For Cher Tan, reading is less an escape and more an excavation, of systems, identities, and the fault lines in between. A cultural critic and essayist, Tan’s literary taste traverses zines, theory, and underground ephemera, all filtered through a sharp, unrelenting intellect. Her bookshelf is shaped by curiosity, reading works by the likes of Guy Debord and Mimi Thi Nguyen, in which a swirling vortex of Big Tech, surveillance and selfhood is parsed with the same rigour as a throwaway joke between friends.
Peripathetic is Tan's 2025 Stella Prize-longlisted debut collection subtitled 'notes on (un)belonging', that builds a world in fragments that arrive at coherence. It’s a collection of essays on internet culture, late capitalism, memory and migration, stitched together with biting humour and philosophical clarity. Her approach to reading reflects that same ethos:expansive and deeply informed by a history of countercultural thought. She doesn’t do favourites, and always is looking for writing that fractures rather than conforms.
Whether she’s highlighting the anti-imperialist rigour of The Jakarta Method, reflecting on addiction memoirs, or returning to Society of the Spectacle every few years for fresh insight, Tan reads with the urgency of someone making sense of it all, one sentence at a time.
Below, we speak with Cher Tan as she shares the books that formed her, the zines that changed everything, and the ideas she keeps turning over.
The last book I read …
White Out by Michael W. Clune. One of the best in the “addiction memoir” genre in my opinion; Clune writes with visceral verve and acute self-awareness about the ways addiction can irrevocably shape one’s past, present, and future. His prose is top-notch, and last I hear he’s got a novel titled Pan coming out soon, which I’m eagerly awaiting.
On my bedside table: I am currently reading …
Mood Machine by Liz Pelly. I’m in the midst of reviewing this book, but I’m also a fervent anti-streaming advocate in my personal life so this particularly speaks to my interests in terms of how Big Tech corporations manipulate the ease of convenience to enact new normals at the expense of humanity and the world.
My favourite book of all time …
I don’t particularly enjoy playing favourites. Moods and tastes change over time, and I consider it odd to have one unwavering favourite throughout one’s lifetime.
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The literary character I most identify with is …
I wish I can say I identify with literary characters, but I much prefer characters who are unlike myself. They help me understand how other people conduct relationships or move through the world in various times and settings.
The book that changed my life is …
Laura Grace Ford’s Savage Messiah. It’s more of a zine, but its issues have now been collected into one big book that was published in 2018. Other serialised zines which changed my life were Al Burian’s Burn Collector and Mimi Thi Nguyen’s Slander (also known as Slant). They were really formative for me in that they showed me underground worlds from their point of view and that I could simply publish whatever the hell I wanted.
The best book I ever received is…
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. I rarely receive books as gifts, as most people in my life are afraid of either buying me the wrong thing, or that I might have read it already. But the hardcover edition had just come out, and while I didn’t mind waiting for the paperback (I prefer paperbacks), a friend who similarly enjoys the author’s work ordered this for me as a thank-you gift for our friendship.
The book I would give as a gift is …
The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. This is rigorous investigative journalism about the effects of the US-incited communist purges during the Cold War period—in particular what resulted in mass killings in Indonesia in 1965–66 (see Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing for an abbreviated, audiovisual version)—and how they have reverberated around the world. It was published in 2020 but remains all the more relevant halfway through this decade of mounting crisis and renewed fascism.
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Growing up, the best book on my bookshelf was …
I didn’t really have my own books growing up. They were often loans from school or public libraries. A friend lent me a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 not long after I finished high school, which opened my eyes to censorship under authoritarianism.
A writer I admire the most is….
It’s hard to pin one down, for reasons I’ve mentioned throughout this interview. Here’s ten: Percival Everett, Jackie Ess, Dionne Brand, Lisa Carver, Norman Erickson Pasaribu, Can Xue, Virginie Despentes, Elif Batuman, Max Easton and Vigdis Hjorth.
My favourite living author is …
Just like how I don’t have a favourite book, I don’t have a favourite living author. I’m of the opinion that it’s better to have favourite dead authors because you cannot form parasocial relationships with them. I think my favourite dead author is Ursula K. Le Guin. Mark Fisher, Janet Frame and Dubravka Ugrešić come close; or at least, they are authors whose deaths I mourn because no more new books.
A book everyone should read at least once is…
Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. It contains 221 of Debord’s ‘aphorisms’ on the spectacle—“not a collection of images but a social relation between people that is mediated by images”, as he describes—that surrounds us as a result of capital and power. I’ve been re-reading it every five years or so since I discovered it in 2008 and often encounter a new insight each time.
