<aside> 🔥 a 2023 recap! but because this year was defined by too many eras, too many plotlines, too many changing contexts and emotional states, I can’t just write a linear story because my brain can’t even process it all. so I’m going with a different route, in which I non-linearly talk about storylines if I’m reminded by them <3

(too many long comma separated lists in sentences?)

</aside>

I’m not a very strongly opinionated person and I vacillate between beliefs the more I learn; and also don’t find myself a great literary or film critic.

So here’s Claire’s opinions on the many things that I consume, because I am someone who runs away from boredom like mouse runs towards a cheese in a trap 🪤.

this will likely forever be a draft, because i’ll always have more to add, so please feel free to add notion comments or dm me any reactions. this is my love language. or give recommendations/reactions to your favs.

ov~

https://open.spotify.com/track/11PsvksHKqh7SOP7dS2hMp?si=b9cfd09cb6334021

jan-jun: senior year, andover. traveled to italy, went to warp and horizon, did college visits, fell in love with my friends <3

jun-aug: rsi counselor. many, many friends visited, got to counsel™ my kids.

august: tokyo, w/ the rat squad. explored the city and nature, spent time with long-time friends.

sept-dec: freshman year, mit. kind of hell kind of heaven, call me the pearls ****by burgmuller the way I be having highs and lows. went to dc, nyc, and ri.

📚 books that will leave you forgetting who you are

An incomplete list of books I read this year. Back during college apps one college had this prompt that was just “a list of books you read in the past year” and I got so excited I wrote like seven pages of thoughts and quotes and stuff until my school counselor told me no one was going to read it.

At the start of 2023/end of 2022 I took a course on trauma literature and read some of the most amazing things ever, and I wish more people read these amazing books (in the dropdown).

• books un-included or before 2023, that you should definitely read

• tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, gabrielle zevin (winter break, 2022-2023)

  • A while ago I went on a bender and re-read the little poems and docs and projects I did as a kid in elementary school and found so many rants about how all the songs in the world were about love, about romance, how every book had to have some unlikely pairing. And while this book touches on that, and yes there’s this feeling of unrequited love; I prefer to live in the world in which Zevin writes one of the most beautiful representations of platonic love. Because what else is stronger? They build a world together, destroy that world and their world, struggle to share things about their lives with each other but instead. build. new memories. I think that’s the most beautiful thing about friendships that I really started to appreciate this year: that you don’t need to just share your life stories; the traumas; the sad parts, but instead, you can build strong friendships by building new memories. It’s why your freshman year roommate is your closest friend, why the first person that talks to you at a new school will forever have a nice spot in your heart, and why, to this day, I am still friends with the people that responded to my first messages in Hack Club or the people whose names I got wrong and didn’t get mad at me at Andover.

• the three-body problem, cixin luo (winter break, 2022-2023)

• godel, escher, bach, douglas hofstadter (jan, 2023, unfinished oops!)

• crying in h-mart, michelle zauner (march, 2023)

  • I read this on a plane ride to WARP and proceeded to ugly cry sandwiched between two buff Texan guys. 10/10 experience. This book is meant to be sad, so sure, makes sense, but I just couldn’t get it out of my head weeks after. I have a March 18, 2023 note titled “an airplane crisis” and it is 1,643 words of me trying to parse out my thoughts about my family and parents. I don’t think I can ever find the courage in me to share that, but I find myself, ~9 months later, a lot more forgiving and patient, not finding myself drawn to fits of text essays to the Family Groupchat… but how much if that is just added compartmentalization? I also find myself more aloof with family: I can find it within myself to constantly forgive and move on but it may be because I am caring less about it as well. Anyways, read it. Please. If not for a greater understanding if your mothers, for the fact that the author is also Japanese Breakfast, a god tier music artist.

    https://open.spotify.com/track/0dpyzcT3RMNNSd2xKBf35I?si=5c983a0f8a034bd6

• range, david epstein (march, 2023)