Thomas's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:18:49 -0700 60 Thomas's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Such a Fun Age 43923951 Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.

With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone family, and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.]]> 310 Kiley Reid 052554190X Thomas 0 to-read 3.76 2019 Such a Fun Age
author: Kiley Reid
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/16
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]]> The Hole 51283868 ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý
One day, while running an errand for her mother-in-law, she comes across a strange creature, follows it to the embankment of a river, and ends up falling into a hole—a hole that seems to have been made specifically for her. This is the first in a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape filled with eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures, leading her to question her role in this world, and eventually, her sanity.]]> 92 Hiroko Oyamada 0811228878 Thomas 0 to-read 3.47 2013 The Hole
author: Hiroko Oyamada
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review]]> 22542312 464 Raymond Williams 1784780154 Thomas 0 to-read 4.39 1981 Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review
author: Raymond Williams
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/15
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]]> Breaking and Entering 834582
Willie and Liberty are drifters. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay a while, and then move on. They have been lovers since they were teenagers, yet Liberty now senses that Willie is drifting away from her—that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous.]]> 288 Joy Williams 0394757734 Thomas 0 to-read 4.11 1988 Breaking and Entering
author: Joy Williams
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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]]> The Island 216389275 128 Antigone Kefala Thomas 0 to-read 3.57 The Island
author: Antigone Kefala
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.57
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/15
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]]> Lucky 194803834
Before Jodie Rattler became a star, she was a girl growing up in St. Louis. One day in 1955, when she was just six years old, her uncle Drew took her to the racetrack, where she got lucky—and that roll of two-dollar bills she won has never since left her side. Jodie thrived in the warmth of her extended family, and then—through a combination of hard work and serendipity—she started a singing career, which catapulted her from St. Louis to New York City, from the English countryside to the tropical beaches of St. Thomas, from Cleveland to Los Angeles, and back again. Jodie comes of age in recording studios, backstage, and on tour, and she tries to hold her own in the wake of Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Joni Mitchell. Yet it feels like something is missing. Could it be true love? Or is that not actually what Jodie is looking for?

Full of atmosphere, shot through with longing and exuberance, romance and rock 'n' roll, Lucky is a story of chance and grit and the glitter of real talent, a colorful portrait of one woman's journey in search of herself.]]> 384 Jane Smiley 0593535014 Thomas 0 to-read 2.98 Lucky
author: Jane Smiley
name: Thomas
average rating: 2.98
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]]> How Music Works 13235689
Acting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns—and shows how those patterns have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators, from Brian Eno to Caetano Veloso. Byrne sees music as part of a larger, almost Darwinian pattern of adaptations and responses to its cultural and physical context. His range is panoptic, taking us from Wagnerian opera houses to African villages, from his earliest high school reel-to-reel recordings to his latest work in a home music studio (and all the big studios in between).

Touching on the joy, the physics, and even the business of making music, How Music Works is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.]]> 345 David Byrne 1936365537 Thomas 4 4.00 2014 How Music Works
author: David Byrne
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/14
date added: 2025/04/14
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]]> Elizabeth Costello 6206 Elizabeth Costello is, on the surface, the story of a woman's life as a mother, sister, lover, and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling.]]> 231 J.M. Coetzee Thomas 0 to-read 3.49 2003 Elizabeth Costello
author: J.M. Coetzee
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire (Asian Interactions and Comparisons, 4)]]> 2592399 Crossed Histories represents a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to Manchuria under Japan's influence from the turn of the twentieth century to 1945. The contributors, who represent the fields of history, literature, film studies, sociology, and anthropology, unpack the complexity of Manchuria as an effect of the geopolitical imaginaries of various individuals and groups shaped by imperialism, colonialism, Pan-Asianism, and the present globalization. Manchuria is thus examined in the imaginations of a Chinese journalist and his Shanghai readers in the 1930s; prewar Japanese city planners and architects; a Manchu princess later executed by the Chinese nationalist government; various audiences of Japanese goodwill films of the 1930s and 1940s; the seven thousand Poles who immigrated to northern Manchuria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the state makers of Manchukuo (which included both Japanese and Chinese leaders) and North and South Korea during the Cold War era; and a student of Manchuria Nation- Building University in the mid-1940s.]]> 224 Mariko Tamanoi 0824828720 Thomas 0 to-read 3.50 2005 Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire (Asian Interactions and Comparisons, 4)
author: Mariko Tamanoi
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> <![CDATA[The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904-1932 (Harvard East Asian Monographs)]]> 1880036


