Source Code: My Beginnings

What struck me most wasn’t any technical anecdote or the founding myth of the empire. It was something simpler, rougher, and far more universal: the importance of knowing what you want. Gates had undeniable privilege, but he also carried around a very specific kind of obsession. Clear-cut, almost mathematical: computers, logic, and solitude.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson is one of those books you don’t really read — you survive them. The prose is dizzying and addictive. It drags you into a state of mind where the line between fiction and reality shatters like a broken mirror. Reporting the facts wasn’t the point: it was about showing the trembling hands holding the mirror.

Connecticut

Grief

Social rituals

Lucid Comedy

Joan Didion

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

The Wedding People

Some books make you cry. Others make you laugh. And then there are the ones that manage to make you laugh while tying your stomach into a knot. Wedding People, by Alison Espach, is one of those. The narrator’s voice is so honest, so uncomfortably honest, that at times I felt like I was inhabiting her body... Yes, it made me laugh. But not in a light, disposable way. It made me laugh because it reminded me that life, even in its most absurd and painful moments, often looks a lot like a badly acted comedy in an empty theater.