Chloe Cullen's Blog, page 3

THE LOG: My Top 10 Auto-Pilot Albums

I’m an obsessive listener. If I like an album, often with a moody guitar and melancholic lyrics, I will play it a few days in a row. When I’m not listening, the songs are stuck in my head. Then I try to push it on someone else. Songs sent over text, then follow-ups requesting their opinion, only if it aligns with mine. Many a car ride have been monopolized by my insistence on listening to my current favorite album, a hazardous game when the sad-girl genre I frequent has the potential to make mos...

6.2 Do we really need Levin’s mowing in ANNA KARENINA?

I bought my copy of Anna Karenina in 2013, the summer before my senior year of high school. This Barnes and Noble Classics edition, clean-edged and dense like a sheet of coffee-table glass, sat out during a summer storm. I was only halfway through. The yellow highlighter bled away from the words into vertical, waving ripples. The paperback spine unglued at page 302, cleaving the book into two (still substantial) novels.

my hashtags are giving me a visceral reaction.. not a good one.

My dad talks ...

6.1 How Leo Tolstoy & Tony Tulathimutte Write Funny Men

Embroidered on the couch pillow of our collective brain is the first line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What is rarely remembered is the immediate domestic catastrophe of Prince Stepan “Stiva” Arkadyevitch Oblonsky and his unhappy family:

Page 1 of my copy of Anna Karenina. If you want a color code on the annotations…The black pen is from my 2013 summer reading, and the dark green felt-pen-thick notes are from my AP Lit class not...

The Digest: The timeless rituals keeping me sane from winter to spring

Isabella, a subscriber who went to high school with me, asked me this week, “How is it being a full-time writer?”

Someday, I hope to write full-time.

Today? I’m a part-time nanny with a full-time preoccupation about whether I’m writing enough to someday transition to full-time.

To correct the narrative, I played around with the idea of a “day in my life” schedule. I commute into Manhattan every afternoon around 1:30 or 2 p.m. I walk my second grader to her activities and finish her homework before ...

Lesson 6: A beginner's guide to Leo Tolstoy & ANNA KARENINA

If you only read the biographical broad strokes, the condensed list of bullet-point items in Tolstoy’s long life, you can get the safe impression he’s a pill.

After losing both of his parents before he turns 10, he holds onto his brothers and dreams about an idyllic family life. When he marries and has 13 children, he considers sex and lust as sinful and marriage as an institutionalized form of prostitute, according to The Kreutzer Sonata, though, decades earlier as a young man, he contracted ST...

Violet Sorrengail, blink twice if you need help

I opt in to romantasy like a Christmas-and-Easter Christian. I tap into the notable events with good-natured cheer, and I (try to) limit my skepticism to escape to a younger, more innocent mental landscape.

But after the third and latest installment in Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean Series, also known as the Fourth Wing books, I am done with this series.

I won’t be reading the fourth, fifth, or seventeenth book about Violet Sorrengail and Xaden Riorson, because Yarros either has lost track of her chara...

5.5 MIDDLEMARCH is an epic for losers and failed marriages

If Austen is the optimistic banter of Love Island, where couples end the story with a happy engagement and promise of a good life together, Eliot is Couples Therapy, massaging the scar tissue of a fifteen-year marriage.

“There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that–to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail” (Chapter 76).

Set in 1829, Eliot wrote Middlemarch as a historical fiction, a glance back thirty years in the past to the anticipation of England’s First Reform Bil...

Who will (& should) win at the 2025 Oscars?

Receiving this text is, to me, the highest compliment:

(For transparency, it’s from my mom.)

The fun part of the Oscars is casting a personal ballot and seeing how the Academy goes with or against your taste. Reading Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars reminded me that the Academy is a political body. The winners are determined by voters, and voters are humans to influence. The Harvey Weinstein campaigning chapters show the cut-throat manipulation of a body of voters to push the result you want. If he...

Reader's Note: The new schedule is no schedule

If you could download 1,000 books into your mental library with a click, would you?

You would retain a mental inventory of the pages, an instantaneous memory of every line and plot point, a photographic knowledge of page numbers in a second.

An adjacent hypothetical is, if you could maintain perfect nutrition with a once-daily IV drip, would you?

Sure, it would be nice to offload the mental bandwidth of plotting meals, but what about wandering through grocery stores? Catching up with a friend ov...

The Digest: The Death of a Writer Locked Out

The Digest is a monthly reflection & round-up for paid subscribers. Today’s post is best viewed in browser or app, since it’s too long for email 🤷🏻‍♀️

Over the summer, Luke decided to spend February in Utah to work remotely and ski on weeknights and weekends. A bucket list item of his. I encouraged it. It wasn’t until I had to leave him behind in Utah that I imagined what our apartment would look like without him in it.

Being a Capricorn workaholic, I pictured my return home as a reciprocal worki...