Latest Update: 31th Aug 2025
Between the Lines: This is a chaotic, evolving, and occasionally questionable reading list.
Books I like: I love the beauty of paradox, the allure of contradictions, and the meanings hidden beneath words and metaphors.
Book recommendations? –> Email me!

Beneath the surface

Books I Keep Coming Back To

Here’s a list of books that never seem to leave my mind (or my nightstand). These are the ones I revisit, quote endlessly, and always find something new in.

• To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf
• The Waves — Virginia Woolf
• Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
• Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise: A Novel — Lin Yi-han
• Neapolitan Quartet - Elena Ferrante
• Taipei People - Pai Hsien-yung

Current Reading List

Here’s where things get messy. These are books I’m reading, want to read, or just like having on my shelf.

• Pale Fire — Vladimir Nabokov
• Madness and Civilization — Michel Foucault
• The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
• Crying in H Mart - Michelle Zauner
• The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan
• Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
• We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
• The Awakening and Selected Stories - Kate Chopin
• Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
• The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
• The Castle - Franz Kafka
• Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
• Narcissus and Goldmund - Hermann Hesse
• In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
• Milk and honey - Rupi Kaur

Recent Finished

Here’s a list of books I’ve recently finished—some stayed with me longer than others, but all left their mark.

• Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death - Jean-Dominique Bauby
• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison - Michel Foucault
• 1984 - George Orwell
• Raise the Red Lantern - Su Tong
• Rouge - Lilian Lee
• A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
• A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf
• Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee
• Foe - J. M. Coetzee
• Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out - Mo Yan
• Big Breasts and Wide Hips - Mo Yan
• Educated - Tara Westover
• Life of Pi - Yann Martel
• Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
• Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro