Index
- Essay by Kaylee Kepple
Images Kindly Provided by:
1. Aries: Poiema Lee
2. Libra: Lucy Peterson
3. Capricorn: Ane Santiago
4. Pisces: Nanuka Jorjadze
5. Sagittarius: Emma Lee Smit
6. Cancer: Laurien Doodeman
7. Taurus: Arsejda Berzani
For this month’s Shelf Reading, we looked at readers’ stacks alongside their star signs and pulled a tarot for each. What does your pile of half-finished novels, dog-eared essay collections, poetry books, and softcovers reveal? Are you in your romantic Jane Eyre era? Covertly reinventing yourself? Avoiding one life by living five others? Is your Venus in Leo showing, or is that just the Eve Babitz effect?
Part literary criticism, horoscope, and tarot spread, we’ve given a playful attempt at decoding the stories stacked beside you. We paired each sign’s most recognizable reading habits with a card from the deck — unraveling the mood, plotline, and perhaps a personal myth currently unfolding between Chapters 3 and 247.
The stars offered their opinions, the tarot, classically, a few cryptic notes. The books, as always, told on you. The results are entirely unscientific, occasionally suspiciously accurate, and best enjoyed with a martini in hand.
Aries
Aries, your stack has become more an invitation than a reading list (in the best way).
The Paris Review, Forefowk, Mind Me — literary journals, independent publishing, small objects with big ideas. You gravitate towards books that are still becoming, conversations that haven’t quite settled, or writers who are scaling to become household names. There’s something wonderfu lly impatient about the way you forage: looking for the next voice before its revealed by someone else.
Your bookshelf suggests you’re less interested in certainty than discovery. You don’t find rereading the classics particularly sparks joy, so you opt for that of which is just beyond it.
Tarot: The Fool. Follow the obscure recommendation, buy the slim poetry collection, take the long way through the independent bookshop. New beginnings suit you.
Libra
Libra, your bookshelf is beautifully persuasive.
Every title is in conversation with the next, building an argument that feels both deeply political and personal. But for all the theory, there’s remarkable tenderness. You are never reading to win debates in dialogue, instead to imagine a softer more generous and connected way of living.
Your stack reminds us that beauty and justice have never been mutually exclusive. You like your ideas rigorous, covers striking, and your future hopeful.
Tarot: Justice. Naturally. Justice asks you to trust your voice enough to add something of your own to the conversation.
Capricorn
Capricorn, your bookshelf has the confidence of someone who refuses to be defined.
Baldwin and Bell Hooks. Tolstoy, Austen and Orwell sitting comfortably beside Adichie and Douglas Stuart. It’s ambitious without being showy, eclectic without the chaos. You read broadly because you suspect every great writer is answering the same question through their own language (perhaps both literally and metaphorically).
This stack by no means is for the weak! She (yes, she) has some power and endurance. You’re building a private canon that values complexity and rewards the slow accumulation of perspective.
Tarot: The World. A suitable card for someone whose reading habits span continents and centuries. Continue following the trail and unravelling threads. Every book in this stack tactfully introduces you to the next.
Pisces
Pisces, your stack doesn’t believe in genres, rather emotional weather.
Four towering piles, each wandering somewhere different. There are novels about memory, desire, grief, politics, translation and reinvention. All somehow speaking to one another across the room. You read to build an atmosphere around you, words washing over you like a wave, waning from the need to find answers in the works you encounter.
Your stack suggests you’re happiest living several lives at once. One book for the heart, one for the mind, one for the train ride home, and another because someone you admire mentioned it in passing. You trust intuition over algorithms, which is why your favourite books always seem to find you instead of the other way around.
Tarot: The Star. The card of hope, imagination and resonate faith. Continue following your instincts and protecting sacred time in solitude.
Sagittarius
Sagittarius, your bookshelf has some frequent-flyer miles going.
Baldwin, Duras, Coetzee, Tolstoy, Adichie, Orwell, Barbara Comyns, Jane Austen, Bell Hooks, Nina Simone, Douglas Stuart. Less a reading pile than an ongoing dinner party where everyone has varying convictions (but you’ve thoughtfully invited them all). You seem suspicious of those who only read one thing. Why settle for a single perspective when you can collect a dozen?
Your stack reveals a reader who’s endlessly curious, happiest chasing ideas that span and stand the test of time. You don’t read to confirm or conform to what you already know, rather with the hopes to debate and question your former self. Always with the intention to grow and remain agnostically curious.
