[The #FF0000 Book] 2025?
I started reading Book 1 of My Struggle a few nights ago, having come across it in a little free library in my neighborhood. I’d been putting it off for the past decade because it was, at first, too trendy, then too performative, then too mainstream, then finally too canonical, at which point it was too embarrassing to be reading it at all because that could only mean that I hadn’t already. I furtively slipped the volume into my bag and walked home with my head down, the last person in the tote bag universe who had yet to read Knausgård.
That night was the first time in years that I stayed up til morning thrill-reading in bed, pants off and phone Brick’d, a giant projection of a pink moon thrown across the room. The last time that happened, I was reading Normal People by Sally Rooney. I remember finishing it and then looking out the window, sun rising behind the San Francisco fog, wondering why I did that when I had work in three hours. Before that, it was Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life—though that one I don’t regret and do recommend. I had assumed that My Struggle would be something like Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, but written in the voice of Stephen King: tediously descriptive, mundane, linear. Instead I found myself stunned at the lyricism, the way Knausgård transitioned from the opening ruminations on death into the first scene of the book: the author at eight years old, watching a maritime television program and hallucinating a human face on the surface of the water and then running to tell his father. So frictionless was the movement that I had to go back and reread what I just read. It was that good. I then bought a ticket for his San Francisco book release event. I’m extra excited because the internet says he’s 6’3’’.
Another thing that I resisted was P.T. Anderson’s One Battle After Another. After hearing two straight guys rave about it (one after the other), I decided that that was enough for me to declare a boycott because I could tell from the prosody of the title alone that I’d hate it. One? Battle? After? Another? Please. Anyway I watched it a few days ago and thought it was excellent. Of course. A bit of a similar tenor to Birdman.
On the other hand, I’d been dying to see Marty Supreme. I liked Uncut Gems and love a twink in rimless glasses and a white tank. Not this time I guess! I also didn’t enjoy Sentimental Value, though concede that many of my smartest and chicest friends did, which is meaningful. I found the metaphors too self-consciously on the nose: a fractured father-daughter relationship being rewritten! (the father is a screenwriter who wants to cast his daughter as his daughter in the film about his daughter) and a crumbling generational house being repaired! Then the actress who would be played by another actress in the film-within-a-film later replaces her. Eyeroll emoji. At TIFF, I loved the film 100 Sunset, named for the apartment complex in Toronto that’s home to a large portion of the Tibetan diaspora. The scenes are intimate and slow, evocative almost immediately even before any narrative context is introduced. The actors are all cast from the local community, like my other favorite movie about an insular religious community, Silent Light, which is set in a Mennonite colony in Northern Mexico.
On the plane from Toronto to SFO, I watched a French sci-fi movie called The Animal Kingdom. The premise is that a virus is going around which makes people morph into giant animals (the movie 100% looks like an Animorphs cover). It quickly becomes a crisis of national security, martial law is enacted, and then in true French cinematic form, the oppressed mutants organize and revolt. It was sooooo good. I cried all through the end credits (extremely satisfying closure to the strained father-child relationship…unlike that other movie…). I love all sci-fi movies, except Passengers, which I watched this year because a Redditor in r/screenwriting said to read the script. I LOVED Presence, the Soderbergh movie filmed from the perspective of a ghost, despite the bad casting and worse dialogue. I think Soderbergh himself said he regretted making that movie. Agree to disagree!
My favorite poetry books were Saturday by Margaret Ross and Chronicle of Drifting by Yuki Tanaka. I actually started reciting Margaret’s poem “Socks” to her this summer at Bread Loaf, but she told me to stop being weird. I liked this episode of Weird Studies about reciting poetry by heart. In my favorite poem in Yuki’s book, the speaker pines after a girl until one day, while they’re talking, a wind suddenly blows up and under his shirt, puffing up his torso like muscles. Yuki had no idea what I was talking about when I told him this, but I stand by my interpretation. I admired the poems “Second Body” by Catherine Pond and “Hot Springs” by Armen Davoudian and the short story “Dear Lillington Families” by Owen Park. I am slowly making my way through the doorstopper that is The Search for Modern China, a “comprehensive explanation of four centuries from the decline of the Ming dynasty in 1600 through the demise of the democracy movement in June 1989.” I find that historians are, for me, the best prose stylists. I was very happy to have finally procured a copy of Viscose Journal, a magazine of fashion criticism, after first hearing about it years ago from someone at Cashmere Radio. I bought Issue 02: Clothes at their fall event at Montez Radio and was so impressed that I bought all the other issues that Chess Club (my favorite magazine store and water bar of 2025) had in stock. It’s also where I found Cookie Jar Issue 2, a box set of four pamphlets published by the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. I especially liked Hannah Black’s essay on the painter Joseph Yoakum and Johanna Fateman’s Le Tigre tour diary. Free to download btw! And it looks like the physical copy might also be free with institutional affiliation.
I don’t finish many novels. I don’t have the patience and worse, feel no shame about it. Of the small number of novels I did finish, two of them for a classics-only book club, I enjoyed On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. Slim and plotless and translated from the Danish, it’s about a woman stuck in a time loop, cursed to wake up on the morning of November 18 and relive its events over and over. Most relatable book I’ve ever read. Makes me think about that joke where it’s like -Psychoanalyst: What’s happening? -Patient: Nothing -Psychoanalyst: !!! Be right there!!!! I did finish Hogg by Samuel R. Delany as recommended by Brutal Book Club. I only mention this because a guy on Feeld told me that having read this was a red flag.
My favorite fragrance of 2025 is Frederic Malle Lipstick Rose, which I bought NIB (100mL) from eBay for less than a hundred dollars. It smells like a luxury department store lipstick from the 80s stewed into a pot of raspberry jam and scented with rose petals. My favorite makeup discovery is the Sephora 12-hour eyeliner pencil, which smudges well with a q-tip and doesn’t budge, but requires frequent sharpening. My favorite bag charm is this Sailormoon keychain from AliExpress and my favorite pop socket is this butterfly from Temu, which is especially fun because it makes you very popular with toddlers. I listened to the album Star Witness by True Blue a lot, as well as the podcast Fragraphilia, which is hosted by Jane from Sea of Shoes. The best things I ate were the samosa soup at Top Burmese in Portland, the laphing (soupy) and gyurma at Shambhala Kitchen in Toronto, and the jhol momo at NY Lhasa Liang Fen. My New Year’s resolutions are to wear real pants more often, as I’ve been accused by a growing number of concerned friends and family of only being seen in stretchy pants, and to post on Substack monthly as an accountability measure, else I just don’t write at all. I was inspired by this post by Celine Nguyen and this post by Amelia Ada to resurrect this stack. I highly recommend reading those posts if you also want to write more, or get started. Celine emphasizes consistency and endurance while Amelia takes a Zuckerberg-ian “move fast and break things” approach (jokes!). I’m obviously a disciple of the latter, which is why I’m going to try for the former, which means another missive will come in either one month or four years. Fingers crossed emoji.
