Cortis Book Recommendations

CORTIS read. Like, actually read.

They talk about books in interviews, pass them around the dorm, leave them lying in their hideout. So I did the obvious fan thing and collected everything I could find, member by member. Then I added a few of my own picks at the bottom — books I’d hand them if I could.

Juhoon reads more than the rest of them put together, so he has a page of his own: every book Juhoon has read, with a short synopsis of each one.

Books I’d recommend to Cortis

Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell

This one is not mine. Ari, a Juhoon biased COER, left it in the comments on this post along with a second vote for Madonna in a Fur Coat, and she was right on both counts, so here it is with her name on it.

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to go back through old newspapers and rewrite history so that the Party has always been right. He starts keeping a diary, which is a crime, and falls in love, which is a worse one. Almost everything people now say about surveillance, propaganda and language comes out of this book, and the vocabulary came with it: Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, the memory hole. It is also, underneath all that, a love story that goes very badly.

It sits oddly well next to what CORTIS already read. Put it beside Dazai’s No Longer Human and Hesse’s Demian and you have three books about a person trying to stay themselves while something larger works on them.

The Artist’s Way — Julia Cameron

If I could put one book in their hands, it’s this. The Artist’s Way is basically a twelve-week boot camp for unblocking your creativity, and the reason it works is that it’s not precious about it — it’s practical. Morning pages, artist dates, the whole routine. It’s the book a lot of working artists quietly credit. Doechii has talked about doing the morning pages — three pages, longhand, first thing, no editing — and you can hear that kind of discipline in how sharp and intentional her writing is. For a group that produces its own music, this is the book that protects the part of you that makes things.

Madonna in a Fur Coat — Sabahattin Ali

A quiet Turkish novel from 1943 that became a sleeper hit decades later, especially with younger readers. It’s a love story about a shy young man and a fiercely independent woman, but really it’s about loneliness and the ache of being deeply seen for once. Short, tender, and it sits with you for a long time after. Seconded by Ari in the comments, who said it became one of her favourites straight away.

Timecode of a Face — Ruth Ozeki

Ozeki sat in front of a mirror and looked at her own face for three hours, then wrote about it. That’s the book. It sounds simple and it absolutely is not — it turns into a meditation on identity, aging, memory and being mixed-race. For people who spend their lives being looked at, like an idol group does, this one would hit a very specific nerve.

The Memory Police — Yoko Ogawa

On an unnamed island, things quietly disappear — birds, roses, whole categories of objects — and the people slowly forget them. The Memory Police make sure of it. It’s a soft, dreamlike, deeply unsettling novel about loss and what holds a person together when memory won’t. The perfect companion to a long flight or a sleepless tour night.