Tarot: Temperance. A card ever so fitting for someone who instinctively blends classics with contemporary fiction, politics and poetry, and somehow always attuned with what’s arriving next. A literary alchemist through and through!
Cancer
Cancer, you’re collecting emotional evidence through your archive and sparking meaningful conversations when spotted reading on the street.
John Fante, Murakami, Alejandro Zambra, A Little Life. Every title on your stack begs the same question from a different angle: How do we belong to other people without disappearing into them? You seem drawn to writers who understand this depth and rebirth that comes from moments we may view as catastrophic. Even your ‘lighter’ reads don’t feel the need to conform to levity.
You also find absorption in the spaces between people: friendship, memory, identity, longing. You read with great intention, happy to live inside a beautiful sentence for a while. You find interest in a books’ perspective, collecting ones that formatively change the way you see yourself and the people around you.
Tarot: The Moon. The card of intuition, dreams, and reflection. This month, trust and take notice of the book that keeps finding their way back onto your bedside table. There are stories that persist for a reason.
Taurus
Taurus, your bookshelf smells faintly of artisanal olive oil, dried herbs, and a dinner party that started at seven quickly dissolving into midnight.
Cookbooks, fermentation guides, travel pages, and books chosen as much for their covers as their contents: this is not a stack assembled for productivity. You’ve carefully assembled, designed, and curated over time purely for pleasure and a bit of R&D. You read the way you cook — slowly, generously, and with great respect for texture.
Your bookshelf suggests you’re in a season of sumptuous nesting. Making the ordinary feel like a Michelin star restaurant experience. Lux. A better meal, a better table, a better afternoon spent reading in that patch of sunlight.
Tarot: The Empress. Card of abundance, beauty, and things that ripen like a sweet summer peach. Keep building the beautiful world you read about and expect the unexpected to inspire something delicious to come into your life.
Haus Journal: Noir Narratives
- Essay by Rogier van Schaik
Other Movie Recommendations:
1. The Killers (1946) directed by Robert Siodmak.
2. Laura (1944) directed by Otto Preminger.
3. Touch of Evil (1958) directed by Orson Welles.
4. Gun Crazy (1950) directed by Joseph H. Lewis.
5. In a Lonely Place (1950) directed by Nicholas Ray.
A western offers its frontier, a musical breaks into song and a horror movie will present its threats early on. Film noir moves in much more elusive ways. It slips away the moment we try to define it through aesthetics alone. The trench coats, cigarette smoke, venetian blinds and dark alleyways have become iconic, but they are not what makes a film noir.
It's the surface texture of something deeper.
Perhaps that is the reason why critics have argued for so many years whether Noir is a genre at all. Since the 50s, this debate remains unsolved. Noir seems less interested in what it looks like, than in what it feels like. It is at the end of the day a cinema of anxiety, a theater dream of moral erosion, haunted by the suspicion that control was always an illusion.
Thinking about the Noir protagonist reminds you that control is something you lose more and more along the way. The Noir protagonist rarely begins as a villain, but as someone trying to solve a problem. A detective taking a case, a writer needing money, or a boxer wanting another chance. The decisions seem small enough, reasonable even. Yet with every choice they make it narrows the path until escaping becomes impossible.
The upcoming screening of Billy Wilders’s Sunset Boulevard will show you how well it understands this trajectory.
Our Joe Gillis enters the story as a struggling screenwriter desperate to stay afloat. When he stumbles into Norma Desmond’s decaying mansion, it all appears that the arrangement made will be temporary. He needs shelter, and she needs companionship. The transaction feels manageable, but noir does not interest itself in a controllable outcome. It wreaks havoc and thrives on dramatic mistakes.
What follows is a story about a man gradually losing all ability to choose his own fortunes. An agencyless spiral awaits — money becomes obligation, obligation becomes dependency, and this in itselves becomes an entrapment.
By the time our Joe Gillis has the epiphany to regain control over his freedom, the narrative has already tightened around him to where the ending is one he cannot escape. It is predetermined, for every exit has removed itself from his path.
This is Film Noir’s most enduring insight, downfall arrives disguised as circumstance. A noir protagonist does not simply lose control, rather discover they never possessed it as they imagined. A Noir woman of seduction discovered that power was only the name others gave to the desires they surrendered at her feet.
The femme fatale remains one of cinema’s most recognizable features, precisely ‘cause she embodies this concern. She appears wherever desire and deception become impossible to separate. Her power lies not in evil, but uncertainty. She forces characters to question what they want is truly their own.
