Every year I go back to a handful of books and films. Not to "revise" them, but to see what they do to me now. The pages don't really change. They never will, but I do. If a book can still punch a hole in my chest, it's not dead. If a film still makes me shift in my seat, it hasn't forgiven me yet.
So, here's what I'm going back to in 2026.

1. Either/Or – Søren Kierkegaard
I picked this up again on a random day, standing on a train platform. One of those tiny moments: train doors open, you pause for half a second, not sure if you want to get on or just disappear back into the crowd. That stupid pause felt like Kierkegaard territory. Either/Or came out in 1843 under the name "Victor Eremita." The book is basically two ways of living arguing with each other: the aesthetic life and the ethical life. One voice is all about seduction, music, mood, and clever little thoughts; the other is a judge talking about responsibility, marriage, and picking a direction instead of floating around.First time I read it, I was all in on the aesthetic stuff. I wanted to be the clever one, the one who doesn't commit, who just hovers. Now the judge annoys me less. Worse: he makes sense. Kierkegaard doesn't really tell you what to do, he just keeps pointing at that point where you're trying not to decide and says, "That is also a decision." If you actually sit with this thing, your idea of "beauty" stops being innocent. The book doesn't pat you on the back. It holds up a mirror and waits and actually squeezes you.
Every time I read it, the book oozes different ideas, beauty and different realms—this is the magic of this book.

2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche
This one has been in the background of my life since around 2009, when I first bumped into it through Osho.
Since then, Nietzsche has been like bad weather: even when he's not there, I check the sky. I don't look for God but only for him.
Written between 1883 and 1885, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is where he throws out the big stuff: Übermensch, "God is dead," will to power, eternal recurrence. It's written like some strange, half-drunk scripture — parables, speeches, songs — but it keeps making fun of its own seriousness.
When I was younger, I treated Zarathustra like a prophet with secret messages. I even used to utter every aphorism with great care like if I read it too quick it would vanish from the pages. Now he feels more like a lonely guy dancing on a mountain, talking to people who mostly want comfort, routine, and a warm bed. It's not a "self-help" book. It's more like a long, intense monologue you overhear and then can't get out of your head. If you want to watch your morals wobble a bit, go spend time with him. Just don't expect the book to care about your comfort.
Heads up, I recently bought the audio book and instantly regretted it, because other people weren't uttering like me, they were rushing through the words, awful audio book.

3. Histories – Herodotus
When I was working on my Who Will Bury the Dead God, I kept drifting back to Herodotus. Not for facts, but for energy. Whenever my writing got too clean, I needed his mess.
Written in the 5th century BCE, Histories is often called the start of Western history writing, but honestly, it reads more like a guy telling stories that keep spiralling. He talks about the Persian Wars, then suddenly we're off in Egypt, then we're with strange animals or listening to oracles or local gossip someone told him in a tavern.
It's not "objective." It's curious. He'll say, "Some people say this, others say that, I'm not sure," and just leave it with you. I like that. Rereading it feels like hanging out at the moment where history is still half-myth, half-report. If you want ancient Greece to feel alive instead of like exam material, this is a good place to get lost.

4. The Red Book – Carl Jung
This one feels less like a book and more like opening someone's skull and finding a cathedral inside. I needed that, someone needed to crack my head in two halves, my head was too messy back then and Jung broke it, my hemispheres.
Between about 1915 and 1930, Jung wrote and painted what later became The Red Book — records of visions, strange conversations with inner figures, and a kind of deliberate descent into his own unconscious. He recopied it all into a big, red volume with careful handwriting and wild paintings: mandalas, prophets, deserts, creatures. Archetypes, gods, strange voices, all arguing over what a human being is. It's uncomfortable in places, and sometimes it feels too close — like reading a dream that has no right to recognize you as well as it does. I come back to it slowly, a few pages at a time.

5. The Golden Bough – James George Frazer
For my second book, Frazer and Freud were basically my two noisy neighbours. One spoke in rituals, the other in dreams.
The Golden Bough came out in 1890 and later exploded into twelve volumes of myth, ritual, and speculation. Frazer goes through dying-and-rising gods, sacred kings who have to be killed, fertility rituals, seasonal festivals — all the ways humans try to bargain with the world.
At the centre is that priest of Nemi, the "Rex Nemorensis," who holds power only until someone else kills him and takes his place. His big story is that human thinking moves from magic to religion to science, dragging pieces of the old stages along the way. A lot of his theories are outdated now, and the book has rough edges, but the scale of it is still wild. If you love spotting myth in modern life — in films, politics, your own weird habits — this is the book you keep dipping into rather than "finishing.

