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To Justify Overambition
another end-of-year reading recap
I wanted to make a tradition of my post from last December, revisiting the books I read throughout the previous year and compiling passages and excerpts which I’d flagged while reading with lower corner dog-ears (the highest form of flagging according to my personal system). I wasn’t looking forward to admitting that I read fewer books in 2025 than I did last year. After an incredible run over the summer of books I loved one after another, a combination of work’s busy season and a couple books that didn’t grab me in the way I wanted them to slowed my reading over the course of the last few months. I also usually listen to audiobooks as well, and count those towards my reading goal (audiobooks count, I will never change my mind on that), and this year I listened to far fewer. Instead, I listened to more music, watched more movies, and probably spent way too much time scrolling on tiktok and eBay.
The purpose of this now-annual list, to me, as well as the purpose of this newsletter as a whole, is just to think about the things that I consume, the way they build with and upon each other, these images being the scaffolding for talking about my/our lives and my/our loved ones and my/our world as it unfolds. Providing a necessary structure and stability that can only come from something exterior to us, something we can lean against as we address something interior. The way that reading fiction allows us to practice feeling, to place ourselves in emotional contexts and bear witness to our own response, to understand ourselves better.
At the end of last year’s compilation post, I promised to post more in 2025. I did fail at that. I failed at some of the other goals I set for myself for this past year too, as I’m sure many of us did. But I achieved other goals—some of which I hadn’t been expecting to—and made progress even towards the goals that I fell short of reaching by this arbitrary deadline, and that in itself makes the effort worth it, justifies overambition. Next year I’ll write more, next year I’ll take more photos, I’ll read more, I’ll watch more movies, I’ll listen to more great music. And by the time the end of 2026 approaches, I’ll wish I’d have gone farther in all of those metrics, so I’ll set goals for 2027.
So, again, as an end-of-year gift for you all, here’s the incomplete list: most of the books I read this year, in the order in which I read them, each with passages I flagged with lower-corner dog ears:
“Each time she started reading a book she liked, she would fill with fear, shame, and endless sadness because this good book was whole, and the thing was that Anna’s book would not become whole, would never become one with the world, one with these books and their wholeness, because Anna was not whole, could never be so, could never become this person who was one with the world and sure of their place in it.”
“I don’t know whether I’m lying when I tell them the truth about myself. Each time I tell a secret, it feels as though the secret is retrieved from a bucket inside me that’s filled with fiction. And as soon as the secret is spoken aloud, it hangs above the table between us like a mobile of mirrors and suddenly seems made up. Maybe I believe I can’t live without my secrets…How to see oneself as anything other than an image, spoken into being out of nothing?”
“Only somebody who has lived in the streets of a city, suffering some kind of misery, can be aware of what the paving stones, the doorways, the bricks, the windows signify…A modern city, however, is not only a place, it is also in itself, long before it is painted, a series of images, a circuit of messages. A city teaches and conditions by its appearances, its facades and its plan.”
PRETENTIOUSNESS: WHY IT MATTERS, Dan Fox
“The original meaning of the word ‘prestige’ was an illusion of conjuring trick, from the latin praestigium — a delusion. The delusion is in ever-deferred processes of personal betterment through acquisition…As-piration is the sense of dislocation between our present state and what we hope will make life easier, more tolerable. To close this gap, we play roles that might help us feel we are living a more ideal life. We might close the gap with a hobby, the way we present ourselves on social media, a way of dressing, or in the food we eat. Pretentiousness defines a degree of dislocation between our circumstances and the image we are trying to project.”
DAYBOOK: THE JOUNAL OF AN ARTIST, Anne Truitt
“Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves…The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.”
MODERN LOVE, Constance De Jong
“I’m running around in hot pursuit, attempting to find, attempting to be the originating cause of everything. I dont believe in numbers. I’m after a total effect, wanting to see how it all fits together.”
“something tells me if I continue turning my insights into adjectives I’ll turn into a criminal. I’ll steal the splendor of this moment and commit it to a long, sorry sentence. I’ll murder people and bury them in gorgeous metaphors. I’ll mutilate events and objects, cut and arrange everything into pretty patterns. Into spectacular but empty images.”