The principal agency in the piecemeal growth of Japanese colonization was the South Manchurian Railway Company, and by the mid-1920s Japan had a deeply entrenched presence in Manchuria and exercised a dominant economic and political influence over the area. Japanese colonial expansion in Manchuria also loomed large in Japanese politics, military policy, economic development, and foreign relations and deeply influenced many aspects of Japan's interwar history.]]> 544 Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka 0674012062 Thomas 0 to-read 3.79 2001 The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904-1932 (Harvard East Asian Monographs)
author: Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s]]> 217387881 The origins of our postsecular present, revealed in a vivid, groundbreaking account of the moment when popular culture became the site of religious conflict.

The 1980s are usually seen as a slick, shrill decade. The Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers urged "Death to America"; Ronald Reagan was in the White House, backed by the Moral Majority; John Paul II was asserting Catholic traditionalism and denouncing homosexuality, as were the televangelists on cable TV. And yet "crypto-religious" artists pushed back against the spirit of the age, venturing into vexed areas where politicians and clergy were loath to go—and anticipating the postsecular age we are living in today.

That is the story Paul Elie tells in this enthralling group portrait. Here's Leonard Cohen writing "Hallelujah" in a Times Square hotel room; Andy Warhol adapting Leonardo's The Last Supper in response to the AIDS crisis; Prince making the cross and altar into "signs of the times." Through Toni Morrison the spirits of the enslaved speak from the grave; Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen deepen the tent-revival intensity of their work; U2, Morrissey, and Sinéad O'Connor give voice to the anguish of young people who were raised religious; Wim Wenders offers an angel's-eye view of Berlin. And Martin Scorsese overcomes fundamentalist opposition to make The Last Temptation of Christ—a struggle that anticipates Salman Rushdie's struggle with Islam in The Satanic Verses.]]> 496 Paul Elie 0374272921 Thomas 0 to-read 4.00 The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s
author: Paul Elie
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.00
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]]> <![CDATA[The Soundscape: Our Environment and the Tuning of the World]]> 585024
As a society we have become more aware of the toxic wastes that can enter our bodies through the air we breathe and the water we drink. In fact, the pollution of our sonic environment is no less real. Schafer emphasizes the importance of discerning the sounds that enrich and feed us and using them to create healthier environments. To this end, he explains how to classify sounds, appreciating their beauty or ugliness, and provides exercises and &ldquo;soundwalks&rdquo; to help us become more discriminating and sensitive to the sounds around us. This book is a pioneering exploration of our acoustic environment, past and present, and an attempt to imagine what it might become in the future.]]> 320 R. Murray Schafer 0892814551 Thomas 0 to-read 4.07 1977 The Soundscape: Our Environment and the Tuning of the World
author: R. Murray Schafer
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> <![CDATA[The Information Bomb (Radical Thinkers)]]> 203092 Virilio's exploration of the relationship between technology, war and information technology.

“Civilization or the militarization of science?�

With this typically hyperbolic and provocative question as a starting point, Paul Virilio explores the dominion of techno-science, cyberwar and the new information technologies over our lives . . . and deaths. After the era of the atomic bomb, Virilio posits an era of genetic and information bombs which replace the apocalyptic bang of nuclear death with the whimper of a subliminally reinforced eugenics. We are entering the age of euthanasia.

