How to prevent my brain from turning into mush

aka my 2026 reading plan

A few weeks ago I was listening to Andrew Ross Sorkin talking about his book 1929 when he said: There were Cassandras in the room, but nobody really wanted to stop it. The party was going, the drinks were flowing.

I knew Cassandra was a reference. I just didn’t understand it. Heck, Taylor Swift has a song called Cassandra and I don’t understand that either. I got frustrated, stepped off the jogging track to Google what the heck this was a reference to.

Oh. It was to the Troy / Trojan Horse thing. I’ve heard of that. But I don’t know the story.

And then the urge to read the classics welled up in me again. This is a cycle I know well.

Out of all my failed dreams, the one that haunts me the most is that I never got to be good at English literature.

In tenth grade, nat and I wanted to learn literature so badly we asked our English teacher to guide us. We didn’t get very far.

In university, I took every literature course I could — enough to earn myself a minor in humanities. Most of us in the Hong Kong university didn’t speak English as our first language, so instead of a full book each week, we were assigned two or three chapters of different books. I would hastily speed-read Orwell, Austen, Kafka, without really understanding much.

Embarrassingly, I adore classic stories, just not in their original form. I love Sherlock Holmes in its BBC adaptation, Pride & Prejudice in The Lizzie Bennett Diaries, The Odyssey through the fan-animated musical EPIC: The Musical. Every time I get the urge to read the originals, I pick up the book, read a few pages, and get confused all over again.

The cycle perpetuates.

Not knowing the references makes me feel ill-equipped as a writer. There has been a humanity’s worth of literature since we first learned to articulate our thoughts. The giants are there. I just haven’t figured out how to stand on their shoulders.

So my 2026 reading plan is almost embarrassingly simple: have one hard book going at all times.

A “hard” book is classic literature, but it can also be science or history. A dense book. I’m not trying to hit a certain ratio.

Just keep one going. That’s it. I don’t need to finish anything. I don’t need to hit a number.

It would be great if I could lay out a lifetime reading plan like Tommy Dixon’s. But I don’t know enough about literature to give myself a curriculum. And I believe the right book finds you at the right time, so I’ll take things one book at a time and see where curiosity leads.

What will keep me accountable: a weekly study club hour with Ines Lee and Bhav Sharma. We all want to learn properly this year, and somehow landed on similar reading goals. After spending 90 minutes discussing note-taking systems for books (with no conclusion for any of us 😅) we started with The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and are moving on to The Great Gatsby.

(I also asked my personal literature professor Nat to teach me about note-taking. She gave me a tip to treat books like having a conversation with the author. Going to try and fill up all that marginalia with my thoughts. Slowly…).

Maybe next time someone references Cassandra, I’ll actually know the full story.

And though I’m not supposed to have a “proper” plan, these are some books on my list (not committed to this year):

• The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee

• The Bible

• East of Eden by John Steinbeck

• The Odyssey by Homer

What else would you add to this list and why?

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Update log:

• 👩🏻‍💻 Have been busy building youtubeproducer.app - tools for fellow YouTube producers like me. Basically tryna vibecode my job one task at a time

• 🤓 It was fun going into work on Monday morning. Apparently Ali and I have both been Claude-pilled at the exact same time. So on Monday we were both just trying to see what kind of tools we can build out to better our YouTube systems

• 📖 I’ve been really enjoying Lin-Manuel Miranda’s biography. I’ve lived through a lot of the moments chronicled in the book so it felt real special to see them immortalised in a book.

• 🛬 Back in Hong Kong. I’m now emotionally spent — as is most instances after time with family — and just being a lil hermit

• 💪 But lil hermit still gotta exercise. So I’ve already done 2x strength sessions + 1 run session since I got back. On the day this publishes, I’m doing 1x strength and 1x interval running sesh. I’m sore…

• 📘 Finished The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Now I just gotta transfer my analogue book notes to digital

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