“It was compelling, like a surrender. A certain physical and emotional response. A very big sensation. As if without will or effort I could join the motions and rhythms of an existence that was there before me, would go on with or without me, be there after me. Just be there.”
THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS, Ayşegül Savaş
“His true passion was the collection, the accumulation of expired things, their foggy poetry.
This stuff is so cool, we always told him. You should really do something with it.
Yeah, Ravi said, I will.
This was the other thing: it seemed that our interests could be legitimized only if we made something from them—a book, an exhibit. We often said what a shame this was; we romanticized artists of past decades, doing work with great joy and creativity without turning it into a product.”
“Over tea, we talked about the women we had admired as children. Characters from movies or charismatic friends of our mothers’, whose speech, gestures and outfits we’d committed to memory. I marveled at Lena’s methodical listing—she knew precisely what she had borrowed from each woman and was now assembling the individual parts in fresh combinations.”
“I put it away in a cupboard with other objects I had bought without dedication, because they had briefly offered an idea of something.”
PERFECTION, Vincenzo Latronico
“They will be tempted to search elsewhere for what they found all those years ago in berlin and then tried and failed to find again that winter. But it will prove impossible because that abundance was the result of a specific overlap between the city’s history and theirs. Intensely disoriented, they will find themselves unable to disentangle one from the other; and thus, their sudden inability to access a version of their past unfiltered by nostalgia, will be their understanding of nostalgia.
“I had a moment of clarity: Join a league. Take up Mahjong. Consider the lilies. Play the game badminton. Batter up, girlie girl. *Suh-wing battah battah* But then I remembered I was not coordinated. But then I remembered I did not have much follow-through. I had tunnel vision. My vision was marred by elements.”
THE TIME OF THE NOVEL, Lara Mimosa Montes
“I can only venture to guess in hindsight that such an experiment was designed to help me work through a kind of ambivalence about the future: that things happened, and the things that happened, while observable to me, were not in my control.”
“I could not yet discern between the layers, the Real, the dream. Writing. What I touched, what touched me. To say “semi-permeable” is to say “self.” Everything was sinuous and becoming synonymous with itself. I became obsessed with words and what I termed their inverted mirror doubles: high/hi, eye/I, you/ewe, pause/paws, two/to, steal/steel, sum/some, pie/pi.”
HAPPINESS FOREVER, Adelaide Faith
“If I see someone, say if I see someone walking past my window, my brain will think, There’s a person, going from A to B for a reason, sure they know that B is better. And I wonder how they know. I don’t feel that I would know, or walk with such certainty. I feel like I’m just a set of controls, waiting for a person with certainty to come and work them.”
“She sometimes felt so happy that if something good happened, if she found money or got a text from someone she really liked, Sylvie would panic that things were too good. She worried that something bad would happen to her brain if it got any happier”
“‘Are you good that way,’ Chloe says, ‘with a costume?’
‘I think so. I think it’s why I wear the same outfit every day, so it’s easier to remember how to act, so I feel like one person.’
Chloe smiles. ‘You’ve done well to do that, to choose a uniform to help you perform continuity. I often feel like I dont have a developed-enough sense of self because I don’t have a look.’
‘You have a look!’ Sylvie says. ‘I know your look.’ They walk silently while she tries to think. ‘Your look is . . . Library-Hotel-Performance-Archive, I think.’”
“Maybe children make such good actors sometimes because there is more of a blur between what is real and what isn’t. Adult actors I think always know that they are pretending and that everyone is laughing at them and their desperate choices. That feeling isn’t specific to actors though. I’m not trying to say everyone always thinks everyone is laughing at them, but I do think everyone is always making desperate choices towards a promise of more. There are many things you are not told as a child. Maybe those things you don’t know really help you to live in a space between the two worlds.”
THE MOBIUS BOOK, Catherine Lacey
“It was a romantic notion, though a stupid one, and it reminded Marie of how song lyrics have a way of seeming true—how almost anything can seem true when set to music or rhyme, no matter how inane, no matter how mind-numbing and reductive and even destructive these notions could be. Sometimes Marie suspected that Edie—as adventurous and considerate as she was—had also readily accepted every stupid, seductive idea that had ever found her, which meant her life was a continual attempt to disentangle herself from all these beloved falsehoods, but all she ever did was further ensnare herself in every mental trap within reach.”