Film Noir’s relationship to manipulation is more complicated than the archetype suggests.
Hitchcock’s Notorious demonstrates this beautifully. Alicia Huberman initially appears to occupy familiar territory. She uses charm, performance and seduction to infiltrate a Nazi organization. On paper she has all the attributes of the classic femme fatale. However, the film gradually shifts our attention elsewhere.
The true manipulator is not Alicia, but Mrs. Sebastian, Alexander’s Mother, whose influence operates through psychological pressure, rather than seduction. Her power emerges from control, surveillance and emotional domination. She understands that coercion doesn’t need to come in the form of attraction. Sometimes it is offered through obligation, family, fear and loyalty.
What makes Notorious feel Noir above all, is not the presence of the dangerous woman, but the presence of hidden forces shaping every decision.
Film Noir is the dream a society has when it begins to suspect that its certainties were only another form of fear. The question is whether anyone truly understands the game being played. Perhaps this is why Noir so often flourishes during periods of social instability. It emerges not from confidence, but from uncertainty. It needs a shaky foundation to roar on. It needs to be free from any form of safety.
The original Noir of the 40s carried the shadow of war, the world had witnessed unprecedented violence and discovered how fragile ordinary life could become. This anxiety seeped into our cinemas and hidden enemies, secret networks and invisible threats became the recurring narrative obsessions. Lang’s Ministry of Fear is the captivation of this mood.
A seemingly insignificant event, a man winning a cake at a carnival, opens onto a world of espionage and conspiracy. The absurdity is precisely the point. Noir suggests that history can intrude upon ordinary life at any moment. The individual is never insulated as they imagine. Generations later, the fear has come back and changed. The distrust, more of the same.
Film Noir endures because the human soul has not become less obscure.
Some scholars argue that Film Noir belongs to a specific historical period, ending sometime in the late 50s. Yet the themes that animated those films continue to resurface because the conditions that produced them feel more and more relevant today. They may have never vanished. Political corruption persists, economic insecurity feels larger than life, manipulation seems more on the forefront than ever and the feeling that unforeseen forces shape our lives and instil fear that another world war is coming persists.
As long as these anxieties remain, these movies will continue returning to the Noir vocabulary.
Not necessarily its shadows, not necessarily its detectives, but the view of the world. Ultimately Film Noir is less a genre than a recurring mood of cultural self-examination. It emerges when certainty begins to crack. Whenever institutions become suspect, or, individuals discover that their choices are constrained by forces they cannot fully perceive.
The shadows do matter because they visualize the uncertainty, but Noir was never about the shadows. It is and has always been, about what is hiding within them.
Haus Journal: End-of-Year Movie Roundup, Inspired by our Tarot Reading
- Essay by Rogier van Schaik
Movie Theory:
1. Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time. (1985) — A poetic meditation on cinema as time
and memory, emphasizing rhythm and duration. Especially resonant if you love slow,
contemplative films
2. Bresson, Robert. Notes on the Cinematographer. (1975) — Aphoristic reflections on
cinema’s unique expression; recommended if you appreciate minimalist, expressive
form.
Other Movie Recommendations:
1. Yi Yi (2000) directed by Edward Yang.
2. The Color of Pomegranates (1969) directed by Sergei Parajanov.
3. Eternity and a Day (1998) directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
4. Still Walking (2008) directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda.
5. Taste of Cherry (1997) directed by Abbas Kiarosta.
Will 2026 be as fruitful as 2025?
The cards I pulled did more than respond to a personal uncertainty. They formed a tapestry, weaving together the films that left me awestruck, to the meaning of the cards.
To ask the tarot whether the next year will be as fruitful as the last is already to admit uncertainty about what fruit means. Is it abundance, recognition, intimacy, coherence?
The reading for 2026 does not answer with reassurance or denial. Instead, it stages a sequence of conditions: love that stabilizes, a collapse that clarifies, and restraint that quietly sustains. The cards, The Lovers, The Tower, and Temperance, do not promise continuity. They suggest transformation. Their meanings echo uncannily through the movies I’ve picked out from the ones I’ve seen last year in Beau Travail, Sentimental Value, Synecdoche, New York, The Brutalist, and First Cow, films that understand fruitfulness not as accumulation, but as consequence.
The Lovers is not peace. It is exposure.
