Douglas’s 1966 anthropological study, Purity and Danger, to explain. Douglas’s work “correlates reactions of impurity with the transgression or violation of schemes of cultural categorization.” In other words, impurity is a “category mistake,” anything that defies or confuses boundaries. “Things that are interstitial, that cross the boundaries of the deep categories of a culture’s conceptual scheme, are impure, according to Douglas.”

Carroll gives the example of winged insects with four legs, because four legs are a feature of land animals, yet these things also fly. Other examples include bodily fluids like blood, vomit, pieces of flesh, as they are things that should be on the inside (of the body) but are outside. They straddle the categorical oppositions of “me/not me,” “inside/outside,” “living/dead.” Categorical misgivings can also arise out of incompleteness or formlessness (e.g. something disintegrating or rotting, or soil). Julia Kristeva’s theorization on abjection comes to mind here as well, where she builds on Douglas’s ideas and applies them to the individual psyche.

Carroll therefore defines an object or being as impure if it is any of the following:

• categorically interstitial

• categorically contradictory

• incomplete

• formless

Many horror monsters slot into this framework well. Ghosts. Zombies. Mummies. Vampires. Edritch and cosmic horrors fit into this too, as do formless monsters like slime, mist, or clouds. What unifies them is exactly their unclassifiability according to our standard schemas. They are impure because they are categorically transgressive.

Even in the cases that could be given as counter-examples (Halloween with a serial-killing psychopath, Jaws with a shark — all conceivably “normal” things that exist in our world), they still transgress categories. They take on supernatural, exaggerated, or unusual attributes (Michael Meyers’ invincibility, the Jaws shark’s vicious attacks on humans and unnatural intelligence).

fusion/fission

Carroll further dissects the object of horror by offering two processes of monster creation: fusion and fission. Fusion involves:

the construction of creatures that transgress categorical distinctions such as inside/outside, living/dead, insect/ human, flesh/machine, and so on. Mummies, vampires, ghosts, zombies, and Freddie, Elm Street’s premier nightmare, are fusion figures in this respect.

Fusion brings together two disparate and composite figures into one monster, conflating distinct types of beings.

Alternatively, fission is when:

the contradictory elements are, so to speak, distributed over different, though metaphysically related, identities. The type of creatures that I have in mind here include doppelgangers, alter-egos, and werewolves.

Werewolves fall into the fission category because although they are composed of two different entities (human and wolf), they inhabit those beings at different times. They are not simultaneously human and wolf (though I’m sure there’s an argument to be made here), but they must shapeshift between the two. They do not overlap temporally. The idea of doubles is also a case of fission, as in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, with the monstrous painting that absorbs the moral sin of the character.

Within fission, there are two types: temporal and spatial. Temporal fission divides characters in time (Jekyll and Hyde). Spatial fission multiplies characters in space (doppelgangers).

conclusion

In sum, Carroll’s philosophy of horror rests on two conditions:

• the monster (object of horror) is…

  • dangerous and threatening

  • impure

• …which then evokes art-horror (an emotional response of fear and disgust) in the character, and by extension, the audience

But a definition this clean invites pressure-testing. Carroll's model is a cognitive one about how we categorize a monster. Not everyone agrees with his framework, nor his ideas on impurity. Others, like Xavier Aldana Reyes and Filippo Contesi, have pushed back against Carroll's model. We’ll get into where those critiques land next. I’d also love to hear your thoughts. Do you agree or disagree with Carroll?

And underneath all of it sits a stranger question that even a perfect definition can't answer: why do we choose to feel this way on purpose? Why do we enjoy horror? That's what we’ll dive into after.

resources

New York Film Academy, “The First Horror Movie & the History of the Horror Genre”

Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990)

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966)

If you’d like to read more of my thoughts on horror movies, impurity, and abjection, you might enjoy my piece, “Hangry Women: Female Cannibalism Films, Graves’ Disease, and Abjection”

Dearest friend,

July is always my best or worst month. It’s my birthday month, after all, so the emotional experience of it can be rocky. What’s that thing people say? 28 felt young, but 29 feels old. 30 will feel young again. Well, I’m 29 now, somehow, and I feel too old.1

When I was little, I was obsessed with Peter Pan.2 I didn’t want to grow up. I was so afraid of what adulthood would bring. While I don’t quite feel this way anymore, my birthday inevitably makes me reflect on aging, what we ascribe to each age, and the pitfalls and sense of safety that a perpetual childish nostalgia brings about. (Stacey Yu’s debut novel, Kitten, explores this!) When thinking about the throughline of the media I consumed this month, I realized how much of it, even if indirectly, circled around this feeling of stuck-ness, stalled time, and the relentless inescapability of it.

On the Calculation of Volume II explores how to move forward when one is quite literally frozen in time. Cathedrals explores how an inability to confront the past stalls the characters on a psychological and familial level. Even Strange Homes confronts the familial and physical structures that trap people in a cycle of violence and confinement. In contrast, Midnight Rising reckons with the real American history of slavery—a violent history that this country actively wants to suppress, despite the fact that it’s impossible to repair and move forward if we never confront it. All these stories revolve around the people and institutions (and physics? when it comes to Calculation) that enact this stuckness. Is there ever a way out?

the diary

the library

Strange Houses by Uketsu
A writer is approached by his friend who’s looking to purchase a house. He shows the writer the blueprints. While at first glance, all seems normal, upon further inspection oddities become apparent. Bedrooms that are only accessible through other bedrooms. Dead spaces between walls. The mystery deepens when another house’s strange blueprint is revealed.

I ripped through Uketsu’s Strange Pictures, which I found equal parts disturbing and intriguing. I expected to enjoy Strange Houses just as much, if not more, because I love stories about houses, labyrinths, and mazes. However, Strange Houses doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. Both of the Strange books place readers into the roles of detectives/investigators by providing readers with “evidence” (photographs, blog posts, illustrations, blueprints). Technically, the puzzles should be solvable with what’s given. Even when far-fetched, there’s enough suspension-of-disbelief to go along with the conclusion of Strange Pictures. Strange Houses, on the other hand, is not quite as successful. I don’t need believability or tidy conclusions, but I would’ve liked some more loose ends tied, and the convoluted nature of the mystery ultimately feels forced. I’m not dying to read the next book in the series, Strange Buildings, but maybe someday when I’m in more of a reading slump I’ll get around to it.

On the Calculation of Volume II by Slovej Balle
On the Calculation of Volume follows a woman trapped in a single November day. No matter what she does or learns, she cannot seem to find a way out.
Its simple premise belies how compelling the series actually is. Seven books! On one day! And yet, I devoured the first book in the series and felt such profound emptiness afterward that I ran to the bookstore to find the next two volumes. On the Calculation of Volume is so singular. It is unlike anything else I have read, and simultaneously, I can see the threads that connect it to every single other one of my favorite novels. It belongs to one of my favorite subgenres: “thinky women.”

The first volume could be characterized primarily by stasis. There is a sense of stillness, place-attachment, and knowledge-acquisition as a way out (so much to unpack just there and I don’t know where to begin!). It also has an immensely tender examination of long-term love, and the oblique ways two people can drift apart. Volume two in contrast is characterized by motion, momentum. It reads like a travelogue. I am forcing myself to stop here, to give myself some time before I read books three and four. I think about the series so often though, I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to hold out! One day, I hope I can gather my thoughts enough to write an entire post on it.

Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro
Decades ago, a girl’s body was found dismembered and burned. No one knows what happened, who did it, and why. The unanswered questions and grief have torn the family apart as a result. Thirty years later, the truth is finally revealed.

This was my third Piñeiro novel. In Cathedrals, she once again explores family dysfunction, private dramas, crime, and the prejudices and institutions that shape who we are. Like with the other novels in July, I flew through this one. Piñeiro is a must-read author for me, despite not being an all-time favorite. The themes she grapples with are interesting and thought provoking—especially so here with the unraveling of religion and obligation—but her novels often leave me wanting more. I especially felt this way here. Certain decisions near the end of the novel felt questionable (in all senses of the word: I wonder why she chose them, plus I wasn’t sure they were good choices). Still would recommend regardless!

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War by Tony Horwitz
Midnight Rising tells the true and electrifying story of John Brown, the staunch Calvinist abolitionist who led armed strikes against slavery, and ultimately, sparked the Civil War.
Alongside “thinky women,” another of my favorite subgenres is what my husband has dubbed “adversity, teamwork, mission.” I especially like my nonfiction this way, as the added element of real stakes, social issues, and revolutionary spirit make it all the more appealing to me. Think: Star Wars of course, but also Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution that Changed the World by Tony Perrottet.3 Midnight Rising falls squarely within that camp. Adversity (life/death stakes, moral righteousness), check. Teamwork (Brown and co), check. Mission (abolitionism), check. I am also deeply invested in the question of violence: who determines what counts as violent, when/if violence is necessary, how/if violence is inevitable. While Horwitz never makes any definitive proclamations on the subject, Midnight Rising certainly raises it. Brown’s story, his convictions, and what he catalyzed are well worth reading about.

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the record player

Lots and lots of alternative rock as usual. Shoegaze, dream pop, a dabbling of metal. Artists on repeat: Radiohead (specifically The Bends and In Rainbows) and Mazzy Star.4

the café

• The Horror Identity Crisis. A fantastic article on the horror film DNA and why Backrooms feels unsure of itself (and therefore is ultimately unsuccessful as a horror movie). I agree with much of it! Backrooms does too little with too much, in my opinion, never allowing the horror to play out, to fill the space it creates. It never interrogates its own setups, willfully ignoring its major themes and characters’ positions within the world. The movie was not unenjoyable by any means, but given that it’s such a ripe concept, I would’ve loved for it to be more.

  • Takeaways for writing horror: You have to make a decision about what the horror at the heart of your story is and ollow the thread as far as it will take you. More is not always better. Specificity rules when it comes to building dread, tension, and a satisfying conclusion. Who are your characters? How does who they are affect their actions, reactions, and the world/horrors around them? Let the reader/viewer live in the horror and with your characters’ reactions to it.

• Indie perfume shop, Pierrot Perfumery, creator of one of my faves (Person Suit), will be closing indefinitely! Get something before they’re gone. 10% off everything in August. Every month following, the sale will increase by 10% until there’s nothing left. Not affiliated in any way but just feeling a great loss in the indie fragrance world.

• If you’re ever in the mood to learn some US History, here’s a free open source textbook.

• I just started learning to play the bass. Here are the videos I’ve been using. I’ve also been learning songs and playing along with these.

A poem for the road:

Full Moon
Mary Ruefle

The white spot to the upper left 
which looks like the pith plug 
in a peeled orange is the crater Tycho. 
I have never been there. Perhaps one day 
you will. I saw many jackets in the coatroom 
but none of them were his. I know someone 
who is alive somewhere. 
It is embarrassing to be alive. 
Sometimes you have to stand out on the street 
and look upwards, and then you have to pretend 
the stone at your feet 
is not an object of observation, 
when it is.

With love,

Charlotte

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Wars have always happened, but World War 2 was unlike any that had come before it. Technology revolutionized modern warfare. Nazi scientiest, Werner von Braun’s V-2 rocket changed everything. First came destruction. Then came sound. A reversal of expectations.1

Gravity’s Rainbow is set at the tail end of World War 2. We follow an astronomical number of characters. The closest person we have to a protagonist is Tyrone Slothrop, a weird guy who does weird things, the weirdest of which is the uncanny link between his erections and the V-2 bombings. Several unsavory organizations orbit around Gravity’s Rainbow and Slothrop. There’s PISCES and “The White Visitation” and The Firm and I. G. Farben and ACHTUNG (where our guy Slothrop works). There’s lots of sex and shit and hallucinations and masturbation. There’s paranoia and surveillance and human experiments. There’s slapstick comedy (so many bananas), illuminations of dark under-examined areas of history (Herero genocide), and stunning passages on death, the sky, love.

prelude

Just a couple days into starting the novel, I sent this message to my friends:

That same night, I made a quick 180.

Going in, I expected Gravity’s Rainbow to be a challenging read. I expected to wrangle my way through, to want to give up, to shove it down like a bowl of bland vegetables.2 What I hadn’t expected: enjoyment, pleasure. I was laughing and rolling my eyes and talking and thinking about Gravity’s Rainbow every waking moment. It consumed me in an entirely surprising way. I read the rest of part one quickly. This isn’t to say that I understood most of it on first read, but that at some point, the language transformed from just pure nonsense into beautiful ridiculous gross intriguing nonsense.

As I’ve stated before, this reading log is meant to be a travelogue of sorts, or a diary, rather than a coherent analysis/review/guide. One of the best ways to understand (a book, yourself, anything) is to articulate it. So this is what that is. A way to think through writing. To transcribe my thoughts, and in doing so, arrive at some semblance of understanding or recogntion.

reading companions

I’m trying to listen to the suggestions from others to vibe-read. Read the book and let the words wash over me. Swim through the murk of not-understanding. Not force myself to know everything, or anything at all. But I have to admit that I do find that I enjoy myself better when I read the summaries for each section/chapter, and ultimately, I am still trying to enjoy this experience, not just withstand it. This is the reading guide I am following along with from time to time as I read. Here’s my method: I’ll read a few sections, pause, think, read the summaries, then go back to the book. Rinse and repeat.

Here are some other resources around the internet that I’ve found useful or want to bookmark for future perusal.

Gravity’s Rainbow Reading Guide: Chapter-by-chapter summaries

Course Hero: This is helpful especially for the characters list. I haven’t looked much into the other sections.

The Exegesis of Thomas Pynchon: Chapter-by-chapter analyses

Slow Learners Podcast: Inconsistent sound production, but great podcast! The hosts dive into GR and are quite funny. They also invite guests onto the show to talk about various threads of interest, like V-2 history and Pynchon’s public reception.

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the preterite failson

In part one (“Beyond the Zero”), we meet our “hero,” (or as close to a hero as we are going to get), Tyrone Slothrop. He’s a medical oddity and a womanizing wartime hot commodity. Our man Slothrop gets an erection every time a missile is dropped. Or maybe it’s the other way around, but no one knows the direction of the cause and effect. Maybe there is no cause and effect. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Regardless, everyone wants to know why.

Slothrop, as his name implies, seems to be a bit of a loser in many ways. He’s a the descendant of early Massachussets settlers, a lineage of WASPs hat took a downturn some years ago. He’s a Harvard alum, though his family’s methods for getting him in/paying for tuition are suspect. His family sold him out as a child for weird experiments and Pavlovian conditioning in exchange for money. In the War, he’s a lieutenant in the U.S. Army and works for ACHTUNG (Allied Clearing House, Technical Units, Northern Germany), where he is sent to examine bomb sites. Slothrop, despite (or perhaps because of) his familial legacy and job, is figured as a bit of a fuck-up. Or at the very least, someone who has been cast aside, used and abused by others above and around him. Slothrop is, in Pynchon’s terms, a Preterite. He is an outsider, one who has been passed over by God’s grace, outside of the predestined “Elect,” forgotten, tossed aside, fucked over by capitalism and war and society.