These exhilarating bulletins from the information war extend the range of Virilio's work. The Information Bomb spans everything from Fukuyama to Larry Flynt, the Sensation exhibition of New British Art to space travel, all seen through the optic of Virilio's trenchant and committed theoretical position.]]> 160 Paul Virilio 1844670597 Thomas 0 to-read 3.71 1998 The Information Bomb (Radical Thinkers)
author: Paul Virilio
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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]]> Speed and Politics 203100
Speed and Politics (first published in France in 1977) is the matrix of Virilio's entire work. Building on the works of Morand, Marinetti, and McLuhan, Virilio presents a vision more radically political than that of any of his French contemporaries: speed as the engine of destruction. Speed and Politics presents a topological account of the entire history of humanity, honing in on the technological advances made possible through the militarization of society. Paralleling Heidegger's account of technology, Virilio's vision sees speed―not class or wealth―as the primary force shaping civilization. In this "technical vitalism," multiple projectiles―inert fortresses and bunkers, the "metabolic bodies" of soldiers, transport vessels, and now information and computer technology―are launched in a permanent assault on the world and on human nature. Written at a lightning-fast pace, Virilio's landmark book is a split-second, overwhelming look at how humanity's motivity has shaped the way we function today, and what might come of it.]]> 176 Paul Virilio 1584350407 Thomas 0 to-read 3.83 1977 Speed and Politics
author: Paul Virilio
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Aesthetics of Disappearance]]> 203090 The Aesthetics of Disappearance as a "juncture" in his thinking, one at which he brought his focus onto the logistics of perception -- a logistics he would soon come to refer to as the "vision machine." If Speed and Politics established Virilio as the inaugural -- and still consummate -- theorist of "dromology" (the theory of speed and the society it defines), The Aesthetics of Disappearance introduced his understanding of "picnolepsy" -- the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing through and defining it. Speed and Politics defined the society of speed; The Aesthetics of Disappearance defines what it feels like to live in the society of speed."I always write with images," Virilio has claimed, and this statement is nowhere better illustrated than with The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Moving from the movie theater to the freeway, and from Craig Breedlove's attainment of terrifying speed in a rocket-power car to the immobility of Howard Hughes in his dark room atop the Desert Inn, Virilio himself jump cuts from such disparate reference points as Fred Astaire, Franz Liszt, and Adolf Loos to Dostoyevsky, Paul Morand, and Aldous Huxley. In its extension of the "aesthetics of disappearance" to war, film, and politics, this book paved the way to Virilio's follow-up: the celebrated study, War and Cinema.This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Crary, one of the leading theorists of modern visual culture.Foreign Agents series. Distributed for Semiotext(e)]]> 128 Paul Virilio 1570270414 Thomas 0 to-read 3.91 1980 The Aesthetics of Disappearance
author: Paul Virilio
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, And The 1960's]]> 154114 192 Maurice Berger 0064301850 Thomas 0 to-read 4.00 1989 Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, And The 1960's
author: Maurice Berger
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> Approaches to Gramsci 1812963 Book by 254 Anne Showstack Sassoon 0906495563 Thomas 0 to-read 4.20 1982 Approaches to Gramsci
author: Anne Showstack Sassoon
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Hegemony and Revolution: Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory]]> 189232 314 Walter L. Adamson 0520050576 Thomas 0 to-read 3.61 1980 Hegemony and Revolution: Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory
author: Walter L. Adamson
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms]]> 406729 216 Lisa Lowe 0801481953 Thomas 0 to-read 4.00 1994 Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms
author: Lisa Lowe
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> <![CDATA[The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Post-Contemporary Interventions)]]> 694102 Reworking Marxist critique, these essays on Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe advance a new understanding of "cultural politics" within the context of transnational neocolonial capitalism. This perspective contributes to an overall critique of traditional approaches to modernity, development, and linear liberal narratives of culture, history, and democratic institutions. It also frames a set of alternative social practices that allows for connections to be made between feminist politics among immigrant women in Britain, women of color in the United States, and Muslim women in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and Canada; the work of subaltern studies in India, the Philippines, and Mexico; and antiracist social movements in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. These connections displace modes of opposition traditionally defined in relation to the modern state and enable a rethinking of political practice in the era of global capitalism. Contributors . Tani E. Barlow, Nandi Bhatia, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chungmoo Choi, Clara Connolly, Angela Davis, Arturo Escobar, Grant Farred, Homa Hoodfar, Reynaldo C. Ileto, George Lipsitz, David Lloyd, Lisa Lowe, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Aihwa Ong, Pragna Patel, José Rabasa, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Jaqueline Urla]]> 608 Lisa Lowe 0822320460 Thomas 0 to-read 4.31 1997 The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Post-Contemporary Interventions)
author: Lisa Lowe
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics]]> 2781 Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture.

Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the “foreigner-within.� In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant—at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation—displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a “failed� integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders.

In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.]]> 272 Lisa Lowe 0822318644 Thomas 0 to-read 4.06 1996 Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
author: Lisa Lowe
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere)]]> 27833542
It’s every novelist’s greatest pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into writing hundreds of pages only to realize that their story has no sense of urgency, no internal logic, and so is a page one rewrite.

The prevailing wisdom in the writing community is that there are just two ways around this pantsing (winging it) and plotting (focusing on the external plot). Story coach Lisa Cron has spent her career discovering why these methods don’t work and coming up with a powerful alternative, based on the science behind what our brains are wired to crave in every story we read (and it’s not what you think).

In Story Genius Cron takes you, step-by-step, through the creation of a novel from the first glimmer of an idea, to a complete multilayered blueprint—including fully realized scenes—that evolves into a first draft with the authority, richness, and command of a riveting sixth or seventh draft.]]> 288 Lisa Cron 1607748908 Thomas 0 to-read 4.16 2016 Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere)
author: Lisa Cron
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> In Thrall 231370
Sixteen-year-old Lynn writers her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter, and they embark on one of the funniest–and saddest–love affairs in one shrouded in secrecy and guilt. This is the early sixties, years before gay liberation, when all Lynn knows about "lezbos" is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father's, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Lynn, in her desire to appear "normal," continues to make homophobic jokes with her girlfriends, neck with her boyfriend, and play the innocent with her parents, even as she checks the mirror each night for the telltale signs of her "perversion."

In this profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged novel, Jane DeLynn proves herself a writer of the first rank.]]> 264 Jane DeLynn 0299190145 Thomas 4 3.70 1982 In Thrall
author: Jane DeLynn
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1982
rating: 4
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]]> Caught 28186166 Caught, published when the bombing had only recently ended.

Like Green, Richard Roe, the hero of this resolutely unheroic book, comes from the upper class. His wife remains at their country estate, far from the threatened city, while Roe serves under Pye, a professional fireman whose deranged sister once kidnapped Roe’s young son, a bad memory that complicates the relationship between these two very different men. The book opens as the various members of the brigade are having practice runs and fighting boredom and sleeping around in the months before the attack from the air. It ends with Roe, who has been injured in the bombing, back in the country, describing and trying to come to terms with the apocalyptic conflagration in which he and his fellows were caught, putting into question the very notion of ordinary life.

Caught was censored at the insistence of its publisher, Leonard Woolf, when it came out in 1943. This is the first American edition of the book to appear as Green intended.]]> 208 Henry Green 1681370123 Thomas 5 to-read 3.58 1943 Caught
author: Henry Green
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1943
rating: 5
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]]> Concluding 126914 213 Henry Green 1564782530 Thomas 0 to-read 3.86 1948 Concluding
author: Henry Green
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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]]> Nothing (British Literature) 126913 203 Henry Green 1564782603 Thomas 0 to-read 3.73 1950 Nothing (British Literature)
author: Henry Green
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> The Overstory 40180098 The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A New York Times Bestseller.]]> 502 Richard Powers 039335668X Thomas 0 to-read 4.10 2018 The Overstory
author: Richard Powers
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Thomas 0 to-read 3.88 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Psychoanalysis of Children (The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 2)]]> 666042
This volume describes both the theory and practice of her methods, and includes a preface, written for the third edition, in which she outlines the development of her thinking in relation to certain essential hypotheses.

