Welcome ✦✧
personal canon is a newsletter about trying to live a meaningful, intellectually engaged and self-actualized life. It’s about how to take your intellectual, artistic and literary aspirations seriously—especially when you’re no longer in school or academia, but feel a strong desire to keep on learning, making, and growing.
It’s also about the joy of reading widely and reading deeply, whether that’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry or philosophy.
Every week or so, I’ll write posts about:
Great contemporary literature, poetry and essays—I love writers like Annie Ernaux, Victoria Chang, Ben Lerner, and Olivia Laing
Older, canonical works—by writers like Hannah Arendt or Marcel Proust
Architecture and design trends
How to apply ideas from philosophy, critical theory, sociology and art history to everyday life
I also write monthly roundups of books, films and visual design inspiration:
personal canon has been featured by Substack three times: in Substack Reads (June 2024), The Weekender (October 2024), and The Weekender again (June 2025)…and in the weekly recommendations from Lapham’s Quarterly and Marginal Revolution.
What does “personal canon” mean? ✦✧
Everyone has their own personal, idiosyncratic highly subjective set of canonical works—the works they’ll return to for the rest of their lives; that shaped who they are; that reward renewed looking, reading, listening and experiencing.
I’m always interested in how others define their own canon—and writing a newsletter is one of the best ways to share the canonical works that have changed my life.
Where should I start reading? ✦✧
If you’re interested in literature:
If you want to read about architecture and design:
If you’re interested in art and technology:
And if you’re an artist, writer, researcher or technologist who needs some words of encouragement:
Who are you? ✦✧
I’m a software designer and writer living in London. Before this, I lived in San Francisco, and wrote about the city’s art and literary community here:
I have a very interdisciplinary background (computer science and design in undergrad, design history for my MA). As a result, personal canon covers a wide range of topics: modernist literature, book cover design, web-based art, electronic music, and amateur investigations into sociology and philosophy.
I also write literary and design criticism:
On the perils of “design thinking” for The Atlantic
On cultural stagnation in the 21st century for Asterisk
On conspiracy theories and the internet novel, for the Cleveland Review of Books
On Vietnamese modern architecture and climate change for the modernist #44
On Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries for ArtReview
…and some other work:
6 book recommendations for novels and memoirs with beautiful, sensory language for The Atlantic
A roundtable discussion on museums and climate activism in the Reiminagining Museums for Climate Action book