If Jay Gatsby is the new money American Dream dismantled and exposed, then Tyrone Slothrop is the old money American Dream dismantled and exposed.

I read somewhere that Pynchon writes about the “corrupted myths” of the West. Slothrop is that. He is the story we are taught (WASP, hero, etc.) turned on its head, revealed for what it actually is. And the whole of Gravity’s Rainbow does this kind of expose work, unveiling the rotten underbellies of war, empire, colonialism, and the Western project as a whole.

The typical Hollywood narrative of World War 2 generally romanticizes and glorifies the war and America’s part in it. Savior. Hero. Masculinity. Patriotism. Gravity’s Rainbow peels this narrative apart, destabilizes it. It pushes the readers to question the balance we’ve been taught about good and evil, in the war, but also in contemporary Western narratives in general.

At the end of the day, Slothrop is us. He is America. He is the everyman who was promised a certain life and delivered something else. He is the wartime person among persons. He is the figure, milling about, going through life and work, bracing for death, for the bomb to drop, for life to end, for what dreams may come beyond zero.

‘…It could happen any time, the next second, right, just suddenly…shit…just zero, just nothing…and…’
It’s nothing he can see or lay hands on—sudden gases, a violence upon the air and no trace afterward…a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence…not the Word, the one Word that rips apart the day…

banality of evil

What sticks out to me most after reading part one is the crummy mundanity of it all. The death and destruction that begins in the gray cubicle by the bureaucrats and scientists who wash their hands of all responsibility.

It is the dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachy, sour-stomach middle of the day, a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it…

Evil is in the banality of it. It is in the clocking in, filling of the Excel spreadsheets, collecting the paychecks, working one’s way up the corporate ladder. And meanwhile, bombs are dropped, people are murdered by the hundreds. And everyone is “just doing their jobs.”

For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.

— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

Then and now, there is an added layer. The instilled belief that what one is doing is a patriotic duty. Noble, even.

And there is something else, too, I think. A motivator. At least for those at the top pulling the puppet strings.

Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.

The more I read and learn, the more it appears that it’s turtles all the way down. The rotten root of it all. Or if not “it all,” then a damn enormous lot of it all. Capitalism. Colonialism. That great cannabilistic monolithic systems that seem so eternal and inevitable when we live in it. The monster (Abenoid blob ??) that eats and eats and never is satisfied. Every time a country goes to war, defense stocks skyrocket and the rich get richer. War is the best moneymaking machine. To the shareholders and authorities, all else is collateral.

inevitability of evil

I was (and truthfully, still am) fascinated by space exploration, especially with the inauguration of NASA’s Artemis missions. In its purest form, space exploration feels like a deeply noble and human enterprise. Yet, with just a small amount of digging, it is clear how inextricably tied to war, colonization, and violence it is/can be. Werner von Braun invented the V-2 rocket at NASA. The good seems parasitically attached to the bad. See: birth control. See: haber-bosch process.3 I want to believe innovation does not necessitate violence and destruction. I’m not smart enough to parse it all out. Can we have one without the other?

We often think of history (and its wars, genocides, death, violence) as inevitable. As if it was a necessary progression of events, a necessary evil for the unrelenting march of progress. Exploration, colonization, exploitation. V2 rockets, atomic bombs, drones, AI. On and on. The relentless barage of forward momentum that can’t and won’t be stopped. If it can happen, it will happen. And loss of life/liberty is framed as the unfortunate but necessary consequence of humanity’s technological advancement.

Von Braun seemed to believe this. He was the first high profile advocate for human missions to Mars and he spoke of it as an inevitability, like an obvious evolutionary next step. V2 rocket → Earth orbit → Moon → Mars.4

In this day and age of intellectual distrust, I am a bit wary of discussing the relationship between scientific/technological discovery and fascism, but I don’t think the two (distrust and advancement) are mutually exclusive. If anything, the current “Elect” of American governance pushes forth on both fronts: a devaluing of medicine, scientific inquiry, and research, while simultaneously pushing for space colonizaiton, exploitation of the land and natural resources through technology, and plutocracy. Our culture of scientific inquiry has always been and is currently being shaped by political values, and the space program has long been used as a way to further political agendas and to soften the public re: plutocracy.

But Gravity’s Rainbow also troubles the distinction between who is good and evil. The line between the two is thin. While the SS officer, Captain Blicero, is the obvious antagonist, Pointsman, the English Pavlovian behavioral psychologist, is revealed to be just as horrid.

cause and effect

Central to the novel is the concept of cause and effect. Specifically, the (possible) causal link between Slothrop’s erections and the V-2 strikes. Some of the characters—namely, Pointsman, a researcher who works in the psyop agency known as PISCES—is obsessed with this relationship. It goes as so:

sex -> bomb
Or
bomb -> sex
Or
coincidence?

Pointsman, and a number of fellow psychologists, are devoted Pavlovians. For the unaware, Pavlov was the Russian guy who came up with conditioning. Ring a bell every time the dog eats and eventually, ringing the bell itself will trigger drooling.

Pointsman and co’s devotion to Pavlov borders on religiosity. This is further evidenced by a shared (and purportedly cursed) Book they pass between each other. Like a Bible, perhaps?5

Pointsman’s fixation on Slothrop and his need for an order of operations illuminate his desire for control. Nailing down the cause and effect = ability to control the subject. He is convinced that everything, including humanity, can be quantified, categorized, and manipulated. Pointsman is a Pavlovian power-trip of a man. And, of course, he (much like Blicero) is a stand-in for the totalizing of Empire.

This brings to mind the Frankfurt School6, a group of Jewish critical theorists who were active in the 1920s and 30s, and wrote about the enlightenment, mass culture, and the rise of totalitarianism (among other things). They argued that rationality had taken the place of mythology as the framing narrative for moderntiy, but in doing so, reason had become idolized. Rather than the liberatory tool it was supposed to be, reason became a way to categorize, quantify, dissect, label, measure, and control. A way to seek absolute mastery over the natural world and beings.

Several decades earlier, Nietzsche shared similar warnings:

One ought not to make 'cause' and 'effect' into material things, as natural scientists do…It is we alone who have fabricated causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, compulsion, number, law, freedom, motive, purpose; and when we falsely introduce this world of symbols into things and mingle it with them as though this symbol-world were an 'in itself', we once more behave as we have always behaved, namely mythologically.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

It’s no coincidence that the mysterious Pavlovian book passed around between these researchers is shrouded in secrecy and intrigue, brought to the level of mythology. Pynchon seems to be pointing out this nearness between the two: the insistent drive to turn all things into cause and effect, and reason’s return to a mythological symbolic order.

Pynchon turns a critical eye to all symbol-makers/mythologizers. Astrology, tarot, the I-ching. All of it has its darker undercurrents, vulnerabilities to co-optation. But Pynchon places reason with the rest, too. Facism is totalizing. All can be subsumed.

folk consciousness // make love not war

It is not death that separates these incarnations, but paper: paper specialties, paper routines. The War, the Empire, will expedite such barriers between our lives.7 The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fuhrer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity (131).

I can’t help but think of the current US admin with this, and of the US presidencies of old (i.e. Andrew Jackson). Their Trojan horse of corrupted populism used as a scheme to get into office. A false promise of unity as a politician “for the people,” before the rug is pulled out and the exact opposite is enacted. Of course, Nazism is a great example of this as well…

Gravity’s Rainbow examines this—the false folk consciousness that is proposed by the fascist empire and the implied true folk consciousness that is smothered by the empire’s manufactured one. How do they differ? How can we find the actual folk consciousness? Is that the answer? To war, empire, violence?

AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN. These things appear on the walls of the Red districts in the course of the night. Nobody can track down the artist or painter for any of them, leading you to suspect they’re one and the same. Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness. They are not slogans so much as texts, revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people…

Is this Pynchon’s proposed antidote? Conversation, discourse, unity. It feels a bit hokey, or like a misread on my part. A “make love not war” kind of sentiment, which often devolves into empty action. The Frankfurt School talks about this as well: when collectivism is manipulated into a tool for ideological homogenization and domination. (See: Brave New World for example)

What’s compelling for me here in Gravity’s Rainbow (and how it differs from other such pithy solutions of love>war), is the novel’s suggestion that although taglines of hope can be subsumed and co-opted by empire, the very act of catalyzing conversation may be the whole and necessary point. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake (great names) are two of the most wholesome characters in the whole novel. Some people find them oddly sentimental for an author like Pynchon, but I find their relationship compelling and endearing. Maybe it’s because I want some beacon of hope through the shitshow and they offer some semblance of it. There is something in the two of them that reminds me of 1984’s Winston and Julia or Never Let Me Go’s Kathy and Tommy—this clandestine relationship forged in opposition to the reigning powers, love as hope in a bleak world. There is something tragic latent in their relationship, but there is also something redemptive. Their passages are easily some of the most beautiful in the entire novel, offering a brief bittersweet respite in the midst of the darkness.

miscellaneous thoughts and questions

Some of these chapters were so bizarre that I’m not sure how to go about thinking about them. Example: Slothrop’s hallucinatory adventure that involves the Roseland Ballroom, JFK, Malcolm X, a toilet, and a cowboy fantasy. IYKYK. I vaguely understand that it has to do with Slothrop as the portal into the American psyche/American race relations. Another example: Captain Blicero’s sadistic Hansel and Gretel sexcapades with prisoners, Katje and Gottfried. What’s up with the Hansel and Gretel repeated references? I’m not sure yet. It comes up again later too.

Here are some more of my notes and annotations:

All in all, part one has been a wild, thought-provoking trip. I’m excited to forge onward! I’m not sure if future reading logs will be as in depth as this one, but I wanted to lay out some of the threads that I’ll be following for the rest of the novel in this first entry. Let me know if you have any thoughts, suggestions, connections, or questions of your own down. See you in the next installment for part two!

Dearest friend,

A blink, and the year flies by. It is high summer now. The sun beats hot and close, and I am a year older. Time does not feel real until I sit down to account for all of it: books read, songs listened to, films watched. Here is my mid-year audit.

2025 was a big reading slump year for me, largely because I was trying to write more. My issue, I think, is that I am afflicted with an enormous sense of guilt re: time tradeoff. I often view it as a zero sum game: if I am reading, that means I am not writing, and what I really should be doing is writing. So instead I am stuck in an endless doomed loop of writing on low fuel/inspiration but never letting myself to read because I haven’t “written enough” yet. In 2026, I have been trying to break this curse. I am “allowing” myself to read more and to not feel weirdly guilty about it.

I started January off with quite a bit of sci-fi, which is not my usual genre of choice, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun I had. I then switched gears and dove into the International Booker Prize shortlist, reviewing each book before the awards were announced (I correctly predicted the winner hehe). Now, I am reading whatever pleases me without any parameters. This has led me to new favorites (On the Calculation of Volume) and a behemoth of a book project.

Beginning this year, I embarked upon a new challenge to read around the world and map my progress. The goal is to push myself to read more geographically diversely, and to encourage you to do the same! It’s also just a fun way to visually render “where” I’m reading. The book counts only if: (1) the author is from that country, and (2) the book is primarily set in said country. Updates will occur sporadically. You can follow my journey here:

the diary

The past half year: weddings, running, pilates instructor training, career uncertainties, endless writing, new and old hobbies. Found new favorite novels, rediscovered old interests, resisted the temptation to live in immaterial fantasies of the future.

the library

some rapid-fire picks from the past six months—

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami
A collection of essays on writing, publishing, and life as an author. My favorite essay was the one on his drafting and revising process (he goes through upwards of six or seven full drafts of his novels, sometimes rewriting them from scratch). Appreciated this, though not as much as What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, his other memoir on writing and running marathons—a delicious pairing of the physical and the mental/creative that has inspired my new series on movement.

Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato
A daughter leaves her home in Brazil for college in the US. The mother is left behind. Skype, with its glitches and containment, becomes the medium for their long-distance relationship. This one did it for me. I am not always fond of a minimalist and unvarnished writing style, but when it works, it works. The simplicity of the story between the mother and daughter resonates with me on a personal level, but the form fit the content. The mundantiy of the days is mirrored in the sparse sentences, with the slow jittering lag of the internet and the routine of life regardless of location. It represents life, and missing someone, in such an intimate way. The quiet hum of melancholy undergirds the entirety of Blue Light Hours, like the ever-present glow of the computer screen.

Heart the Lover by Lily King
Heart the Lover is the prequel/sequel to Writers and Lovers. The novel is split into two parts. The first follows Casey through college, along with the tumultuous ups and downs and romances that accompany those years. In the second part, Casey is married and has children, when a former lover (whom we meet in part one) shows up at her doorstep. I loved Lily King’s Writers and Lovers, but Heart the Lover unfortunately did not hit the same register for me, partly because one of the big twists felt unnecesarrily withheld imo, and ultimately, the novel read too sentimental to me. There were aspects that reminded me of the film Past Lives. Read if you like emotional, suckerpunch novels.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Five astronauts and cosmonauts orbit earth, documenting its days and nights, mountains and cities, hurricanes and heat waves. A gorgeous and moving ode to our planet and its inhabitants. This was a deeply life affirming read. It gave me the same sense of awe I get when I watch rocket launches or nature documentaries. Harvey is in love with language, which is evident in Orbital. Sentences twist and lilt and sing. A perfect read if you love lyrical and poetic novels that are not particularly plot or character driven. Listen to the Interstellar soundtrack while you read!

Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur
Women Without Men chronicles the intertwining lives (and deaths and resurrections) of five women as they find their ways to one another. Playful and bleak in turns, Parsipur imagines a utopia outside of the patriarchal confines of Iranian society. This was exactly my flavor of mysticism and surreality, until the end, which felt couched as a concession to censorship (so I won’t fault the author for it).

The Fisherman by John Langan
Abe and Dan are two widowers who find solace in fishing together. They find themselves drawn to Dutchman’s Creek, a mysterious fishing spot shrouded in legend and folklore. They soon learn of its horrific past. Though this novel didn’t always work for me, it has some of the most enduring and terrifying passages I’ve read to date. Well worth the read.

