feeling

quietly-brilliant

3 books1 film2 albums

album1998

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Neutral Milk Hotel

I resisted this album for years because of how much people talked about it. Then one night it made complete sense. The rawness isn't affectation — Mangum sounds like he has no choice but to mean every word. Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2 is the most heartbreaking song I know. I return to it when I want to feel something.

★★★★★5.0

emotionalnostalgicquietly-brilliant

stayed with me

novel1989

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

Stevens drives across England and constructs a perfect defense of every choice he ever made. By the end you understand exactly why he needed to build it. The restraint is almost unbearable — every scene where he almost says the thing and doesn't. Ishiguro's greatest book, I think. And that's saying something.

★★★★★5.0

restraineddevastatingquietly-brilliant

stayed with me

novel2020

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

Unlike anything else I've read. It starts as a puzzle and ends as something tender and strange. Clarke builds a world with such internal logic that by the time you understand what's happening, you've already accepted all of it completely. I finished it in one afternoon and sat with it for days.

★★★★½4.5

beautifulquietly-brilliantnostalgic

stayed with me

film2016

Moonlight

Barry Jenkins

Three chapters, three versions of a person. Jenkins uses light and silence like language — every frame is a deliberate choice. I've thought about the diner scene more than most things that actually happened to me. The ending is so quiet and so much.

★★★★★5.0

emotionalbeautifulquietly-brilliant

stayed with me

album2015

Carrie & Lowell

Sufjan Stevens

I put this on during a long drive and had to pull over. Not because it's a sad album — though it is — but because it's so specific. The grief is particular and named and that makes it more universal somehow. Death With Dignity and Should Have Known Better are in my permanent memory. Return it to regularly, always unexpectedly.

★★★★★5.0

emotionalbeautifulquietly-brilliant

stayed with me

novel2005

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

Read it in one sitting and spent a week quieter than usual. What it says about memory, complicity, and the smallness of our rebellions has no clean resolution — and that's the point. I kept waiting for them to fight back. They never do. Neither, the book implies, do most of us.

★★★★★5.0

emotionalslow-burnquietly-brilliant

stayed with me