“He said the afterlife didn’t come after, that it was during and before, but never after, and that this is a misunderstanding that people kept clinging to—the obsession with what comes after when there isn’t an after. Just a before.”
“Hope is in the visible objects in our homes. Identities and plans rest dormant in a stack of books. The kitchen pantry reassures us of future nourishment. A toolbox is the confidence that we can fix what will break. Little notes to self. Little notes of self. The secret language of things we use to fold life into time, time into life. … It wasn’t clutter to him—it was measurement.”
A LEOPARD-SKIN HAT, Anne Serre
“—hauling in other people’s words, arranging them so that they resembled her own, holding on to them. She was a ’toiler of the sea,’ a worker of the deeps—hence those sinewy arms and limbs—continually hauling in her nets filled with other people’s words, quickly emptying out the plentiful proceeds of the day’s catch, and then skillfully arranging it all: not to impress or seduce people, but simply to have words to say that would enable her to set foot elegantly, like everyone else, in the world of the living.”
“Perhaps we all have lives the person closest to us knows nothing of? And perhaps this is what really attracts us to each other: the presence of this secret life which, from time to time, is revealed to us through a gleaming, narrow slit. The vision is fleeting and comes as a complete surprise; all of our convictions are shaken because, however observant we might be, we hadn’t noticed a thing.”
“We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once. … Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them. …You can’t step into the same story twice – or maybe it’s that stories, books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’s this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to more transient art, which is real too, just for less time) will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and going. Because come then go we will, and in that order.”
“At one level reflection means we see ourselves. At another, it’s another word for the thought process. We can choose to use it to look into the light in our own eyes, or we can be light sensitive, we can allow all things to move over and through us; we can hold them and release them, in thought. Broken things become pattern in reflection. The way a kaleidoscope works is to allow fragmentary or disconnected things to become their own harmony.”
“To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.”
“At times, looking in the mirror, I’ll see his expressions on my face.”
“Over well whiskeys at a sticky tabletop that week, I learn the man’s a painter. He’s older, has had a measure of success, and occasionally says things like, ‘Artists are the only alchemists in the world. They pick up a pencil and turn lead into gold.’
Despite this, I enjoy his company.”
“—and she was in a sense proud of her daughters naïveté, because it meant that she had been raised with no reason to distrust the world, but it also made her feel incredibly alienated from her. It made her feel like her daughter was the kind of person who could not survive the childhood that she’d had herself”
SUZANNE AND LOUISE, Hervé Guibert
“Isn’t what happens at the crux of the photograph, on Louise’s face, an act of transfiguration? When I show her the final photos of her with her hair down, with a relaxed, extraordinarily beautiful expression, suddenly young again, Louise doesn’t recognize herself, at first she thinks she is looking at her sister.
‘That isn’t me.’”
TO REST OUR MINDS AND BODIES, Harriet Armstrong
“I really could make anything happen by just typing some words into my phone. I didn’t how I would ever make myself stop, it felt like I would just keep making things happen through my phone forever. I had never felt that way before, like I held within my own specific self the capacity to really make things happen. I had never felt that way before.”
“It was very exciting, to be speaking to someone whose thoughts and feelings I couldn’t guess at all, and for a moment there I felt that that was love: the total inability to know what someone was going to say and think and feel and the constant wish to know those things fundamentally and intuitively. That endless and insatiable wish to know things seemed to me at that moment to be the absolute root of love and desire, but when Luke walked back through the door carrying our steaming paper bag of food I knew I’d been completely wrong, that love was something else entirely.”
LUXURY, SENSATION, AND THE MOVING IMAGE, Alice Blackhurst
“…giving shape to the relief found in giving oneself over to another’s path. In ‘abandoning herself’ to a stranger’s habits and itineraries, Calle is pleasurably diverted from the pressures and demands of her own life, exempted from the imperatives of having to perform as an actor and an agent in the functioning world. …a state of ‘dreamlike disengagement’ where shadowing one’s chosen Other is the only task at hand.”