On the Calculation of Volume by Slovej Balle
Tara Selter is stuck in a time loop. Every day she wakes up to find herself in November 18th. She cannot find a way out. It’s surprising to me how immensely compelling a novel about a single day, repeated ad infinitum, has been to read. It is not thrilling by any means, yet I find myself devouring the series and having to force myself to slow down. I finished the first book and sat staring at my wall for several long minutes, wondering what the heck to do with myself. I then called three bookstores to ask if they had the next few books in stock.

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the cinema

Twin Peaks
This was my first time watching Twin Peaks! The series balances humor and drama remarkably well. It’s soap-y and corny, yet there’s an earnestness threaded throughout that undercuts any irony. The beauty of each shot, from the color to the composition, are so cohesive and compelling that the slowness (when it is slow) is a welcomed delight. The eye wants to linger on the red shadows, the blue-green sky, the dark woods. You’re reeling from a reveal right after laughing at a ridiculously prolonged comedic bit.

Obsession
To say I love this movie would be an understatement. I was well and truly obsessed with it. Obsession’s “be careful what you wish for” premise is simple, but in the clever and deft (and budgeted) hands of director Curry Barker, we get a profoundly disturbing story about a woman’s loss of autonomy.

the record player

This past year, I’ve returned to a lot of tried-and-true favorites (Radiohead, The Smiths, bôa). I seem to always go back to English alt rock at the end of the day. Fleetwood Mac joined the mix recently as well. I’m not the biggest fan of their top hits so have always written them off—that is, until my friend introduced me to Tusk. I’ve also been listening to a lot of 2010s indie rock that I loved as a teenager (Modest Mouse, The Menzingers).

the café

• This interview between Haruki Murakami and Harry Styles for Runner’s World is so wonderful to me. What an intertwining of worlds—of music and literature and running! Two stars in their own respective ways finding common ground through movement and art. It also made me wonder about the confluence of the music and literary worlds, what with the rise of celebrity book clubs like Dua Lipa’s. Are authors beginning to be viewed as celebrities now? Has this always been the case? What does this shift signify?

• I listened to this DJ set titled “On a Moonlit Night in Iran with Katayoun” while writing this dispatch.

  • “This selection envisions a soundtrack for an imagined Iranian Spaghetti Western, blending epic cinematic sounds that evoke vivid imagery of the Wild West. It features surf rock-inspired guitar tones fused with jazz and Iranian folk music. Inspiration is taken from Ennio Morricone’s iconic scores and the melodies and harmonies of traditional Mexican music, as interpreted by master composers like Fariborz Lachini and trumpeter Manouchehr Biglari, amongst others.”

• I lived in Buffalo, New York for a number of years, so was intrigued by this New York Times article on Buffalo’s equally snowy, equally rust belt-y neighbor, Syracuse, and the “legendary writers” whom the city has housed over the years. The argument essentially goes: relative affordability + freezing (introspective) winters = appealing to writers.

• If you happen to be reading Gravity’s Rainbow: this podcast has been a fun (and educational) supplement as I read. In the first episode, the hosts interview a historian of U.S. space exploration, who goes into detail about the history of the V-2 rocket.

A poem for the road:

Solstice
Audre Lorde

We forgot to water the plantain shoots
when our houses were full of borrowed meat
And our stomachs with the gifts of strangers
Who laugh now as they pass us
Because our land is barren
the farms are choked
With stunted rows of straw
and our nightmares of juicy brown yams
that cannot fill us.
The roofs of our houses rot from last winter’s water
but our drinking pots are broken
we have used them to mourn the death of old lovers
the next rain will wash our footprints away
and our children have married beneath them

Our skins are empty
They have been vacated by spirits
who are angered by our reluctance
to feed them
in baskets of straw made from sleep grass
and the droppings of civets
they have been hidden away by our mothers
who are waiting for us by the river.

My skin is tightening
soon I shall shed it
like a monitor lizard
like remembered comfort
at the new moon’s rising
I will eat the last signs of my weakness
remove the scars of old childhood wars
and dare enter the forest whistling
like a snake that had fed the chameleon
for changes
I shall be forever.

May I never remember reasons
for my spirit’s safety
may I never forget
the warning of my woman’s flesh
weeping at the new moon
may I never lose
that terror
which keeps me brave
may I owe nothing
that I cannot repay.

With love,
Charlotte

index

• part one: beyond the zero

A screaming comes across the sky.

It’s me. I’m doing the screaming, and it’s because I’m about to embark upon a multi-month journey through my first Thomas Pynchon novel. Naturally, I’ve chosen to dive into the deep end with Pynchon’s third and most widely-acclaimed novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, which sits at a nice, slim 760 pages. This will be the first in what I’ve decided will be my summer of big books, aka Big Book Bsummer1, that may or may not just continue on into Big Book Bautumn and Big Book Bwinter. Or perhaps I will lose steam and my foray will start and end with this one…We’ll see.

So, Gravity’s Rainbow. Why this chonker? Why now? Why the sudden breaking of my Substack silence?

The plainest and most boring answer is that my local bookstore is hosting a GR bookclub. Reading difficult texts is most fun in community, after all. I expect this one to rile up a lot of opinions and I hope to learn something from the members who have read GR multiple times. I’ve also been feeling very drained by my reading lately. I’ve read plenty of good books, but my natural tendency is to reach for short, easy-to-digest books that leave me feeling and (importantly) thinking nothing. They’re fun! But not much else. And right now, I am in the mood for a monster of a book. Something that I can chew on and chew on and chew on. A book I can live in and with for weeks at a time. I want to be challenged, to fall down rabbit holes, come up gasping for breath, read analyses, listen to podcasts, talk to other readers. Also, I want to read a book about war. About bombs and death and the absurdity of living through it all. Because, well, look around. So, Gravity’s Rainbow.

The second part of all of this is that I’ve long struggled with maintaining any sort of consistency online. It’s largely because I feel so much pressure to post something good and well thought out, so I want to lower my stakes and hopefully post more as a result. Allow myself the grammatical errors and idiosyncracies and dumb jokes. Not worry about the “value” of a post or how algorithmically friendly it is. Let posting serve my offline life rather than the other way around. I’m reading this anyway, so why not just post about it too.

So this is not a guide to Gravity’s Rainbow. Not a review nor an analysis. This is a reading journal. A travelogue through the terrain of this novel’s 700+ page landscape. There will be half-formed thoughts, feelings, rabbit hole tunnels to fall through, and yes, there will be spoilers, as much as a book like this can be spoiled. I’d love for you to join in reading this book with me, whether it’s now or years in the future. Together, let’s find out just how “unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene” Gravity’s Rainbow truly is.2

I’ve written about my health briefly in the past. It’s a constant topic of concern for me, though too intimate of one to have ever written about well. I am not, to my knowledge, a hypochondriac. It’s just that my body has never allowed me to fully forget that health is a precarious thing. Life has often felt like a neverending battle between mind and body. I have ambitions! goals! desires! and sometimes, my body simply is not up for it. Illness or not, I am certain this is something that afflicts us all, at one point or another.

I was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism at twelve, though by that point I had already developed a massive goiter and a whole host of other symptoms, including but not limited to spontaneous fire-hydrant bloody noses, perpetual motion sickness, frequent vomiting, and extreme bouts of fatigue. My preteen memories have taken on the quality of fever dreams: hazy uncertain blurs of rage and despair, blood and fluid. Perhaps in a not-so-unrelated turn of events, I developed a penchant for horror movies and novels around this time.

Pre-hyperthyroidism, my childhood was raucous. I was a hyper child. I ran and jumped and danced—too much, for those around me. I was a fast runner and swimmer. My parents could not make me sit still. Post-hyperthyroidism, life as I knew it slowed to a sticky standstill. I became despondent. My grades tanked. I couldn’t stay awake through my exams. I wasn’t allowed to participate in gym class. I went from being one of the fastest in the class to the slowest.

I had my thyroid removed in high school, and since then, I have been on a decade-long adjustment period of finding the right dosage of synthetic thyroid hormones for my body. Every couple of years, I react poorly for reasons beyond my or my doctors’ knowledge. I often don’t know what to blame on the thyroid hormones and what not to anymore. And the thing about chronic pain is that it can be severely isolating. No one wants to hear about how you feel nauseated again for the hundredth time that day. But when you live in the body that causes that pain, those sensations are insistent, endless, and vocal. No need for the Roman by your side to whisper memento mori into your ear, your body will do that for you.

All this to say, my relationship to exercise, movement, and wellness has been strained throughout my life. But this strain is one that likely looks different. For so long, I begged to be able to participate in gym class. I begged to try out for the track team and soccer team. I couldn’t. My body. My health. My thyroid. So then years later when I finally could, I started to take every available opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, this has led to a cycle, which goes as follows:

push too hard → body freaks out → flare up → doctor/rest → get better → push too hard again

I am trying to learn to break this cycle and to approach my fitness goals in a sustainable way, which is a part of…

Why I’m writing this.

Many others have spoken/written on the topic of health and chronic illness far better than I ever could, so I will defer to them here. That’s not really what this series is about. I’m writing this for a few reasons:

(1) I am in the midst of a (possible) flare-up and am reminded, again, of how deeply I cherish the times I feel well. I want to think through what “health, wellness, and movement” means to me, as someone with ups and downs.1

(2) As it currently stands, online (Western) fitness/wellness culture is mired in body-image-driven/self-optimization toxicity. I think anything to combat that is a net positive. I want to cultivate a mindset where health and wellness is not simply a means towards the false ends of immortality, thinness, or desirability. I want to work out to feel happy, strong, and regulated. I also want to learn to rest without guilt.

(3) Finding movement that I love has completely changed my life. Hopefully sharing some of that journey will encourage you too?

(4) I like to read blog posts and watch videos of people discussing their relationships with their sports/exercises of choice, so here’s my version of that.

(5) Just as many other writers have pointed out, a movement practice pairs well with a writing practice. In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami explains that the purpose of his book is not to publish a treatise on how to run or be healthy, but to gather his thoughts about what running has meant to him as a person. I have a similar aim with this series. I am interested in writing and movement as separate yet parallel disciplines. I want to document my own process with this as both an amateur writer and amateur fitness enjoyer.

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Falling in love with movement.

At around twenty years old, I began to slowly stabilize. With that came a renewed physical ability and awe for what my body was capable of. I was young and in college. Opportunities for activity abounded. I packed my time with movement as much as I could and it changed me for the better overall.

The first time I truly fell in love with movement was when I joined a dance team. I was bad at it. So bad. But it was fun! And funny! And that level of joy and satisfaction made up for any possibility of embarassment. I poured my life into it and spent hours practicing in dingy garages (sometimes clocking in 6+ hours). Dance showed me something that no other form of exercise ever had before: community, growth, hard work. It led me not to a body that was smaller, but one that could move in strange and beautiful ways, a body that led me towards connection and other people. So I danced for two years. I got pizza and bubble tea after long nighttime practices. I made good friends. I performed on stage!

It was a wondrous but tumultuous period. I hadn’t been taking my medication properly for years and regularly experienced symptom flare-ups.2 Weeks of dancing hard led to weeks of debilitating fatigue and depression. I’ve since taken random dance classes at studios here and there, but it’s no longer a mainstay in my life.

The state of my health/wellness/movement now.

I have been trying to find my “thing” for the past couple of years. I have tried everything under the sun, from tennis (not for me) to salsa (possibly for me someday in the future). A couple of years ago, I got really into climbing. I bought the chalk bag, the shoes, the harness, the gym membership. Then after a year of being obsessed with it, I woke up one day and just stopped going. The desire to climb vanished. Two lessons:

• Don’t buy all the gear immediately lol especially if it’s expensive (Luckily, it wasn’t for me! I bought the cheapest shoes and chalk bag, and was gifted the harness. But still a good cautionary tale)

• It’s okay to have seasons of interest. It’s okay to quit. Or to go back to it someday! Nothing is or has to be forever.

I am aware of my tendency to go all in, all at once, so am wary of saying that I’ve figured out my forever thing, but for the past couple of years I have been focused on pilates (reformer, mat, and other pilates-inspired variations like solidcore) and pole dance.3 I picked up running last month, too. Then I was hit with intense vertigo yesterday that has still yet to let up today. I am resting because I must. I am urging myself to not do much of anything (besides writing this). Another lesson:

• Rest BEFORE it gets too bad! The early warning signs were probably there, I just chose to ignore them.

I was inspired to start this health and wellness/movement diaries series by Brandon Taylor (who occasionally writes about tennis on his Substack, Sweater Weather), Julyssa Rose (who has a weekly “health and wellness” series on her Substack, Museum of Me), and the aforementioned writing/running memoir by Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I’m not sure if anyone else will find this series useful or interesting. I find it useful and interesting though, so that’s enough reason for me to continue.

Dearest friend,

All of human history is marked by migration. We, like our animal bretheren, are in a constant state of movement and seeking. We go towards food, warmth, resources, survival.

I think often about what my life would have been like had my parents not immigrated to the US. As this country—my country—gets harsher, crueller, and more brazenly violent,1 I find myself retreating to these thoughts with increasing frequency. I think about the material conditions that drove my parents to make the difficult yet necessary decision to uproot their entire lives in search of escape and a future. A decision that millions make every year. Along with the geese and salmon and gazelles. Along with the cavepeople and spacepeople.2 I won’t dredge up the details here, but I know that in many ways, my parents were feeling and thinking many of the same things that I am now: fear, anxiety, and the possibility of hope. I think often about what my life would be like if I could emigrate. I don’t see this in my immediate future, however. Don’t mistake me. I do not feel indebted to this country, but I do love it in that painstaking way that you love your dysfunctional family: they hurt you every day, you want them to be better. So ultimately, I just wish for a home that is safe. For me, for my community, for everyone.

Some action items:

• Know your rights

• Call your local legislators

• Protest

the diary

Now, for some pieces of joy! My final quarter of 2025 was full of music, coffee, and family. I got to see two of my favorite bands: Japanese Breakfast (opened by Wet Leg) and Big Thief. I learned to cook more Taiwanese dishes, panic-calling my mom to get advice on the most basic of things. I got bangs. Turned them into my whole personality. I watched my big brother get married! I put hours into making gifts, and spent Thanksgiving and Friendsgiving with people who feel like home. I went back to Shanghai after seven years away and held tight to my grandparents’ hands, prayed that I’d get to see them again soon. I returned to the US and prepared for the new year, full of anticipation.

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the library

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The Compound by Aisling Rawle
The Compound is a dystopian satire of reality TV. I would describe it as Love Island meets Survivor. A delightful and page-turning romp that turns a critical eye on consumerism in our age of voluntary surveillance.

Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay
A horror movie within a horror novel. We follow two timelines: the original script of a horror movie that never got off its feet and the attempted reboot years later.

A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon, translated by Anton Hur
An ode to the girls who grew up watching and loving Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura (me). In Seolyeon’s novella, we follow an unnamed every-woman. She’s 29, drowning in debt, and deeply depressed. Just as she’s about to end it all, she learns that she’s a magical girl and is recruited to save the world.

Severance by Ling Ma
A prescient dystopian about a disaffected millennial living and working in New York, pre- and post-apocalypse. Zombies, but make them (physically) harmless metaphors. Watch my review here.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Eleanor Vance is invited, along with a few others, to observe the paranormal happenings at the infamous Hill House. I made a short video about my love for this novel!

the cinema

What I lacked in reading this year I made up for in movie-watching. I wrote about all of the movies I watched in 2025 here.

the record player

the café

• Why Heated Rivalry is the Perfect Adaptation of the Romance Novel’s Strict Conventions

  • I watched the adaptation of Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation when it premiered on Netflix. Since then, I’ve been thinking about what makes a good romance. While the adaptation was fun and felt relatively faithful to the book, it feels like there is something (or multiple somethings) missing. I binged Heated Rivalry not long after and have found myself, along with the rest of the online world, completely besotted. Granted, it’s not a one-to-one comparison, given that the former is a Netflix movie and the latter a TV show, but I do think they make for interesting comparison points. Anne Margaret Castro’s piece on Lit Hub offers some insights into why this may be.

• Heated Rivalry and the Erotics of Equality

  • One of the most striking things about watching Heated Rivalry was the intense gender envy it cultivated within me. From a quick search online, it appears that I am far from alone on this. Yalda Keshavarzi’s piece on Shado Magazine illuminates some of the causes. To watch two people fall in love on such equal grounds (from height to status to gender) was dazzling.

• I’ve been turning to short form content a lot more lately. Here’s my video on my top 5 books of 2025.

A poem for the road:

Every bombed village is my hometown
by Nikita Gill

“Every bombed village is my hometown” 
- James Baldwin

And every dead child is my child.
Every grieving mother is my mother.
Every crying father is my father.
Every home turned to rubble
is the home I grew up in.
Every brother carrying the remains
of his brother across borders
is my brother.
Every sister waiting for a sister
who will never come home
is my sister.
Every one of these people are ours,
Just like we are theirs.
We belong to them
and they belong to us.

With love,
Charlotte

I am decidedly not a movie person. It’s not that I don’t enjoy movies, but just that I don’t often go out of my way to watch them. The few movies I have seen and loved have developed into lifelong obsessions though, so I always wonder why I don’t watch more of them. So, in an attempt to find more of these gems and to expand my artistic horizons, at the start of 2025, I declared to a friend (and the internet) that I wanted to put a concerted effort into watching more films. It’s uncertain whether this project was a success or not, but I definitely did better than I have in the past! Here’s the breakdown.

In 2025, I watched a total of 24 movies. I also watched 3 limited series, which I logged into my Letterboxd, but I won’t be counting them here. I watched most of the movies at the tail end of the year on two long-haul flights between the US and China. My high score (lol) was 6 movies on my flight back home. I did not sleep on that flight.

My top 3 movies of the year were Scream (1996), The Host (2006), and Sinners (2025).

My least favorite movie of the year was 28 Weeks Later (2007).

My most-watched genre was, unsurprisingly, horror.

Here’s everything I watched in chronological order, with some added commentary.

1. Little Women (2019) — This was my last book of 2024 and first movie of 2025. I’m so glad I watched this. A new favorite!

2. Burning (2018) — An adaptation of a Murakami short story. The protagonist really nailed it, disgustingly so. I mainly watched this for Steven Yeun though.

3. Battle Royale (2000) — I’m so sorry to be that guy, but this just wasn’t as good as the book!!!

4. The Prestige (2006) — Learned that Christian Bale is, in fact, British!

5. We Live in Time (2024) — Devastating in a predictable way, but a good watch anyway.

6. The Monkey (2025) — Good, ridiculous, forgettable fun.

7. Ring (1998) — Better than the book! Too much of a classic for me to properly rate it though.

8. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) — Surprised it took me so long to watch this. Loved as expected.

9. Detention (2019) — This is an adaptation of a video game I loved. I’m excited to watch the TV show adaptation as well.

10. Scream (1996) — Another one I’m surprised I hadn’t yet watched. Perfect. Glorious. Perhaps a yearly rewatch for me.

11. The Host (2006) — Bong Joon Ho!!!! God, that man can make movies.

12. The Witch (2015) — Stressful folk horror that gave me the same anguish as The Crucible

13. Taipei Suicide Story (2020) — Quietly devastating

14. Late Night with the Devil (2023) — This was primed to be a favorite for me but they used AI generated images for a couple of the scenes, which tainted the movie for me.

15. The Long Walk (2025) — This felt like a sequel in spirit to The Shawshank Redemption. Surprised by how much I liked this one. It stuck with me for days after.

16. Sinners (2025) — Just as good as everyone says.

17. Mickey 17 (2025) — Not bad!

18. Weapons (2025) — Truly surprising. Genuinely creative and unique.

19. Companion (2025) — Fun sci-fi romp.

20. Heretic (2024) — This started off really strong and then quickly fell off.

21. Juror #2 (2024) — An updated 12 Angry Men of sorts

22. 28 Days Later (2002) — Wow, that was more violent than I expected. I didn’t recognize Cillian Murphy until he shaved.

23. Materialists (2025) — A disappointing ending. A decent movie overall.

24. 28 Weeks Later (2007) — Awful. Should never have been made.

Do you have any movie thoughts? Movie goals? Let me know!

I have always written, though I’ve never considered myself a writer. This is not out of self deprecation, but because I did not actually know how to write—at least not well. I could certainly string sentences together and recognize a good turn of phrase or plot structure, but I couldn’t articulate to you how to actually craft a good novel or story, or explain what the elements of a good narrative were.

I fell in love with stories as a child before I could even read myself, and have wanted to be an author from the moment I learned that that was a possibility. As a result, I spent a large part of my childhood and teenage years writing: bad fanfiction, crummy poetry, half-baked short stories. After a couple of decades of blissful vibes-based writing, I decided that it was finally time to change that at the start of this year. I wanted to actualize this desire of mine—to write and to see my writing exist outside of myself in some official capacity. I wanted to learn, and to take what I learned and make something out of it.

I’ve been lucky enough that here in Houston, Inprint offers writing workshops and classes for adults, both in person and online. I was able to take a couple of them earlier this year, and they’ve helped me tremendously. Learning from an instructor in-person and receiving peer feedback on your work is invaluable, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who is serious about improving their craft (if it’s an accessible option). There are plenty of places online that offer writing classes and workshops as well.

That being said, a lot of my own learning process has involved seeking out resources for myself. I’ve been talking to writer friends, scouring bookstores, and consulting the mystical oracle that is the Internet. I’m still new to all of this, of course, but here is what I’ve found to be most helpful in the past year as a beginner writer, without bogging you down with the overwhelming number of resources that are out there. I hope it helps you on your journey too!1

Introduction to Creative Writing

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READING LIST

Note: You do NOT need to buy all (or any) of the following books listed. These are simply some suggestions. If you do decide to get them, be sure to borrow from your public library, or buy them from an indie or used bookstore. If you purchase using my BookShop affiliate links below, I will earn a commission.

Memoirs/Essays:
These are mainly for inspiration and motivation. I read a few pages from one of these at the start of each of my writing sessions.

• Body Work by Melissa Febos

  • This was the first memoir/craft book I ever read, back when I hadn’t even begun to consider writing something (seriously) myself—least of all anything personal. Body Work was the first thing that made me feel like I might have something worthwhile to say/create/share. It focuses on personal essays/memoirs, but I think the encouragements apply more widely.

• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

  • This was (intentionally) my first read of the year. A tender and dazzlingly funny book. So wonderful for reminding myself to slow down, be patient, and take writing (and life) one step at a time. And maybe most importantly, to delight in the process itself rather than getting lost in the fantasy of publication. To write because I must. Because it is what I was put on earth to do. Because I love writing. Lamott brought me back, again and again, to that core truth.

• Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

  • Murakami has long been one of my favorite authors and I’m particularly fond of his nonfiction (though there are so few). Novelist as an assemblage of essays and lectures on the title topic, gathering his many years of writing experience. While not super tangibly practical, his insights are inspirational at times and offer a wonderful peek into the daily life of such a prolific writer.

I plan to read the following books next:

• Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg

• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

• Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin

Writing Toolbox:
These will become your beginner writer bibles. Useful as references, no matter where you are in the process.

• Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody

  • A great resource for learning the basic “beats” that make up a novel. Helpful for when you’re just starting out and need a general template to go off of. After learning the Save the Cat structure, you’ll start noticing that so many movies/novels actually follow this template!

  • I bought a copy of Save the Cat! Writes Horror (by Jamie Nash)—which just came out last month—for some tailored advice.

• Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway

  • Recommended by a writer friend, whose debut novel is coming out next year. It teaches you the different parts that make up a book: characters, plot, POV, etc. Also includes writing exercises at the end of each chapter. Incredible for pure beginners, like me.

• Refuse to be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts by Matt Bell

  • Recommended by the same friend as above. The first chapter (on the first draft) has been helpful for generating new ideas and for moments when I get stuck. The later chapters delve into the revision and finalization process.

• The Elements of Style by E.B. White and William Strunk, Jr.

  • A style guide. As with everything, learn it, then break the rules with intention if it pleases you. I own the illustrated edition by Maira Kalman.

  • Edit to add: I’ve been informed that this style guide is outdated!

• The Emotion Thesaurus: The Writer’s Guide to Character Expression by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi

  • Good for brainstorming different ways to show your characters’ emotions (body language, expressions, thoughts). I don’t rely on this one too much, but it’s helpful when you’re really stuck!

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I won’t prescribe you with a particular order or way to read these books. However, my small suggestion would be to first understand the Save the Cat structure (and/or whatever other plot structures you want, such as Freytag’s pyramid) and begin to read through Writing Fiction, paying attention to the chapters on plot, POV, and characterization. Then, dive into whatever writing project you want, be it a novel or short story. As you write and inevitably come across various obstacles (writer’s block, confusion over characters/setting/imagery/etc.), refer back to the books in your toolbox as needed, and read the memoir and craft books for inspiration and as morale boosters. Finally, read widely—not just craft books! You cannot be a good writer without being an avid reader. I stand by this, as do many other much more accomplished and seasoned writers. As William Faulkner said,

Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.

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FINAL PROJECT

• Complete a novel

Yours can be something different! Here are some other suggestions:

• Write and revise a short story. Submit it to ten (or more) literary journals and magazines.

• Write and revise a personal essay. Post it on Substack.

• Complete one writing exercise a day for a month.

Given the long-haul nature of the final project, I’m not offering any deadlines. This will be up to you and your individual writing project. As a rough guideline however—and to keep myself accountable—I am planning to have a completed first draft within a year from now. Revisions will take however long they take.

If you have any craft book suggestions, let me know! I’d also love to hear about your projects.

Good luck and happy writing!

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I.

I did not grow up particularly high-achieving. I did, however, grow up in a high-achieving environment. In my high school graduating class of about 700 students, we had forty valedictorians because so many students had achieved perfect GPAs.1 Much to my chagrin, I found myself far down the rankings, graduating with a 2.8 unweighted GPA (3.0 weighted). As my peers prepared to go off to their respective prestigious universities, and discussed their perfect SAT and ACT scores with each other, I felt an embarrassing amount of shame over the fact that I would be attending community college come fall.

If nothing else though, I was good at pretending.

I often pretended like I didn’t feel completely out of place in these conversations about grades and test scores and good universities. Acted like I was just as smart, impressive, and capable as my peers. A Good Student mask I’d slip on. I’d smile shyly when someone asked about my SAT score. I’d shrug wistfully when asked about future plans. I tried to fake it, but I certainly didn’t make it. The persistent secret knowledge of my personal failings festered and fermented into a vicious cycle of self-pitying that benefitted no one, least of all myself. I determined with bitterness that I was “not like them”—my academically successful classmates—and everywhere I turned, I was reminded of this fact throughout my late teens: I was just not smart enough.2

II.

A while ago, I visited a friend who is currently attending medical school. I met some of her classmates while I was there. They were all kind, serious, and ambitious people, and I was inspired by the evident passion they had for their lives and careers—two categories that appeared to be one and the same for them. Each person had their own reasons for going down this path. Personal convictions, family history, etc. Some bemoaned the difficulty and length of their programs, while others complained about exhausting 24-hour shifts at the hospital. Even when they half-jokingly said they would quit, I could still sense that they shared a tacit unspoken certainty. They each knew exactly what they wanted and who they were. They would be doctors. The struggle was worth it.

III.

Throughout my visit I was frequently asked what I did for work. I’m a paralegal, I’d tell them. And more often than not, there would be a follow-up: was I planning to go to law school? A simple and innocent question, one that I’ve gotten countless times before, and indeed, have often asked myself. Still, this time, it grated. I was once again the underachieving kid surrounded by overachieving students, and chafed at the underlying assumption that where/who I was wasn’t enough. That I had to want more, be more. My aspirations, in those med students’ eyes, had to be higher. I felt a mild flush of shame at my own admission that law school was not in my immediate future, if at all.

I became acutely aware of my own self doubt, the double-mirror of thought that filtered through my mind during every interaction; I found myself analyzing myself and my choices through their med student eyes and doctor futures. My heart grew rigid, defensive. Whether or not they actually felt any true condescension towards me was incidental. I interpreted it as such, regardless of reality. Embarrassed, I offered a flurry of excuses (I still might go to law school someday/I love my work-life balance/I’m exploring my options). I launched into pitiful speeches about my years-long indecision over law school.

But the truth is, I doubt they gave my answer more than a few seconds of thought. Once again, I'd built something out of nothing. Made a mountain out of a mole hill.

IV.

I realized what I was doing. Recognized the old patterns and sore spots. Childhood insecurities had resurfaced. The same self-pitying sense of non-belonging from my high school days. It had never been about the med students, actually. I felt pathetic. Not because of my job, but because of my reaction to these perceived and imagined slights. I hadn’t grown as much as I thought I had.

V.

The past few years have been a long journey of divorcing myself from the ideas of career progression and success that I had grown up surrounded by: the common benchmarks of traditional and linear career progressions.3 Careers that were easily recognized, respected, and quantifiably measurable. I know, of course, that even had I gone down one of those coveted paths, I still would never feel like I was good enough.

There are always new targets once old ones have been reached. Law school alone is not enough—it has to be a highly ranked school. Med school alone is not enough—the type of medicine you practice matters. Five hundred subscribers is not enough—I need a thousand.

Just as with all other illusions of success in our world, career success has ever-moving goal posts.

VI.