For 2026, this card does not promise happiness; it promises choice. Choice is always carrying resistance in some small, private way. Under The Lovers, fruitfulness emerges from remaining with discomfort — feeling deeply without demanding resolution — and planting seeds in ground we do not yet fully understand. The fruit here is dense. It ripens slowly, inwardly.
In Beau Travail, love is never declared or consummated, yet it saturates every gesture. Galoup’s devotion — to the Legion, to order, to Sentain — is so rigid it begins to fracture. His body performs obedience while his interior collapses. Love is not union but disturbance, revealing what discipline attempts to suppress. Something desires. Something refuses to be named.
Sentimental Value carries this disturbance inward, into memory and inheritance. Love moves unevenly across generations, passed down like an heirloom that does not quite fit its recipient. Affection arrives too early or too late, in the wrong proportion. The Lovers becomes the ache of proximity without alignment — the realization that intimacy always costs more than we anticipate.
The Tower is not sudden. It is honest.
For 2026, this card does not threaten catastrophe; it offers relief. Certain identities, projects, or narratives will no longer hold. They will fail quietly, without spectacle. In that failure, something lighter emerges. Fruitfulness may arrive disguised as disappointment — the strange freedom of no longer sustaining what was never viable.
In Synecdoche, New York, collapse unfolds gradually, almost corteous. Caden builds and rebuilds, attempting to contain life within representation, as though meaning could be stabilized through repetition. Each structure exposes another fissure. The Tower here is not a lightning strike, but the slow realization that control was always an illusion. The fall occurs when pretense becomes impossible.
The Brutalist externalizes this impulse: concrete, geometry, moral certainty, the desire to build something that will outlast the body that made it. Yet the cost is embedded in the structure itself. The Tower falls not because it is weak, but because it denies vulnerability. Its collapse reveals the human residue buried within ambition.
Temperance is not balance. It is care.
For 2026, Temperance proposes a different metric altogether. The year may not impress or announce itself. But it may sustain you. The fruits will be small, precise, and shared. You will recognize them not by abundance, but by your ability to remain with them.
First Cow understands this instinctively. Cookie and King-Lu do not dream of dominance; they dream of continuation. Their theft is gentle, their ambition is small. They work quietly at night, measuring what can be taken without harm. All for the sake of feeding their dream to be entrepreneurs. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is wasted. Their friendship becomes a form of alchemy — combining patience and risk into something briefly nourishing.
In tarot, Temperance is the art of living without excess and without denial. It is the slow practice of mixing what is available into something livable. In First Cow, fruitfulness is not scalable or defensible. It exists only as long as it is tended.
So will 2026 be as fruitful as the year before? The tarot, like these films, refuses comparison. Fruitfulness is not cumulative; it is contextual. The Lovers suggest that intimacy will demand risk and choice. The Tower insists that what cannot stand must fall. Temperance promises that what remains, if tended carefully, will be enough.
2026, then, is not a sequel year. It is a distillation. Less spectacle, more substance. Less certainty, more meaning. The harvest may not be heavier — but it may be truer.
And perhaps the same question applies to the films we choose to consume in the year ahead.
Haus Journal: The Texture of Conversations
- Essay by Kaylee Kepple
Sociology and Community Theory
1. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. (1912) — on collective experience and the sacred in shared gatherings.
2. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. (2000) — on the social importance of communal connection.
Feminist Theory and Labor
3. Fraser, Nancy. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. (2013) — on solidarity, capitalism, and the transformation of feminist movements.
4. Hooks, Bell. All About Love: New Visions. (2000) — for her framing of community as an ethical practice rooted in care and mutual recognition.
Vulnerability, Storytelling, and Emotion
5. Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. (2012).
6. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. (1984) — on the necessity of speaking, of transforming silence into language and action.
Cultural and Psychological Contexts
7. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. (1977) — for understanding how physical gatherings shape emotional landscapes.
8. Hooks, Bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. (2003) — on community as an act of pedagogy and resilience.
Community, as I’ve come to understand it, is not built in grand halls or committees, but in the murmur of overlapping stories. It happens when someone says, “ah, me too,” and the phrase becomes a bridge. Around the table, we begin to recognize that what we thought were private failures are, in truth, shared conditions — symptoms of a world that often asks us to be smaller than we are. The table thus functions not merely as a setting for conversation, but as a vessel through which empathy and understanding circulate. In the texture of conversations — the pauses, the laughter, the hesitations that reveal sincerity — we find the pulse of community itself.