"Now, let me drag you through my movies list—

1. Stalker – Andrei Tarkovsky
There are films you put on and forget. Stalker is not that. It just sits behind your eyes.
Released in 1979, it's about a guide — the Stalker — who leads a writer and a professor into the "Zone," a forbidden area where the normal rules seem bent. Deep inside, there's supposed to be a Room that gives you your deepest, most honest desire — not the one you post about, the one you barely admit to yourself.
The film is slow. Really slow. Rust, puddles, tunnels, silence. Nothing "big" happens for long stretches, but it all feels loaded. Every time I rewatch it, I realize I want something different than last time, so the Room feels different too. The film never tells you if going there is a good idea. It just keeps asking: are you sure you really want what you think you want? This is the delirium of the human mind.

2. Andrei Rublev – Andrei Tarkovsky
If you stick with Tarkovsky, you eventually end up here, whether you feel ready or not.Set in 15th-century Russia, Andrei Rublev follows an icon painter wandering through war, famine, weird rituals, and long stretches of mud and fog. It's broken up into episodes: pagan ceremonies, brutal raids, a boy trying to cast a bell, people losing faith and then half-finding it again.
Rublev spends big parts of the film silent, watching, backing away from his work because everything feels pointless and cruel. It's not a comforting film. But somewhere near the end, when colour icons appear after all that grey, it hits harder because of the long silence before it. It feels less like "art appreciation" and more like someone suddenly deciding to create again after wanting to give up.

3. White Noise – Noah Baumbach
Baumbach's White Noise (from DeLillo's novel) is basically a midlife crisis wrapped in supermarket light.We follow Jack Gladney, a professor of "Hitler Studies," his messy family, and a small town that ends up dealing with an "Airborne Toxic Event." There's traffic, panic, rumours, and yet people somehow still argue about normal things at dinner. The tone keeps flipping: part comedy, part disaster, part family drama.It's funny and jittery, and under all of it there's this constant hum: we are terrified of dying and we don't know what to do with that fact.
So we shop, we talk, we joke. I watch it to see how much of that hum I'm still ignoring in my own life.

4. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick
You must be thinking, this man's crazy, this should be on top. I know, sometimes you need to save good things for later—like good dessert. I don't half-watch 2001, never did. If it's on, I'm in for the whole thing.From the black screen for 2 minutes 37 seconds and the apes with bones to the spinning ships to that strange, quiet final room, the film tells a huge story with almost no explanations.
The black monolith turns up now and then like a glitch from somewhere else, pushing things forward. HAL 9000, with that calm, polite voice, is still one of the most unsettling "characters" I've seen; he sounds like customer service while he's killing people. When people ask me about my book "The Unknown Existence of Being", I tell them if you solve the mystery of 2001: A Space Odyssey, then you will grasp my book. Hilarious, I know, I should take back my blasphemous words.But every time I rewatch it, I notice some tiny detail I'd missed. Like, how he pushes his glass with middle fingers, how he checks his back pocket, like this. It makes me feel small, but not in a bad way. More like: "Right, I am not the centre of anything, actually." The film just lets that feeling sit there.

5. Eraserhead – David Lynch
Eraserhead feels like being stuck overnight in a factory you can't get out of, with your own anxiety pacing beside you. While I am on my shift at work, I think about this movie most of the time.
Lynch shot it in stark black-and-white. The world is cramped rooms, pipes, weird noises, and that horrible in-between feeling where you're not sure if you're awake. The story is simple on paper, but on screen it turns into guilt, fear of parenthood, and the sense that your life has turned into something you don't understand.
I don't watch this for "fun." I almost don't watch or read anything for fun, see, I have a not-delighted head. I watch it to see if it still gets under my skin. Usually it does. Even when I think I'm fine, one sound or one image from it stays with me longer than it should. Some nights even that creepy newborn comes into my consciousness. Now for the sake of art I give you one extra:

Buffalo '66 – Vincent Gallo
Buffalo '66 is one long, awkward flinch of a film, pretending to be a romance. It's not romance, at least not for me.Billy Brown gets out of prison, panics about visiting his parents, and kidnaps a tap dancer to pose as his wife. It's snow, football, bad family dinners, and people who clearly don't know how to talk about anything that really matters. It's ugly and tender at the same time.What starts as petty revenge slowly turns into a portrait of someone who is totally broken and still, somehow, wants a chance to be seen. Put it next to Eraserhead and you get two different kinds of outsiders: one trapped in a nightmare, the other trapped in his own shame. I go back to them to see which parts still feel too close, and which parts, finally, don't. It's the same as Kierkegaard's Either/Or in visual form.

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