Notice, too, how my thoughts about this topic were inextricably intertwined with perceptions of success. In my head, others’ opinions always seem to trump any sense of intrinsic success/happiness/wellbeing.

Here is where I am now: I want to find out for myself what brings me satisfaction and accomplishment outside of traditional markers of “success.” I remind myself that, at the end of the day, I am the only one who experiences my own life. I’m the one who will have to pay the debts, both financial and otherwise, for my decisions—whether that be law school or something else. Other people’s perceptions of me, my life, and my career are mutable, unimportant, pointless in the grand scheme of things. And perhaps even more importantly, I am a person outside of what monetary value I can bring to society and what ways I choose to be a cog in the machine.

I don’t know that I’ll be able to ever completely extricate myself from this way of thinking, driven by prestige, career, and outside opinions, but I hope the effort of it counts, that it is a worthwhile attempt regardless. Life in capitalism (and life, period) feels like a constant game of tug-of-war. An endless disagreement between the self and society, between the animal human and the modern wage-labor required for survival.

Here are some questions for you, too. What do you value? Money? Prestige? Acclaim? Where does your sense of worth come from? Work? Others’ opinions? It’s impossible to find the core of who you are and what you desire when it’s obscured by the shadows and veils that dangle so tantalizingly in front of you. Brush those aside. For at the end of the day, that’s all they are: shadows, intangible.

What do we really want?

Dearest Friend,

I’m in my nodal reversal right now. Everything feels a little frustrating. The best way to describe it is like being encased in jello: a sense of limited wobbly movement and cabin fever, but there’s also the hint of something that will split me open (hopefully in a good way) on the horizon. What I mean more concretely is this. Work is boring, life is boring. Everything is monotonous Jell-o red. My efforts—at writing, reading, planning for the future—feel constantly in vain. Does that make sense? Ah, well, today is the Pisces eclipse. It’ll pass soon enough.

I’m actually somewhat embarrassed by my own affinity for astrology. I often say I don’t believe in any of it, yet find myself religiously studying the planetary events and what they mean for me.1 I’m drawn to myth-making of all kinds though, really. As a child, I reverently learned and practiced (to the best of my ability) the religions of Ancient Egypt and Greece. In college, I became a devout Christian. Now, in the void of daily prayers and bible studies, I devote myself instead to birth charts, moon transits, and tarot spreads.2 I crave meaning, structure, community, and something that feels untethered from the regular muck of physical reality. I say I don’t believe in astrology because my skeptical and logical side refuses to fully give in, but I continue to read my horoscope because it offers me whimsy and relief (and gives me an easy icebreaker with a lot of women).3

At the end of the day, though, I think it’s as simple as the fact that I have a tendency to fixate on things. Maybe they’re a way to cope. To divert my energy towards a gentler belief system. Case in point: perfume. My love for fragrance is older even than my interest in astrology. I got my first bottle of Victoria’s Secret body spray in elementary school and believed it gave me super powers (I thought it’d make my crush like me back). In middle school, I fell in love with Elizabeth Arden’s Green Tea (for no other reason than that my mother bought it for me).4 It took off from there and only seems to gain momentum the older I get.

I could talk endlessly about perfume but I’ll spare you (until a future post). I’d love to hear about your own fixations, past and present!

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the diary

August was hazy, like a typical Houston morning, muggy and damp and hot from the jump. But there were lovely touchstones throughout it all. I started the month by taking myself out for a solo date and learned that my version of heaven is this: endless fresh Gulf Coast oysters, a cold beer, a book and my journal. Then, I received a belated birthday gift from my husband in the form of a surprise visit from my best friend! We played arcade games, talked late into the night, and ate good food. I saw Ethel Cain a couple of weeks ago. In between all of these events, I wrote when I could and tried not to overthink (inevitably, failing).

the library

Marx for Beginners by Rius
I felt like I was losing touch of reality, stuck in an endless loop of working, brain rotting, feeding the cat, doom scrolling. So I reached for this book at the start of August, and through Marx and philosophy and his historical materialism, was brought back to reality. I’m not sure how a true “beginner” would fare reading this, but it was a good refresher, not just on Marxist thought, but also on a brief history of philosophy itself, from Hegel to Feuerbach and beyond.

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell
Alix Summer has it all: the husband, the family, the friends, and is a popular podcaster to boot. When unassuming Josie Fair bumps into Alix at a pub one day, the two learn that they share the same birthday. From the moment Josie enters Alix’s life, things are never the same, and Alix’s perfect life quickly unravels.
This was a fun twisty book that, like last month’s Listen for the Lie, uses the podcast framework. The audiobook cast made for an excellent immersive experience!

The Eyes are the Best Part by Monika Kim
Ji-won’s family’s life falls apart when her father’s affair comes to light and he leaves them for the other woman. Things only get worse when Ji-won’s mother begins to date George, a white man whose blue eyes begin to take over Ji-won’s every waking (and sleeping) thought. She’s repulsed…but she’s also hungry.
Monika Kim’s debut is one for the books. It’s quick-paced, stomach-turning, and delivers exactly what it promises. I think it’s going to make for an incredible movie.

the record player

the café

• I read this essay by Catherine Lacey for the Yale Review a few weeks ago. Yesterday I broke my favorite coffee cup. I’ve had it for years now. It’s the perfect Goldilocks size, has measurement indentations on the side, and was a pasta jar from an east coast grocery store chain in its past life. I cried. All this to say, this essay was bittersweet and heavy, and I related a touch too much for comfort.

• I’m in the middle of crocheting my first wearable item: this beginner’s crop-top! In the past, I’ve only ever made wonky Fall Guys amigurumi and coasters, so I’m hoping this turns out okay. Crochet has taught me that I am definitely not a perfectionist, lol.

• I’ve been watching Dimension 20: Fantasy High while I crochet. It’s a DnD campaign played by the College Humor cast who are all comedians, so it’s been very very fun and easy to get addicted to. Had I found this in high school, I would’ve made it my entire personality. Maybe I still will?

• Speaking of perfume, one of my favorite Substacks on here is Miccaeli’s Fumes. Her latest piece on celebrity fragrance lines and Troye Sivan’s Tsu Lange Yor convinced me to buy a discovery set. Sage’s Rose is, of course, one of the samples I picked out. Watch this space to see what I think about it!!

  • Also, re: celebrity fragrances/guilty pleasure fragrances—this piece made me feel vindicated for my secret little love of the ones I own!

• “Life, friends, is boring.” This bleak opening to John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14” has been rattling around my head lately. I was first introduced to Berryman sometime early last year by one of my best friends/wedding officiant. Here’s a video of Berryman reading it. The poem is reproduced below as well.

  • Here’s Mary Ruefle’s “I Remember, I Remember,” which I found because of “Dream Song 14.” It’s beautiful beautiful beautiful.

    • I remember reading Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus one lonely evening in my matchbox apartment many winters ago. It was dark out, snowing heavily. I sat on the bare floor eating an apple, reading, and weeping pathetically. It was the first time I ever cried while reading poetry.

    • After Ruefle’s piece, I immediately read Thomas Hood’s poem and Philip Larkin’s and cried (my second ever post-poem cry).

A poem for the road:

Dream Song 14
By John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.   
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,   
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy   
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored   
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no   
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,   
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes   
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.   
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag   
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving            
behind: me, wag.

With love,
Charlotte

P.S. I’ve updated my BookShop, where you can find all of my favorite fiction, nonfiction, and poetry recommendations! If you purchase anything via my shop or by using my affiliate links, I’ll get a commission.

3 August 2025

Dearest friend,

My core trait seems to be that I am a Jack of all trades, master of none. I can’t help myself. I want to do everything. Practically speaking, what this looks like is a scattered mindset, a (self-inflicted) harried life, and constant rabbit-hopping activity. Spanish classes, pole classes, random YouTube dance tutorials, five half-finished books, half-written short stories, incomplete crochet projects sitting at the bottom of my drawer, hundreds of opened tabs, an unused guitar collecting dust. This is the only way I know how to live! I’m interested in everything. I’m curious by nature. Sue me!! But I’ll admit that I stress myself out. I want depth, not just breadth. I want to commit. I want to actually grow and develop skills rather than immediately move on to the next new thing the moment the going gets tough.

The past two months have therefore been an intentional exercise in culling, subtracting, and honing.

1. I began by listing out every single thing I’m interested in or curious about at the moment, no matter how minor. I won’t share the entire list with you, but as inspiration, here are some examples: piano, pottery, the renaissance and reformation, Spinoza, Che Guevara, French cuisine, Goya, flash fiction, book binding, camping, HTML, gardening.

2. After the chaos of said list, I narrowed it down. I prioritised according to what was most interesting to me right now and what was most feasible (financially and practically). I also decided to focus on actionable items/activities rather than random interests (like Goya lol).

3. I then chose four core things that I wanted to spend the rest of 2025 focusing on.

By some standards, I’m probably still over-committing, but for my novelty-driven brain, this is what has been working for me. Each day and week still looks different, but the variation gives me enough room to breathe so that I don’t feel like I’m suffocating in monotony. The goal is consistency over a longer period of time, even if not necessarily day-to-day. So, for me, this is my way of finding balance.

My current priorities (besides my 9-5, obviously…):

→ Substack: Moving forward, I want to take writing for The Espresso Shot more seriously—that is, I’m going to set aside specific times/days to write for Substack and post my pieces consistently (once a week), even if they’re not perfectly polished. I want this page to be a space for experimentation, play, intellectual exploration, and accountability. July was a good start.

→ My super secret important writing project: The goal is to chip away at it daily, even if it’s super minimal. That’s all I’ll say about this for now…

→ Pole Dancing: I started taking classes back in 2024, but then took a loooong time off. I’ve been re-inspired to start again and have begun to train regularly. Aiming to take about 4-6 classes per month. (Shoutout to for always answering my baby-poler questions! And for generally being so inspiring as a dancer, artist, and researcher.)

→ Spanish: I’ve been taking evening classes twice a week with my husband and . The first session is coming to an end and I plan to sign up for the next one! Going forward, I’d like to incorporate some more studying outside of the classroom.

Ultimately, I just feel so lucky that I have the time, energy, and resources to do all of these things!1 To be excited about life feels like such a privilege!

What’s your relationship with your hobbies/goals/passions like? What are your biggest priorities for the next few months? I’d love to know!

the diary

My husband had a research conference in NYC in June so I tagged along! Returning to New York always feels special, no matter how many times I’ve been. I spent several wondrous days freely wandering around, eating, drinking, exploring my way through the city. I met up with a few friends and got to see the Superfine and Sargent exhibits at the Met. For my husband’s birthday, I surprised him with tickets to see a show where some of his favorite actors were performing.

Upon returning to Houston, I found my way back to old hobbies like climbing, and remembered how nice it is to enjoy something for the sake of enjoying it, rather than for progression or improvement. I dipped back into reading philosophy and theory again, too. Savored the experience of being a student without institutional pressures.

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the library

Writers & Lovers by Lily King
This was less a traditional romance novel/love story, and more so a novel about making your way through life and its attendant griefs, difficulties, and heartbreaks. It reminded me a lot of The Wedding People by Alison Espach, which I read last year year around this time and also loved. Both books give me the same bittersweet yet comforted feeling. Like, life is hard and lonely and sad sometimes, but there are always reasons to keep going. New people to meet. New experiences to be had. This is one I could see myself reaching for again someday in the future.

First-Time Caller by B.K. Borison
I really enjoyed the unique characters and family dynamics. Though the book was a bit too long for my personal taste, I still had a good time!

Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather
This was the first book Willa Cather ever published, and it was evidently written before she found her footing and style in future works like My Antonia and O Pioneers. The marks of a budding and uncertain author are clear: the novel as a pastiche of Henry James’s writing, the hesitation of a style and voice not fully grown into itself. While Cather is known for her fiction about early frontier life, Alexander’s Bridge brings us to the city with all its rush and bustle and mayhem. Still, it remains an impressive little book—one that’s made me eager to continue reading more of Cather’s works!

Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera
The audiobook was an elite experience! I’m a sucker for gimmicks, to be honest, and this podcast-within-a-book really hit the spot for me. The voice actors, sound design, and overall production were incredible. I anticipated the ending, but this didn’t detract from my enjoyment much. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time, and it’s led me to a bit of a thriller kick, especially ones that feature podcasts. I’m currently reading None of this is True by Lisa Jewell to scratch that itch.

the theatre

I didn’t watch any movies the past couple of months, and mainly just continued watching Lost (this is my first time watching it!) and random episodes of Impractical Jokers. I did get to watch some live theatre while in New York in June though!

Hadestown
What a dream come true for me! I’ve loved musicals since I was fourteen but haven’t seen many live, so watching this was truly a bit transcendent.

Glengarry Glen Ross
This was a birthday surprise for my husband, who really admires Bob Odenkirk (because he’s obsessed with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul). We got to meet and get autographs from the cast after the show, which was an unexpected bonus!

Houston Symphony
Went to a Houston Symphony concert that showcased music from John Williams’s and Steven Spielberg’s partnership. The themes from Jaws and Jurassic Park were standout favorites. Phenomenal to experience in person!

the record player

I’m on (yet another) Kate Bush kick (it was her birthday recently!) because she is one of my favorite favorite favorites! Besides that, I’ve been patiently awaiting Big Thief’s new album (and listening to Lorde’s latest. Here are some other songs I’ve been playing on repeat:

the café

• Moving forward, I’ll definitely be regularly revisiting Kate Wagner’s essay on writing essays. It made me think much more deeply about how I research, structure, and write, and hopefully this will make my future essays on here all the better!

• Speaking of writing, here are Lydia Davis’s recommendations for good writing habits.

• I’m having a bit of a moment with modernism right now, so I’ve been reading through Alfred Kazin’s Contemporaries, which is a collection of over seventy of his critical essays. The first essay, “The Background of Modern Literature,” serves as a really great overview of the progression of literary movements, from romanticism and symbolism to modernism.

• Willa Cather’s 1922 preface in Alexander’s Bridge, her debut novel, provides such a lovely and encouraging piece of advice for new writers. Worth the quick read!

• This substack essay by Henrik Karlsson is a sweet ode to (unexpected) friendship. About the ways we flatten people in our heads, making quick categorizations and assumptions about them that are often incorrect, and how they deserve a chance to be known better. In general, I’ve been super into Karlsson’s substack, Escaping Flatland, recently. It’s quickly become one of the few Substacks I regularly check for new posts. He writes about self-cultivation, fatherhood, and life philosophies.

