About me

My name is Alanna. I am a 25-year-old artist who really doesn’t like making a website and talking about myself. So, instead of an introduction, here is my book list; I believe it introduces me better than I ever can. My CV and Artist Statement are in the site footer.

Self estimated caption
" * " = Potential triggers for the general audience
" ** " = Triggers for most audience
Bold = Could be a challenging read/academic writing

The current book list has no captions. If I decide to move a book to the recommended list, fitting captions will be added.

Current book list: The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir, Leviathan - Paul Auster, Life for Sale - Yukio Mishima, House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski

Highly recommend books:
Fiction

The Portrait of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde, The Secret History - Donna Tartt*, Hell Screen - Ryūnosuke Akutagawa**, The Great God Pan - Arthur Mathen, The Stranger - Albert Camus, Runaway Horses - Yukio Mishima*, Dogra Magra - Yumeno Kyūsaku*, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Arthur Douglas, No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai**, Shūfūki(秋風記) - Osamu Dazai** (available in Japanese and Traditional Chinese only), Kusamakura - Natsume Sōseki, I Am a Cat - Natsume Sōseki, A Lost Paradise - Junichi Watanabe**, The Flowers of Buffoonery - Osamu Dasai, The Course of the Heart - M. John Harrison*

Non-Fiction

William Blake v.s. the World - John Higgs, Discourse on Decadence - Sakaguchi Ango, Prisoner's Dilemma - William Poundstone, Science as a Vocation - Max Weber, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks

Essay of Art: On Photography - Susan Sontag, To Photograph is to Learn How to Die - Tim Carpenter*, The Queer Art of Failure - Jack Halberstam, Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke, How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change - Al-An deSouza

Essay on Philosophy

The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus**, The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality - Bernard Williams*, On the Genealogy of Morality - Friedrich Nietzsche, Walden - Henry David Thoreau. Nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Trouble with Being Born - E. M. Cioran**, The World as Will and Representation - Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosophy in the Bedroom - Marquis de Sade** (You might also argue this should be in the fiction category), The Ethics of Ambiguity - Simone de Beauvoir

Essay on queer, sex, and disability

A Cyborg Manifesto - Donna Haraway, Feminist, Queer, Crip - Alison Kafer, The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary - Judith Butler, Queer phenomenology - Sara Ahmed, Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies - Michael J. Bader*

Witchcraft and Occult

The Secret Teachers of the Western World - Gary Lachman, The Modern Witchcraft Book of Tarot - Skye Alexander, Dictionary of Ancient Magic Words and Spells - Claude Lecouteux, Hermetica, The Greater & Lesser Keys of Solomon,
A History of Magic, Witchcraft, and the Occult - Suzannah Lipscomb - Suzannah Lipscomb

Poetry

The Flowers of Evil - Charles Baudelaire*, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell - William Blake, Poems of the Goat - Chūya Nakahara*, Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes - Rainer Maria Rilke, After great pain, a formal feeling comes - Emily Dickinson

(updated 12/24/2025)