ELEGY, SOUTHWEST, Madeleine Watts
“—you never stopped saying it. You told me you loved me multiple times a day, when I was brushing my teeth, when I asked if you wanted eggs, when I was putting my tights on and heading out the door to school. ‘Love’ you would text me when I was in classes. Just one word. You loved me.”
“When I first fell in love with you, I knew for the first time what I was truly capable of feeling—the heights of the pleasure and the depths of the pain. This ability to feel, to me, felt like the major measure of my humanity. The poem made me imagine, for a moment, the kind of howl I would become if I lost you. The cataclysm. And did I want to be as human as all that?”
CRUEL OPTIMISM, Lauren Berlant
“To be unoriginal is to gain a reprieve from desire’s self-articulating pressure: accordingly, the more intense the desire, the emptier the body feels. To empty out one’s emptiness through work is something like negating the negation, at least for a minute, because work is absorbing, like eating. But Dorothy also shows that one cannot help but be original to desire.”
“I say ‘affect’ rather than ‘emotion’ here to emphasize that the children to not know fully what they’re doing, flinging themselves at life in order to be in proximity to a feeling of something that is strangely both enigmatic and simplifying. Their objects of desire are really scenes they orchestrate in order to experience absorption, a sense of being held in a scene, of having reciprocity, and being unanxious somewhere.”
“…and that’s what New York meant: so many people swirling around you you never had to think of any one person separately, just compare them all—some were like hornets, others resembled butterflies or snakes—and take your pick. You didn’t have to say hello or nod to each person on the street just because you and the other person were both on the same side of the street at the same time, watching one another as you approached from a distance, then squinting as if to say “don’t I know you? haven’t we met before?”
THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE, Michel de Certeau
“They are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban text they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each others arms. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.”
“It is no longer accompanied, as it used to be, by the murmur of a vocal articulation nor the moment of a muscular manipulation. To read without muttering the words aloud or at least mumbling them is a “modern” experience, unknown for millennia. In earlier times, the reader interiorized the text; he made his voice the body of the other; he was its actor. Today, the text no longer manifests itself through the reader’s voice. This withdrawal of the body, which is the condition of its autonomy, is a distancing of the text.”
THINGS THAT DISAPPEAR, Jenny Erpenbeck
“…as I wait for that one second in which I will be connected to all other people by time, I suddenly realize again how little this second really differs from all the other seconds in a year, then the web of time suddenly looks so small…and all the banging and screaming that flies across the time zones is suddenly nothing more than our own sound with which we seize this man-made moment, as we become aware that we are falling, and as if in a great wave that sweeps across the globe, friends and strangers sink into each others arms for a few seconds, while those who have remained alone cry our, individually but all together”
THE MYSTERY OF PERCEPTION, A CONVERSATION WITH LYNNE TILLMAN, Taylor Lewandowski
“I don’t think I move towards myself, that there is a self waiting, or that is more or less honest or true. I think every day, more likely, I repeat myself, otherwise I’d confuse myself and my friends. [laughs] Every day I think we make it up. That’s my form of existentialism. Don’t you feel like you’re different with different people?”
“Craig wrote about ‘writing alongside art.’ We are alongside it, sometimes in front of it. We aren’t making the art, but living in the same time of its making. You’re around it, and it may have something to do with your life. I think he wanted to know how and why.”
HELEN OF NOWHERE, Makenna Goodman
“Have you ever driven in traffic and thought to yourself, it’s a miracle there aren’t more accidents? I think about it every time I’m in traffic. I think about it when I’m driving and another car comes at me from the other direction, and we pass each other and were a foot apart, separated by one line. It’s the most natural thing in the world, hurtling past each other the way we do, its beautiful chaos, and most of the time we are okay.
If you read (or scrolled) all the way to the end of this list. Here are your rewards:
a 2-hour Spotify playlist (I promise these will not get an hour longer every year)
a mendieta photo:
Fantastic! Love to read your posts, especially this one, a compilation of what touched you and affected you as an independent artist. Love, Pam Reid