• Amidst our culture’s intense fear of aging and death, here is Leon Kass’s case for mortality

A poem for the road:

Cabbage Gardens
By Susan Howe

The past
will overtake   
alien force   
our house   
formed
of my mind   
to enter
explorer
in a forest   
of myself
for all
my learning   
Solitude
quiet
and quieter   
fringe
of trees
by a river
bridges black   
on the deep   
the heaving sea   
a watcher stands
to see her ship   
winging away   
Thick noises
merge in moonlight   
dark ripples   
dissolving
and
defining
spheres
and
snares

             Place of importance as in the old days
stood on the ramparts of the fort
                                                 the open sea outside   
alone with water-birds and cattle
                        knee-deep in a stream
grove of reeds
               herons watching from the bank
henges
      whole fields honeycombed with souterrains   
human
                        bones through the gloom
       whose sudden mouth
surrounded my face
                      a thread of blue around the coast   
                                                         feathery moon   
eternity swallows up time
                                     peaceable as foam
                        O cabbage gardens
summer’s elegy
                        sunset survived

With the utmost of love,
Charlotte

I sometimes have this passing thought.

I visited Taiwan last February and I wondered, not for the first time, what my life would’ve looked like had my mother never moved to the United States when she was twenty. Of course, I’m ignoring the fact that in this alternate reality, she wouldn’t have met my dad and therefore I wouldn’t necessarily exist, or at least this iteration of me, but in my imagination of this Taiwan-life of mine I imagine that I am still me, in essence. I would be surrounded by family. I’d see my neices and nephews all the time, buy them little gifts and treats to eat. I would bike to the beach every day, wriggle my toes in the dark sand, drink coffee by the waves, spend hours searching for sea snails. I wouldn’t cook—the food would be too good. I’d stuff myself with bubble tea and stinky tofu and night market snacks every weekend. I’d celebrate every Lunar New Year and Dragonboat Festival. Maybe in this version of me, I’d be fluent in Mandarin and Taiwanese. I’d have a loose grasp on English, like holding a fish that squirms free, slips back into the ocean, and swims towards the continent across the Pacific. To me, here. To this U.S., English-speaking version of myself.

Pierre Bourdieu coined the concept of the habitus, the set of dispositions that shape one’s behaviors, attitudes, perceptions, and general experience of the world/place/being. The habitus is a positioning, orienting you to act and respond in particular ways to external stimuli. Bourdieu posited that in most instances, the dispositions that arise from one’s habitus are inculcated, structured, durable, generative, and transposable. In other words, a habitus is: learned/trained (especially in early childhood), a reflection of one’s social conditions (class, race, gender, etc.), unlikely to change and endures over time, and widely applicable to new settings and situations.1

Despite his insistence of the durability of the habitus, Bourdieu himself experienced what he called a habitus clivé. A sense of self that felt torn, divided, split, cleaved. Bourdieu had grown up in a small French village, raised by his civil servant father. But despite his humble roots, he experienced extraordinary upward mobility over the years after achieving a great deal of academic success, and eventually rose the ranks and became the chair of Sociology at the prestigious Collège de France. Rather than pride, he felt a deep sense of ambivalence at this promotion. His rapid social ascent had created a rift within himself. One filled with a feeling of transgression, insecurity, and contradiction. A habitus that had been ripped in half—a painful experience.

Bourdieu experienced the habitus clivé in the context of class. Could there be such a split self from other forms of dislocation? What about from immigration? The experience of migration certainly seems to be a case in which a habitus can become “divided against itself, in constant negotiation with itself and with its ambivalence, and therefore doomed to a kind of duplication, to a double perception of self, to successive allegiances and multiple identities.”

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In “The Crucible Within: Ethnic Identity, Self-Esteem, and Segmented Assimilation among Children of Immigrants,” sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut writes that the identity formation of a child of immigrants can be “complicated by experiences of intense acculturative and intergenerational conflicts as they strive to adapt in social identity contexts that may be racially and culturally dissonant.”2 It’s obvious to see why this may be. Children of immigrants must navigate the divide between home and school cultures, multiple languages, different social norms and systems, and sometimes social mobility as well.

I think it’s a common experience for children of immigrants to wonder about this divided sense of self, to seek to smooth it over and reunite the two halves as much as possible. We search for our identities through history and our families, and struggle to feel at home anywhere.

As much as I daydream, I don’t genuinely wish my life was any different, and I certainly don’t fault my parents for immigrating. They made the choices they made based on the circumstances they were given, after all, and I am only who I am because of the moves and divisions and splits and rifts. But I can’t deny that there is a special ache that surfaces each time I return to Taiwan now. A renewed sense of longing. Children take things for granted because they don’t know any better—they don’t understand ephemerality yet, that the one constant in life is transience, and that life never remains still. I certainly didn’t consider the jarring experience of living between two drastically different places (and having family so scattered as a result). But now I know better, I suppose, and that knowledge brings with it a bittersweetness that seems to only grow as I get older. My cousins are getting married and having babies, my relatives’ health worsen, and I am over 8,000 miles away, divided by distance, culture, and language.

So instead I watch from afar, experiencing their lives through screens and poor cell reception, and I imagine my Taiwan-self and the life she leads in my stead, surrounded by food and family, farmland and sea.

In high school, my best friend and I made a private Facebook group, originally named “Lana is a llama” (for now-unfathomable reasons) where we posted our “wishlist,” which was really just a bucket list. They were all things we wanted to complete together. There was no deadline, no rules about what got to go on there, no system. Items ranged from “get our driving permits” to “go on a cruise and meet cute people.” We returned to it randomly over the years, checked to see how much we’d actually done. Some I hope we’ll still get to someday.

I used to make those summer bucket lists for myself every year, too. Silly and boring things like “get tan lines” and “eat popsicles” and “have a summer fling.”

More often than not, the bucket lists weren’t ever really that serious. Rarely did I return to them afterwards. Most of the fun came from the making of the list rather than the doing. Instead, these lists were aspirational, thematic, and whimsical—rough guideliness to structure the vibes of a given period of my life.

I wonder when those bucket lists with pink stickers and crayola markers turned into to-do lists and quarterly goals? When did I start thinking that life needed to be regimented rather than playful, or maybe even both?

I turned 28 a few weeks ago, which means I have just under two years until I turn 30—the age that, for whatever reason, feels like the true start of adulthood for me.1 And with the approach of True Adulthood, I want to tap into that innate childhood sense of excitement and wonder that I know is still inside of me somewhere.

So in the spirit of adolescent bucket lists, here are my 30 by 30 lists! They’re (obviously) very personal to me but I hope they inspire you to make your own variations. If you do, I’d love to see it.

30 BY 30

• Take a pottery class

• Take a cooking class

• Take a wine class

• Adopt a second cat

• Join a political organization I believe in

• Crochet something wearable

• Crochet something wearable for someone else

• Get the splits

• Do 3 pull ups

• Level up in pole

• Perform in a pole showcase?

• Get my pole inverts (reg, shoulder)

• Finish writing my novel

• Get a literary agent

• Run a 10k

• Go outdoor rock climbing

• Go camping

• Find 2-3 charities I believe in and regularly donate to them

• Attend a music festival

• Learn Spanish (B2)

• Build a wardrobe I love

• Go on honeymoon

• Go back to Shanghai

• Go on a Friend Trip

• Host a successful dinner party

• 3+ course date night cooked by me

• Eat at a Michelin star restaurant

• Try omakase

• Build financial literacy

• Read the books on my list

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30 BOOKS BY 30

fiction—

• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

• Dracula by Bram Stoker

• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

• Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

• The Shining by Stephen King

• Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• East of Eden by John Steinbeck

• Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

• Green Island by Shawna Yang Ryan

• The Collapse of Western Civilization by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway

nonfiction—

• The Cross of Redemption by James Baldwin

• The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

• How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

• Neoliberalism by David Harvey

• At America’s Gates by Erika Lee

• Black Skin White Masks by Frantz Fanon

• Illuminations by Walter Benjamin

• Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldua

• Orientalism by Edward Said

• Beyond the Periphery of Skin by Silvia Federici

I’m adding a bonus book to this list based on ’s suggestion: Ulysses by James Joyce

22 June 2025

Dearest friend,

The past few months have been a whirlwind: between wedding preparations, the wedding itself, and traveling, I’m beat! But my cup is full!

I have a tendency to get lost in my own head and to drown in the minutiae of daily life. Left on my own for too long and I become maniacal about my routine, protective over each precious minute like a bridge troll (answer my riddles three). When I feel myself unraveling like this, the people in my life are touchstones—reminders that life is about more than just the next milestone or manufactured goal. I remember, again, that this is what actually matters. My wedding was romantic and lovely for all the usual expected reasons, but I truly shed all of my cynicism the moment I looked out across the reception hall and saw (nearly) all of the people whose love and care have kept me afloat over the years gathered in one room. Imagine that! It felt sublime, ecstatic. I cried a little (I cried a lot).1

But I am back now. I’ve lost my foothold a bit: I haven’t written anything substantial in nearly a month and I’ve barely read as well, and the thought of exercise hasn’t even crossed my mind for a couple of weeks. I was worried for a bit that I had fallen off the tracks for good (I can get so damn rigid sometimes that any change/pause feels a bit cataclysmic). Today though that fire is slowly being rekindled. More than motivation, I have clarity. I’m cleaning my email inbox and my home, pulling books off the shelf, sweeping away the mental cobwebs, ready to begin again.

Here’s how my spring went:

the library

I’ve been reading far less than usual so far this year. My mind has been elsewhere. Between trying to turn writing into a regular practice, wedding planning, and working, there hasn’t been much headspace to read. I’m hoping that changes as the days heat up and summer turns the corner. Looking forward to (hopefully) many languorous poolside reading days!

what i read in april and may —

Flux by Jinwoo Chong
I see the vision, but this was not for me.

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
Another book that was simply not for me, though I greatly admire Kitamura’s deftness with the subtleties of relationships. Kitamura wields language tightly and sparingly, articulating the things said, but even more so, the things left unsaid. I was deeply impressed!

The Yellow Wall Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Reread this three times in one go and it still amazes me every time.

Time of the Flies by Claudia Pineiro
Much slower paced and thinky than the prequel, but I still enjoyed this regardless. Pineiro steps up her experimentation in Time of the Flies, with chorus interludes (which I liked a lot) and the inclusion of multiple POV switches (which I liked less).

Real Life by Brandon Taylor
This was excellent! Taylor dissects and flays apart each character’s internal workings on the page. There is a universe of feeling here: of repression, desire, violence, pain, care. I can't wait to read more from Taylor.

Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson
Evenson is a creative mastermind. What sick worlds he’s spun in this collection! I read this too quickly, which I wouldn’t recommend. Generally wouldn’t recommend reading short story collections in a single sitting as the stories tend to blur together after a while.

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the cinema

Ring (1998)
Dare I say it? This was better than the book. A rightful classic that felt necessary to watch.

White Lotus, Seasons 1-3
Season 2 was my favorite!

the record player

the café

• Saba Sams writes for Granta about the alienation of being in a girl-body, the illusion of control, and (not) playing sports as a child. This essay made me think a lot about my own experiences with the same topic (movement, childhood, gendered upbringings). Maybe something to write about someday…

• Seven sapphic “hydrofeminist” books. July is poking and prodding, so it may not come as a surprise that water is on the mind. My body yearns to be in water right now. Pool, bath, lake, ocean, anything. Let me know if you have any water-centric book recs!

• Can’t Help Myself by Sun Yuan (exhibited at the Guggenheim) is fascinating, both as an artwork on its own, but also as an invitation to interpretation. People feel strongly about it in different and dazzling ways!

• Ann Patchett for the New Yorker on letting go

• Lately I’ve been enamored with the Youtube channel of a young Georgian conservatory student, Mariam Much. Her latest video on practice is beautiful and intentional, and it truly showcases her artistic sensitivity towards the world around her.

A poem for the road:

Poem for My Love
By June Jordan

How do we come to be here next to each other
in the night
Where are the stars that show us to our love
inevitable
Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness
and the rain
falls cool and blessed on the holy flesh
the black men waiting on the corner for
a womanly mirage
I am amazed by peace
It is this possibility of you
asleep
and breathing in the quiet air

With the utmost of love,
Charlotte

A few years ago, when I visited my family in Taiwan, my mom told me about a new game she had picked up called Rummy. She wanted to teach me how to play. She carefully pulled each tile out of the bag and spread them out before us on the desk, pointing to each piece with a finger, a glimmer in her eyes, as she diligently explained the rules. She liked this game. It was fun, she told me, and she was good at it. So I dutifully learned the rules. And naturally, like any good and attentive daughter, I promptly forgot them.

What stands out most to me about that night was the moment when my mom shared with me that she often played Rummy on her own. She said it quietly, offhandedly, like it was a small secret. I was reminded suddenly of her personhood. My mother was not just my mother. I was reminded that she, too, was human, fallible, vulnerable. Because it was then that I felt so keenly my mother’s loneliness, even if she would never say as much. As she told me this admission, I imagined her sitting in her dim bedroom on a random Friday evening, the dusty lamp hazily lighting up the space around her. She sat cross-legged, a tiny woman in sea of bedding, pulling game pieces out of a bag. I imagined her concentration. The folds in her forehead. Her counting figures slowly in her mind, thinking through the variations and strategies. Pretending—just as I did as a lonely child—to play both sides. Both villain and protagonist in her own contained story. Who would best who? Mother or mother?

Throughout my visit in Taiwan, this feeling—this quiet noticing—recurred. It was in the small candid moments: as my mother fed her own mother at dinner, cajoling her to open her mouth and to eat more vegetables; as she wheeled her father through the hospital and asked me to watch after him as she rushed to the pharmacy line; as we took long and quiet walks together at dusk, wistfully watching as the last shimmering dregs of light eked out of the horizon; as she told me anecdotes about her childhood, playing hooky, chasing boys, getting into fights.

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I don’t see my mother or my family much these days. Maybe twice a year if I’m lucky. Like many, I was a bratty child. So much taken for granted. Years taken for granted. I cling onto these moments now like they are precious jewels. I know how fickle our memories can be—how easily moments and thoughts and time can be ripped away from us without notice.

In a brief moment of lucidity at lunch one day, my ama1 turned to me and commented that my eyebrows were beautiful. And we looked into one another’s eyes then, hers momentarily clear like the sea on a full-moon night, and I saw the way her eyebrows arched, so slight that it was barely noticeable, sparse and scattered and utterly recognizable, just like mine. And I felt a swelling in my heart that somehow felt just like loneliness. Like looking into a deep and unknowable pond, and seeing my own reflection staring back up at me, flashing, rippling, gone. Unrecognition slipped back over her eyes like a veil. Who are you, she asked me blandly.

Is dementia not the ultimate loneliness? The ultimate isolation?