Émile Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence illuminates this dynamic: the sense of heightened vitality and connection that emerges when individuals gather and feel themselves part of something greater. It doesn’t require a cathedral — only a circle of chairs and the permission to speak. The table becomes our altar, reaffirming belonging while holding presence and possibility. The gathering becomes its own worship, where care is the offering. In the exchange of glances, stories, and laughter, we are both witness and worshipper.
Bell Hooks writes that community is the practice of love — an active commitment to nurturing one another’s growth. Around the table, that love takes form. The practice of listening, the gentle affirmations, and the pauses that make room for another’s truth become rituals of belonging. Audre Lorde reminds us that “without community, there is no liberation.” At the table, liberation begins with the small, radical act of showing up and being seen. Through conversation and care, we remember that to gather is to practice freedom together. The sacredness of the table, then, lies not in its material form but in its capacity to hold space for mutual recognition and the radical possibility of connection.
And then there is the labor of it all — the unseen work of preparation, invitation, and holding space. Arlie Hochschild’s “second shift” lingers here: the recognition that care often comes as unpaid, unacknowledged labor. Yet when this labor is chosen, not imposed, it transforms from burden into bond. Setting a table, stirring soup, arranging flowers — these are gestures of devotion, love translated into motion, evidence of our wish to make belonging visible.
To gather, then, is to build a language from gestures — a syntax of attention. It is to say: I will listen. I will bear witness. I will remember your story alongside my own. The table becomes a kind of text, teaching us that community is the living grammar of care, and gathering is its sacred speech.
By the end of the night, while we may not have solved the world’s problems, we have surely altered the atmosphere of our own. Community, I think, begins here — in the ordinary act of returning to the table, again and again. Weaving new worlds from conversation, the table keeps its memory waiting patiently for the next gathering, and for love to take its seat.
Haus Journal: The Third Room
- Essay by Kaylee Kepple
Primary Works by Virginia Woolf
1. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.
2. Woolf, Virginia. “The Third Room.” In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1942.
3. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. London: Hogarth Press, 1976.
4. Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. London: Hogarth Press, 1931. (For its meditations on inner life and solitary creative perception.)
Works Resonant with the ‘Third Room’ Concept
5. Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. (Especially essays on personal interiors and public selves.)
6. Babitz, Eve. Eve’s Hollywood. New York: New York Review Books, 2015. (Memoir-as-room: the dreamy, sensorial space of the self.)
7. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt, 1974. (For metaphorical spaces as mental and emotional states.)
8. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. (Philosophical exploration of interior spaces and imagination.)
Contemporary Reflections on Creative & Sacred Spaces
9. Hooks, Bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: New Press, 1995. (On art-making as an act of self-definition and sanctuary.)
10. Smith, Zadie. “That Crafty Feeling.” The Believer, 2008. (On the private process of writing and creative retreat.)
She was always circling the problem of consciousness which is to say the problem of living at all. She wrote as if time were a tide and she were both standing on the shore and already being carried out. She understood the undertow being the long illness of the mind, and stone in the pocket.
What remains is not only the work but the way she made the work feel inevitable — as if it could not have been otherwise, and the only way to survive the act of living was to write it down while it was still happening.
Virginia Woolf also taught us that a woman needs a room of her own. To write, think, and simply exist without being endlessly interrupted. In The Third Room, she takes it further — beyond the practical sanctuary into something subtler: the psychic annex. If the first room is the world’s, and the second is for rest, the third is a territory with no lease. It is the internal atelier where self learns to stretch without witness.
Haus of Terzetto feels like the architectural echo of that third room. Not simply a workspace, not merely a refuge — a place where the boundaries between “out there” and “in here” blur. You can paint until your coffee goes cold, talk to strangers in a language made of glances, or spend hours reading without shifting your chair.
In The Third Room, Woolf isn’t just protecting the artist’s time, she’s safeguarding the return. You go there to get lost — deliberately, luxuriantly — so you can find the thread that leads you home.
While we may say we are here at Haus to create and be inspired, we are really just following Woolf’s map. Walking into that third sacred space where the world loosens its grip and, when we leave, carry it with us. The room, the light, the unspoken permission to be entirely our own.
In this Third Room, you realize you’ve been rehearsing your return without even knowing it. Growing in circles, spiraling inward toward that private address where you keep the first drafts of yourself.
A sacred space (if truly sacred) is not where you end up; but where you turn back toward yourself, unhurried, and start the walk home.