I’ve been told that my grandmother was a headstrong woman in her younger years. She could hold her alcohol, was strict with her children and especially so with her only daughter, my mother. She taught each subsequent parent in the family how to hold a newborn, how to wrap a diaper. She was cruel and clever and tireless and fierce. Everyone was a little afraid of her, and very much in awe.

This last time I visited a couple of months ago, she sat across from me at the dinner table with clouded eyes, compulsively cursing under her breath, over and over.2

Three generations of lonely women. A genetic trait, perhaps.

My mother is the youngest of four children, all boys except for her. She is the only one in her family who left Taiwan, emigrating to the US when she was twenty years old after a heartbreak that never fully healed and a desire to run. She created a new life on her own in New York City. I inherited this attribute of hers—that is, being a flight risk—if not much else. I carry it around with me like a talisman, a reminder tucked away to fidget with whenever the going gets tough: the knowledge that I can always run away, begin again somewhere new. A small superpower.

My parents divorced when I was twelve. My mother had dated after the fact, but never really settled down with anyone. This was my status quo, and truthfully, I wanted it to stay this way for subconscious and selfish reasons. But recently, she has found someone. This initially surprised me. I think I expected her to never need someone else in her life. After all, she’d always been so capable and independent. Someone else would only serve to slow her down. But these days with F, she is happy—happier than I’ve seen her in a long time—traveling around the country and the world. Though I know she is more than capable of doing it alone, I also know that she enjoys sharing it all with somone, experiencing life together.

I often think about the long nights in China back when I was in middle and high school, when it was just me and her. I’d hear her crying throughout the night sometimes. Quiet and hushed weeping that sometimes became unrestrainable sobs. It terrified me. I would sit frozen in bed, straining to hear her, feeling helpless in our mutual sorrow. I often regretted not going to her, comforting her. How long ago that seems now. How many nights did I cry with her, separated by a wall? I didn’t always know the cause of her tears, but I do know how difficult those years had been for her: the long working days, the financial strain, the burden of single-motherhood. We shared a loneliness that perhaps neither of us fully understood nor recognized in one another. And the irony is that much of my own sadness came from the desire to be seen, witnessed, loved.

I’m not sure why it has taken me this long to realize, but my mother wants to be loved, too.3 She deserves to experience the fullness of life, whether it’s alone or with other people by her side, and if it is with another, it should be someone who loves her for every facet of her personality, adventurousness, silliness, and all. We all do. And though love may not be or feel necessary, are we not all the more human for desiring it?

31 March 2025

Dearest friend,

How do you handle solitude? Are you someone who savors it? Prefers it? Or are you like me, afraid of it?

For most of my life I have craved company. I fault my upbringing, naturally. My parents divorced when I was young and my only brother, who is six years older than I am, joined the Marine Corps when he was 18. Consequently, I have often felt like an only child, though I have never admitted this aloud. I spent much of my adolescence alone, playacting, daydreaming, reading. My mother worked a lot and was away for long swaths of time. Home life was quiet. Aptitude at being alone, however, did not translate into comfort with or preference for solitude.

In high school and beyond, I learned to latch onto the people nearest to me, and I was lucky enough to be accepted for/despite it. I spent nearly every afternoon and weekend with my high school best friend’s raucous family of six, which in retrospect, must’ve been burdensome for her parents. Yet, they still wholeheartedly welcomed me in. From then onwards, I have always searched for this level of nearness with other people. I wanted noise, complaints, laughter, arguments, togetherness. Returning home to silence was painful.

I say all of this because things seem to be changing for me these days (and it only took about two decades lol). Maybe it took being in a secure and stable relationship to learn how to be on my own, or maybe it’s just because I’m older now.1 And I would certainly like to think some part of it is because I’ve been actively pushing myself out of my comfort zone this past year. Regardless of the reason, lately I’ve been less scared of doing things and going to new places by myself.

At the end of the day, I will never not prefer community and friendship, but now I can at least enjoy the moments when solitude is required of me. And I feel safe in the knowledge that if no one can/will/wants to accompany me, I will step up to the plate; I can become my own companion.

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the library

what i read in february and march —

Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi (Trans. Lin King)
Fantastic. Such a beautiful and charming story with a clever novel-within-a-novel convention. I read this during my trip to Taiwan in February, eating Taiwanese food alongside the protagonist. 10/10 experience.

The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo
I read this with Murakami’s Jazz Club and had a lot of fun being led into confusion with the club!

Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada
This was an aggressively okay book. I appreciated the playful and thoughtful discussion of language and its role in society/culture, but the multiple POVs and overall arc of the storyline just did not work for me personally.

The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz
A fun, well-paced thriller. I became a bit bored at around the 75% mark, but still enjoyed it overall.

The Lord I Left by Scarlett Peckham
A steamy historical rom-com between a Christian minister and a whipping-house maid. I LOVED this. It was light and fluffy, with the perfect amount of intellectual debate.

the cinema

films —

The Prestige (2006)

We Live in Time (2024)

The Monkey (2025)

television —

Severance (2022)
Everyone is sick of hearing me talk about this show by now, but my GOD, please watch it!

the record player

the café

• Kaveh Akbar’s essay on the obscene ICE abduction of Tufts doctoral student, Rumeysa Ozturk.

• An interview with Michelle Zauner on her stint in South Korea, the overwhelm of fame, and her newest album.

• I finally bit the bullet and got myself a subscription to The New Yorker. The catalyst was this article on a Wyoming massacre of Asian-Americans in 1885. Horrific shit.

  • I’m considering adding on a subscription to either Granta, The Paris Review, or another publication that tickles my fancy. If you have any strong opinions/recommendations, let me know!

• The best part of Houston is 100% the food. One of my favorite places so far has been Chopnblok, which gets a shoutout in this New Yorker article on the city’s thriving West African food scene.

• Sue Williamson writes for Allure about the wellness industry and its veneer of community and inclusivity, but how ultimately, it “[had] no use for [her] cancer diagnosis.”

• If you’ve been on bookstagram (or probably in any literary community) long enough, you’d quickly notice the different cliques, such as: the romantasy readers, the new release readers, and…the “brodernists.” This LARB article has a lot to say about that last category.

• I’ve been taking writing classes lately, which have made me realize just how little I really knew about the craft and skill of writing, despite being a lifelong reader. Here are some helpful resources for others in the same boat as me:

  • DIY MFA Syllabus

  • The Nonwriter’s Guide to Writing A Lot

  • Brandon Taylor’s substack on story openings, which mirrors a lot of what I was taught in my class on “novel beginnings.”

A poem for the road:

April

By Mary Oliver

I wanted to speak at length about
the happiness of my body and the
delight of my mind for it was
April, a night, a
full moon and –

but something in myself or maybe
from somewhere other said: not too
many words, please, in the
muddy shallows the

Frogs are singing.

With the utmost of love,
Charlotte

Moving forward, “coffee breaks” will operate as my monthly wrap-ups. They’ll look more like my past monthly posts on Instagram, but lengthier, with a recounting of what my month was like, the books and movies I consumed (with short reviews), my favorite songs/albums, other favorites of the month (articles, etc.), and whatever else I feel like including. Hope you enjoy!

31 January 2025

Dearest friend,

January was tempestuous. She had bite in ways that I wasn’t quite ready for — the whiplash of Texas snow, the gloomy humidity that clings onto your skin like a hangnail. There’s something surreal about weather like this. Trees stand awkwardly against the buildings, half-dressed. Orange-brown leaves lie plastered on the sidewalk beside tree trunk ankles. A deceptive fog hugs the skyline. It’s not condensation from the cold but the clammy density of uncertain winter heat that steams up my car windows every morning. The office is freezing so I throw on a sweater anyway. It’s confusing. My body is confused.

Let’s not even begin to speak of the political tempest that January was. Everything feels like it’s on fire because it is on fire. I am trying hard not to despair. But I can’t turn away. There’s a sense of responsibility to see it through, and there’s also my job that requires me to pay meticulous attention to it. It’s hard to feel like I’m building something new when so much is actively being torn down. But I still am. Trying, that is.

January is a mirror like no other. It’s a month that prods until something gives. I’ve said before that more than any other time January makes me feel a great sense of lack. She rummages through my life and the past year, and magnifies all the various ways I have failed to live up to my own expectations. She shows me that I’m a fool in more ways than one.

But today, I’m choosing to see this as tough love. She asks, when will you start to act? When will you do the things you say you will do? When will you build the community you speak so highly of? When will you write? When will you become the person you say you are?

I tell her: today, now.

Here are some quickfire resolutions, because yes, I’m still naive and earnest enough to make them. I’m not nonchalant and I’m definitely not cool enough to be someone who eschews this age-old tradition!

• finish writing The Novel (!!!)

• try pottery

• regularly attend pole dance classes again

• donate to organizations i believe in (monthly)

• join a local political organization

• visit family in shanghai

• host a dinner party or two

• host a home cafe or two

• crochet something i can wear

• make a friend…

• read one intimidating book every month

• read one nonfiction every month (ideally history/theory)

My vision board:

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the library

what i read in january —

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
Bird by Bird was tender and funny and heartfelt. I snickered out loud in public while reading this! Some takeaways: write regularly (even when it’s hard), be observant, listen to your intuition. Also, there are reasons to write beyond getting published. Even if you do someday achieve that elusive goal, you likely won’t feel the satisfaction (or whatever it is) that you expect to feel. So write because you love it. Write because it’ll make you a better reader. Write because your soul drives you to do so!

I had been reading bits and pieces of this book for nearly half a year, but decided to finally sit down and read the whole thing in January as a way to frame the rest of 2025. I want to take this year moment by moment, bird by bird. But more than that, I want to write. The word I’ve chosen for 2025 is novelty. And what I really mean is novel(ty). I want newness, I want change, I want a year that will make me comfortable in the discomfort. I want to write. I want to write. I’m going to write so much this year that it’s going to blow your socks off.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
A story of man who discovers something disturbing in his small Irish town. I’m going to be honest, this one didn’t live up to its hype for me, but it was decent!

The Perfect Marriage by Jeneva Rose
The top defense attorney in Washington DC represents her own husband in a murder trial, where he’s accused of killing his mistress. Conflicts-of-interest abound. Everyone is insufferable. No legal protocol is followed. This was beyond stupid. You can read my brief review here.

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
Battle Royale is set in the fictional Republic of Greater East Asia, a fascist nation that hosts a yearly fight-to-the-death with randomly selected classes of junior high students. The novel follows one of these battles, dissecting the psyches of the 42 students of Shiroiwa Junior High’s third year class B as they choose to kill (or not to kill) their fellow classmate. An exhilerating read that spans just a couple of days and dozens of characters, Battle Royale explores the intricacies of interpersonal violence. It is bloody. It is stomach-turning. It is, disturbingly, fun.

There are moments throughout this novel too of genuine profundity. Though I wouldn’t classify Battle Royale as a political novel, its musings on “successful fascism” are particularly striking for me. The Republic of Greater East Asia is the wealthiest and most prosperous nation in the world of the novel. Its success is one of national wealth and industry. One of the students, Shogo, considers this point: “I have a feeling that once we reached this level of success, even the people themselves became afraid of changing the system. With this kind of success, and this high standard of living, we’re not willing to make a few sacrifices, even if there may be a few little problems…And of the ‘few little problems’? This wonderful game.”

What is Critical Environmental Justice by David Pellow
I’m going to refrain from discussing this one here because this (excellent) book will be the subject of a future Sip & Study. Keep an eye out!

ALSO! I’ll be posting a video on my favorite books from 2024 very very soon. Hopefully a day or two after this letter is sent to you.

the cinema

films —

Little Women (2019)
I ended 2024 with the book and I began 2025 with the film. A perfect story to center myself with.

Burning (2018)
An adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story, “Barn Burning.” Steven Yeun is wonderful here, as always. This is exactly how I envision a Murakami movie to be: terse and tense. The micro-expressions, the slow drawn out silences, the cinematic insularity, all of it strikes the exact moodiness that the original story evokes.

Battle Royale (2000)
It’s difficult to adapt a perfect book and unfortunately, I think this movie fell short. While the novel excelled in its vigorous explorations of violence, trust, betrayal, and political oppression, the movie adaption leans more into pulp thriller territory. Much of it is likely to do with the constraints of the medium more than anything. Entertaining, but little else.

television —

Chernobyl (2019)

Waco (2018)

Been on a limited series biopic kick lately. These two were devastatingly good and led me down deep rabbit holes.

Severance, Season 1 (2022)
This show is BRILLIANT. It has everything down. Color scheme, framing, music composition, dialogue, humor, Adam Scott. And it’s currently airing! It’s always a fun experience to be part of an ongoing online conversation about a show. Nerding out over different fan theories has been sustaining me throughout the week. Severance is now in competition with From for the position of my favorite TV show.

the record player

the café

• Blowback is one of my favorite podcasts. Each season, they cover a different major historical event or era, such as the Iraq War and the Korean War. I’m currently listening to Season 2 on the Cuban Revolution.

• Brandon Taylor has announced that he may be leaving Substack soon. Unfortunately for me, I’ve become a bit enamored with his writing (in all forms), and so I’ve taken it upon myself to read through every single one of his Substack posts before they’re gone. This one was my first. It made me scrap and re-write a short story I wrote earlier this month. I’ve since scrapped it again for other unrelated reasons, but I’m still glad I wrote it. Or at least, I’m trying to convince myself that I’m glad.

• Brandon Taylor’s book recommendations may just become my TBR

• Alexander Chee’s answer to the difference between fiction and nonfiction

• Sally Rooney recently had an article published in The Irish Times on capitalism and climate change, where she strongly advocates for grassroots direct action. Her writing shines in the essay format and I would love to see her put out more.

• I’m late to the party, but lately I’ve been obsessed with making a crockpot version of Marry Me Chicken. Creamy, cozy, delicious comfort in a bowl! I like making extra sauce and pouring everything over a bowl of rice.

• This New Yorker article by Atul Gawande on itchiness and neurology has been haunting me ever since I first read it months ago.

• My perfume of the month has been Black Cat in a Pumpkin Patch, a CocoaPink linen spray that I’ve been using as a body spray, hair spray, and room spray — in short, I’ve been using it everywhere. The notes are: rich amber resins, lemon curd and vanilla bean noel, a drop of egyptian musk with a splash of sweet pumpkin. It’s subtly sweet, cozy, and comforting.

charlotte’s web

i.e. what I’ve been up to outside of substack

I’ve been uploading regularly on Youtube again, where my main aims are to: (1) document my life/reading, and (2) offer coziness and comfort. Here are some of my recent videos:

• days in my life in houston

• december reset

• pilates, oat milk lattes, holiday parties ❄️ wintering in houston

A poem for the road:

Yes

By William Stafford

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out – no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

With the utmost of love,
Charlotte

The first time I came across the painting, I was 18 years old. I was profoundly depressed then, and had been for some time, and would continue to be for many years after. If you have any familiarity with depression, you may know how it can place a filter over every experience, throwing shadows across all the bright spots in your life.

Though the way I described it to a therapist at the time was quite the opposite. I told her that I felt like a curtain had been pulled back and I could now see the truth of everything in lightning-sharp clarity — all the ugly disgusting viscera of reality. I knew the truth, I told her. I was enlightened. People were cruel. Life was cruel. It was all endless. I felt that I alone possessed this secret knowledge that un-depressed people did not, and I was smug and possessive about it in only the way a lonely and depressed teenager who has dug herself into a self-loathing pit of perpetual wallowing is. My arrogance coated the humiliation of my banal suffering. In truth — and it is fair to say that I did not believe nor realize this at the time — I viewed the world as informed by my own depressed cynicism. All of art, literature, and life itself was changed by this outlook.

All this to say, when I first saw Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, I viewed it through the darkest lens of my mind’s warped eye. I was lonely, so I saw loneliness. I saw isolation. I saw each man as a cruel and unfeeling island. I looked upon that cold landscape — with the red-shirted farmer and his downcast eyes, the incurious horse, the shepherd whose sheep leisurely grazed upon what seemed like nothing but dirt, the ship, the fisherman on the shore, and of course, that one blip on the canvas, Icarus’s miniscule feet thrashing in that green sea, and everyone ignoring his slow drowning — and I believed that it depicted the world exactly as I knew it to be. I saw in those brushstrokes a lonely unseen death, an uncaring world, and the way one fades into obscurity even in the midst of great tragedy. Even Icarus. Especially Icarus. A life foregrounded not even by his death, but by the ignorance of others. Foregrounded by a man in a bright ass red shirt. No one cared. He was alone.

It must be said that I have no background, formal or otherwise, in art history. I could not tell you the historical context of this painting, nor the techniques employed to paint it. I know vaguely that it has been restored over the years, suggesting that the original, hidden beneath so many layers, may not be at all what we now see today. Even who the original painter was is contested. I also know that there are two known versions of this painting with major differences that set them apart; chiefly, in one version, Icarus’s father Daedalus is depicted flying above the landscape and looking back at his fallen son. The one I had encountered and was enraptured by however was the one in which Daedalus was notably absent. Despite my lack of knowledge, no painting has ever captured me quite as much as this one has. It has become a great motif throughout my life, and as I’ve grown, my relationship with it has also evolved.

In the years following my first impression of Landscape, the painting lingered in my mind. There were moments during that time where I felt like I had finally beat the omnipresent sadness.1 These were periods of startling relief and clarity, when my head would break through the surface of the water and I could take in a big bright gulp of air. The tight strangulation of the filter would dissipate. Things felt a bit warmer. In those times, I would take another look at this familiar painting and feel and see something completely contrary to what I had previously. No one cares — what peace that thought brought now that I could see more clearly! I made the painting my laptop background for years. A reminder that even at your most embarrassing moments, your most catastrophic and legendary failures, no one would pay attention. No one cares.

But then I’d reconsider this thought process. I guess maybe I'd still want someone to care, after all. So I’d vacillate, alternating between the belief that I was alone, to the belief that I was alone.

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A couple of years later when I was 20, I read a short story by Haruki Murakami from his collection, After the Quake.2 The story, titled “Landscape with Flatiron,” is meditative and melancholy. I saw a lot of myself in it.

“Landscape” follows a teenage girl, Junko, who has run away from her abusive home to a seaside town in Japan. There she meets a man from Kobe named Miyake, an artist of sorts who paints and has an obsession with (and proficiency in) building driftwood bonfires.3 The bulk of the story centers around a night at the beach. Junko and Miyake sit, smoke, drink, and watch a fire that Miyake has built. They sit at what seems like the precipice of the world, and there is a dissonant quality to the story that is both insular and cosmic in scope. Their conversations are heavy. They meander. They talk about life, death, premonitions, and Jack London. There is a latent intimacy in their vulnerability and in the way that they bare their hearts to one another slowly and tentatively, yet never fully; their language is cloaked under layers of symbols and metaphors. They are endlessly referential. Everything is talked about sideways, never head on.

Much like Miyake, Junko is enamored with fire. The flames “accepted all things in silence, drank them in, understood, and forgave. A family, a real family, was probably like this, she thought.” Junko’s loneliness seems both subdued and compounded by the flames. She is reminded of what true, bone-deep warmth feels like, but she is also reminded of her lack. In “Landscape with Flatiron,” the wild and natural entity of fire is tamed, domesticated, and enclosed. It is both free and controlled. It gives and takes. There is beauty in this duality for the protagonists.

There is a moment near the end of the story where Junko asks Miyake what painting he’s been working on. He hesitates, saying that it would be tough to explain, but after some more prodding, he relents. He tells her that his latest piece is a painting called Landscape with Flatiron.

“It’s just a picture of an iron in a room,” says Miyake.

Junko asks him why that would be tough to explain. He responds that “the iron is not really an iron.”

“It stands for something else?” Junko guesses. “Meaning you can only paint it if you use something else to stand for it?” He nods.

There is a brief pause here. Junko then confesses to Miyake that she feels completely empty. “There’s really nothing at all in here…I’m cleaned out. Empty,” she tells him.

I wondered about that sequence for a long time. Of course because it included the title, naturally suggesting the scene’s importance, but also because it felt personally meaningful.

What is the iron if not an iron? What is Icarus if not Icarus?

In 1921, Man Ray debuted his surrealist piece, Cadeau (Gift), a flatiron with fourteen brass tacks glued in a column down the center. Cadeau turns a domestic object regularly found in many homes and warps it, rendering it at once useless and dysfunctional with the smallest of changes. It becomes charged with a violent potential. The common household appliance transforms into a tool that can hurt, destroy, and take apart; it grows teeth. Or maybe, the tacks have simply made apparent the already violent potential that has always been dormant within the iron. They make legible what was always already there.

For me, depression was analogous. It was like the sudden gluing of brass tacks to my psyche and the world. But it wasn’t always clear to me how the tacks functioned. Did they make the world appear crueler, or did they make the already cruel world intelligible?

If the brass-tacked iron is a gift, it is a nasty one. If it is a gift, it is a distancing and isolating one.

Regardless, the landscape is undoubtedly changed by the flatiron.

Loneliness and emptiness abound in “Landscape with Flatiron,” and they abound in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, too. And maybe in a certain sense, they also abound in Cadeau. I imagine Miyake and Junko sitting in the dark on that beach — that shadowy precipice of the world. The flames from their bonfire flicker out, embers glowing low and dark in a smoldering pile on the sand. The cold settles in. I imagine that across the dimensions of time, space, medium, culture, and language, a pair of pale white legs thrash in the sunlit water, just a few feet off the shore, unseen by bystanders. Somewhere else, under artificial gallery lights, Man Ray glues a bunch of tacks onto an iron and calls it a gift.

Happy Hallo-week! In honor of this season, I’ve curated a horror guide for you all, full of scary books, movies, games, and more. Not for the faint of heart.

If instead you would prefer something warmer and less spooky, check out my cozy autumn kit.

themes

A chill in the air, creaking floorboards, the moon hanging high and shiny in the sky, a small tremor in your hands, the flap of a bat’s wings, a beating heart, candlelight blown out, gothic castles.

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books

This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno

It was Vera's idea to buy the Itza. The "world's most advanced smart speaker!" didn't interest Thiago, but Vera thought it would be a bit of fun for them amidst all the strange occurrences happening in the condo. It made things worse. The cold spots and scratching in the walls were weird enough, but peculiar packages started showing up at the house—who ordered industrial lye? Then there was the eerie music at odd hours, Thiago waking up to Itza projecting light shows in an empty room.

It was funny and strange right up until Vera was killed, and Thiago's world became unbearable. Pundits and politicians all looking to turn his wife's death into a symbol for their own agendas. A barrage of texts from her well-meaning friends about letting go and moving on. Waking to the sound of Itza talking softly to someone in the living room...

The only thing left to do was get far away from Chicago. Away from everything and everyone. A secluded cabin in Colorado seemed like the perfect place to hole up with his crushing grief. But soon Thiago realizes there is no escape—not from his guilt, not from his simmering rage, and not from the evil hunting him, feeding on his grief, determined to make its way into this world.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Seamlessly blending classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social commentary, The Only Good Indians follows four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives. Tracked by an entity bent on revenge, these childhood friends are helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.

Pet Sematary by Stephen King

When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son-and now an idyllic home. As a family, they've got it all...right down to the friendly car. But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling truth-more terrifying than death itself-and hideously more powerful. The Creeds are going to learn that sometimes dead is better.

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other...

We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer

As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood. As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in.

As soon as the strangers enter their home, uncanny and inexplicable things start happening, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint that their visit should be over. And when Charlie suddenly vanishes, Eve slowly loses her grip on reality. Something is terribly wrong with the house and with the visiting family—or is Eve just imagining things?

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruravia.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

music

(playlist)

southern gothic

disillusioned god-fearing southern belles kneeling by graves, quivering hands drenched in blood // inspired by william faulkner, flannery o' connor, cormac mccarthy

(albums)

TURN OFF THE LIGHT - Kim Petras

genre(s): EDM, techno, hyperpop
sounds like: an underground rave on halloween night, bright pink punch, neon nails

A fun dance-y Halloween party in an album.

There Existed an Addiction to Blood - clipping

Visions of Bodies Being Burned - clipping.

genre(s): industrial hip hop, horrorcore, noise, experimental
sounds like: being the final girl, trying not to breathe, creaking floorboards, the metallic taste of blood in your mouth, the smell of something burning

A two-part love letter to horror tropes, paying homage to iconic films like Scream, Rosemary’s Baby, and Candyman.

tv shows

The Haunting of Hill House

genre(s): horror, gothic, drama

This modern reimagining of the Shirley Jackson novel follows siblings who, as children, grew up in what would go on to become the most famous haunted house in the country.. Now adults, they are forced back together in the face of tragedy and must finally confront the ghosts of their past. Some of those ghosts still lurk in their minds, while others may actually be stalking the shadows of Hill House.

Twin Peaks

genre(s): thriller, drama

A crime drama mixed with healthy doses of the surreal, this series is about FBI Agent Dale Cooper, who travels to the small logging town of Twin Peaks to solve the murder of seemingly innocent high schooler Laura Palmer. Almost nothing is as it seems, however, and the show's sometimes eerie visuals, oddball characters and wild dream sequences drive the point home.

Ares

genre(s): horror, dark academia

An Amsterdam student joins a secret society that has been around since the Dutch Golden Age, but must decide how far she is willing to go to rise up the ranks.

Supernatural

genre(s): horror, mystery, drama

This haunting series follows the thrilling yet terrifying journeys of Sam and Dean Winchester, two brothers who face an increasingly sinister landscape as they hunt monsters. After losing their mother to a supernatural force, the brothers were raised by their father as soldiers who track mysterious and demonic creatures. Violent memories and relationship-threatening secrets add additional burdens on Sam and Dean as they investigate all things that go bump in the night. As old tricks and tools are rendered useless and friends betray them, the brothers must rely on each other as they encounter new enemies.

Yellowjackets

genre(s): psychological thriller, horror, survival, mystery

"Yellowjackets" tells the narrative of a team of wildly talented high-school girls soccer players who survive a plane crash deep in the Ontario wilderness. The series chronicles their descent from a complicated but thriving team to warring, cannibalistic clans, while also tracking the lives they have attempted to piece back together.

movies

Us (2019)

dir. Jordan Peele
genre(s): horror, thriller

Watch yourself.

Husband and wife Gabe and Adelaide Wilson take their kids to their beach house expecting to unplug and unwind with friends. But as night descends, their serenity turns to tension and chaos when some shocking visitors arrive uninvited.

Parasite (2019)

dir. Bong Joon-Ho
genre(s): thriller, drama, comedy

Act like you own the place.

All unemployed, Ki-taek’s family takes peculiar interest in the wealthy and glamorous Parks for their livelihood until they get entangled in an unexpected incident.

The Ring (2002)

dir. Gore Verbinski
genre(s): horror, mystery

Before you die, you see the Ring.

Rachel Keller is a journalist investigating a videotape that may have killed four teenagers. There is an urban legend about this tape: the viewer will die seven days after watching it. Rachel tracks down the video… and watches it. Now she has just seven days to unravel the mystery of the Ring so she can save herself and her son.

Based on the Japanese novel of the same name. The original Japanese film adaptation came out in 1998.

Hereditary (2018)

dir. Ari Aster
genre(s): horror, thriller, mystery

Every family tree hides a secret.

Following the death of the Leigh family matriarch, Annie and her children uncover disturbing secrets about their heritage. Their daily lives are not only impacted, but they also become entangled in a chilling fate from which they cannot escape, driving them to the brink of madness.

Raw (2016)

dir. Julia Ducornau
genre(s): body horror, drama

What are you hungry for?

In Justine’s family everyone is a vet and a vegetarian. At 16, she’s a gifted teen ready to take on her first year in vet school, where her older sister also studies. There, she gets no time to settle: hazing starts right away. Justine is forced to eat raw meat for the first time in her life. Unexpected consequences emerge as her true self begins to form.

video games

Resident Evil

genre(s): survival horror, shooter

A deadly virus engulfs the residents of Raccoon City in September of 1998, plunging the city into chaos as flesh eating zombies roam the streets for survivors. An unparalleled adrenaline rush, gripping storyline, and unimaginable horrors await you. Witness the return of Resident Evil 2.

Phasmaphobia

genre(s): paranormal horror, multiplayer online co-op

Phasmophobia is a 4 player online co-op psychological horror. Paranormal activity is on the rise and it’s up to you and your team to use all the ghost-hunting equipment at your disposal in order to gather as much evidence as you can.

Don’t Starve

genre(s): survival, crafting, open world, 2D

Don’t Starve is an uncompromising wilderness survival game full of science and magic. Enter a strange and unexplored world full of strange creatures, dangers, and surprises. Gather resources to craft items and structures that match your survival style.

There is also a multiplayer version, called Don’t Starve Together.

Ib

genre(s): horror, pixel graphics, 2D

A young girl named Ib visits an art gallery with her parents.
While perusing the various works of art, Ib suddenly realizes that she is alone.
As she searches for someone – anyone – else, the museum begins to change...A 2D exploration adventure game set in a creepy, mysterious art gallery. Inspect the area around you, discovering items and disarming traps to find your way out of the strange gallery.