This new edition, which contains a revised translation and a new index, has an explanatory note by the Editorial Board of the Melanie Klein Trust placing 'The Psycho-Analysis of Children' in the general compass of her work.]]> 326 Melanie Klein 0029184304 Thomas 0 to-read 3.84 1932 The Psychoanalysis of Children (The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 2)
author: Melanie Klein
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1932
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Time of Hope (Strangers and Brothers, #1)]]> 458585 Time of Hope.

The novel opens in the summer of 1914 when nine-year-old Lewis hears the news of his father's bankruptcy, and closes in 1933, when, although hindered in his promising career as a lawyer by the neuroses of his wife, he realises that he cannot bear to leave her. In the course of this ambitious but ultimately unremarkable man's early life rage the great questions of the age - questions of class, of gender, of ideology and of war - asked and answered with wisdom and tolerance.

A meticulous study of the public issues and private problems of post-war Britain, C. P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers sequence is a towering achievement that stands alongside Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time as one of the great romans-fleuves of the twentieth century.]]> 396 C.P. Snow 1842324284 Thomas 0 to-read 3.90 1949 Time of Hope (Strangers and Brothers, #1)
author: C.P. Snow
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling]]> 6524
An international bestseller, How to Write a Damn Good Novel will enable all writers to face that intimidating first page, keep them on track when they falter, and help them recognize, analyze, and correct the problems in their own work.]]> 192 James N. Frey 0312010443 Thomas 2 3.86 1987 How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling
author: James N. Frey
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1987
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> Seven Stories 59742801 A master of the short form, Gina Berriault stands somewhere between Chekhov and Isaac Babel in style and psychological acuity.

"Berriault writes real fiction . . . She deepens reality, complements it and affords us the bliss of knowing, for a moment, what we cannot know." �The Nation

“A wonderful storyteller and a beautiful writer.� —Grace Paley

The seven stories—“Infinite Passion of Expectation,� “Tea Ceremony,� “The Mistress,� “The Overcoat,� “Stolen Pleasures,� “Works of the Imagination,� and “Women in Their Beds”—offer a glimpse into the oeuvre of one of the most celebrated voices in American letters.]]> 144 Gina Berriault 1640095454 Thomas 0 to-read 3.91 Seven Stories
author: Gina Berriault
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.91
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Women In Their Beds: Thirty-Five Stories]]> 34013953 -In these 35 stories, one struggles to find a sentence that is anything less than jewel-box perfect.- --The New York Times Book Review


Gina Berriault is known for the complexity and compassion with which she weaves her characters, and her stories are such models of economy that they seem almost telepathic. In this reissue of her collected stories--twenty years after its first publication--with a new introduction by renowned author and devoted Berriault advocate Peter Orner--we see the deft hand of this well-loved master of the short story at its best.

Berriault employs her vital sensibility--sometimes subtly ironic and sometimes achingly raw--to touch on the inevitability of suffering and the nature of individuality, daring to see into the essence of our predicaments. What moves us? What dictates our behavior? What alters us? Her writing is spare, evanescent, pulsing with life and shimmering with life's strange hope. Her stories illustrate the depth of her emotional understanding.

-Half the women in the world are right now in bed, theirs or somebody else's, whether it's night or day, whether they want to be or not...- With Women in Their Beds, Berriault's prose--moving, honest, and wise--achieves a mastery of the short story form that was in evidence every step of her long career. She was a completely modern writer, blessed with an exquisite sense of the potency of words and the ability to create moments of empathy that are both disturbing and mysteriously amusing.]]> 416 Gina Berriault 1619029618 Thomas 0 to-read 3.75 1996 Women In Their Beds: Thirty-Five Stories
author: Gina Berriault
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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]]> When the Emperor Was Divine 764073
In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of view "the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the family's return to their home; and the bitter release of the father after more than four years in captivity" she has created a small tour de force, a novel of unrelenting economy and suppressed emotion.

Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated, When the Emperor Was Divine is a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times. It heralds the arrival of a singularly gifted new novelist.

From the Hardcover edition.]]> 144 Julie Otsuka Thomas 0 to-read 3.80 2002 When the Emperor Was Divine
author: Julie Otsuka
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin]]> 6853404 In Seven Dirty Words, journalist and cultural critic James Sullivan tells the story of Alternative America from the 1950s to the present, from the singular vantage point of George Carlin, the Catholic boy for whom nothing was sacred. A critical biography, Seven Dirty Words is an insightful (and, of course, hilarious) examination of Carlin’s body of work as it pertained to its cultural times and the man who created it, from his early days as amore-or-less conventional comedian to his stunning transformation into the subversive comedic voice of the emerging counterculture. Sullivan also chronicles Carlin’s struggles with censorship and drugs, as well as the full-blown renaissance he experienced in the 1990s, both personally and professionally, when he became an elder statesman to a younger generation of comics who revered him. Seven Dirty Words is nothing less than the definitive biography of an American master who changed the world, and also a work of cultural commentary which frames George Carlin’s extraordinary legacy.]]> 280 James Sullivan 0306818299 Thomas 0 to-read 4.09 2010 7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin
author: James Sullivan
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> <![CDATA[George Carlin Reads to You: An Audio Collection Including Recent Grammy Winners Braindroppings and Napalm & Silly Putty]]> 55358 Fresh Air.

If one George Carlin audio is funny, then two are funnier and three must be funniest, right? That’s our thinking behind this collection. This laugh-out-loud program includes:

Brain Droppings � 2001 Grammy® winner
Acerbic observations, manic musings, in-your-face questions, witty word play, and more “droppings� from Carlin’s singular brain. “I put a dollar in a change machine. Nothing changed.� “Why are there no recreational drugs taken in suppository form?�

Napalm & Silly Putty � 2002 Grammy® winner
Carlin invents Past-Tense TV (“Got Smart,� “Father Knew Best,� “It Was Left to Beaver�), crusades for the Center for Research into the Heebie Jeebies, and suggests that “if the shoe fits, get another just like it.�

More Napalm & Silly Putty
Everything that wouldn’t fit on the first Napalm recording—like “A Day in the Life of Henry VIII,� “Sports Should Be Fixed,� and candid takes on life’s little moments (“I’m beyond the nice day�), all delivered with wicked glee.

Plus a bonus interview from Fresh Air.]]> 8 George Carlin 1565119169 Thomas 0 to-read 3.72 2004 George Carlin Reads to You: An Audio Collection Including Recent Grammy Winners Braindroppings and Napalm & Silly Putty
author: George Carlin
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> Brain Droppings 55352 Brain Droppings. Filled with thoughts, musings, questions, lists, beliefs, curiousities, monologues, assertions, assumptions, and other verbal ordeals, Brain Droppings is infectiously funny. Also included are two timeless bonus items from the past, "A Place for Your Stuff" and "Baseball-Football." Readers will get an inside look into Carlin's mind, and they won't be disappointed by what they find: I buy stamps by mail. It works OK until I run out of stamps. What year did Jesus Christ think it was? A tree: first you chop it down, then you chop it up. Have you ever noticed the lawyer is always smiling more than the client? I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed. If you ever have chicken at lunch and chicken at dinner, do you ever wonder if the two chickens knew each other?]]> 272 George Carlin 0786891122 Thomas 0 to-read 4.08 1997 Brain Droppings
author: George Carlin
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 517188 150 Muriel Spark 0060931736 Thomas 0 to-read 3.73 1961 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
author: Muriel Spark
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> S*PeRM**K*T 519495 45 Harryette Mullen 0935162127 Thomas 4 to-read, poetry 4.35 1992 S*PeRM**K*T
author: Harryette Mullen
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read, poetry
review:
"Toe jam must ’cause jelly don’t."
]]> <![CDATA[Recyclopedia: Trimmings / S*PeRM**K*T / Muse and Drudge]]> 519494 Three important poetry collections brought together under one cover by Harryette Mullen, author of Sleeping with the Dictionary


if you turned down the media
so I could write a book
then you could look me up
in your voluminous recyclopedia
-from Muse & Drudge

Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen's career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge, all originally published in the 1990s and now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry. Recyclopedia is a major gathering of work by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in America today.]]> 178 Harryette Mullen 1555974562 Thomas 0 to-read 4.17 2006 Recyclopedia: Trimmings / S*PeRM**K*T / Muse and Drudge
author: Harryette Mullen
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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review:

]]> Trimmings 519496 Book by Mullen, Harryette 66 Harryette Mullen 0927920026 Thomas 4 4.19 1991 Trimmings
author: Harryette Mullen
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Forgiveness: An Alternative Account]]> 60747396 Ěý
“Broad in its philosophical sweep and fine in its literary analysis, this work redefines forgiveness as the modest yet heroic ability to hold pain and anger together with hope and nonviolence.”—Joie Szu-Chiao Chen, Lion’s Roar
Ěý
Matthew Ichihashi Potts explores the complex moral terrain of forgiveness, which he claims has too often served as a salve to the conscience of power rather than as an instrument of healing or justice. Though forgiveness is often linked with reconciliation or the abatement of anger, Potts resists these associations, asserting instead that forgiveness is simply the refusal of retaliatory violence through practices of penitence and grief. It is an act of mourning irrevocable wrong, of refusing the false promises of violent redemption, and of living in and with the losses we cannot recover.
Ěý
Drawing on novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Marilynne Robinson, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison, and on texts from the early Christian to the postmodern, Potts diagnoses the real dangers of forgiveness yet insists upon its enduring promise. Sensitive to the twenty-first-century realities of economic inequality, colonial devastation, and racial strife, and considering the role of forgiveness in the New Testament, the Christian tradition, philosophy, and contemporary literature, this book heralds the arrival of a new and creative theological voice.]]> 288 Matthew Ichihashi Potts 0300259859 Thomas 0 to-read 4.07 Forgiveness: An Alternative Account
author: Matthew Ichihashi Potts
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> The Color Purple 52892857 Read the original inspiration for the new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker's epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.

â€Áč±đ˛ą»ĺľ±˛Ô˛µ The Color Purple was the first time I had seen Southern, Black women’s literature as world literature. In writing us into the world—bravely, unapologetically, and honestly—Alice Walker has given us a gift we will never be able to repay.â€� —Tayari Jones

�The Color Purple was what church should have been, what honest familial reckoning could have been, and it is still the only art object in the world by which all three generations of Black artists in my family judge American art.� —Kiese Laymon]]> 287 Alice Walker 0143135694 Thomas 5 4.40 1982 The Color Purple
author: Alice Walker
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[The Man Without Qualities: Volume I]]> 191940 725 Robert Musil 0679767878 Thomas 0 to-read 4.31 1930 The Man Without Qualities: Volume I
author: Robert Musil
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1930
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity]]> 9629 176 Ray Bradbury 1877741094 Thomas 4 3.75 4.17 1973 Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/14
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves:
review:
3.75
]]> <![CDATA[In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose]]> 60943 418 Alice Walker 0156028646 Thomas 0 to-read 4.29 1983 In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
author: Alice Walker
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics]]> 117249 Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.

For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), art almost ranked with religion and philosophy in its power to reveal the fundamental nature of existence. But although he lived in the German golden age of Goethe, Schiller and Mozart, he also believed that art was in terminal decline.

To resolve this apparent paradox, as Michael Inwood explains in his incisive Introduction, we must understand the particular place of aesthetics in Hegel's vast intellectual edifice. Its central pillars consist of logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. Art derives its value from offering a sensory vision of the God-like absolute, from its harmonious fusion of form and content, and from summing up the world-view of an age such as Homer's. While it scaled supreme heights in ancient Greece, Hegel doubted art's ability to encompass Christian belief or the reflective irony characteristic of modern societies. Many such challenging ideas are developed in this superb treatise; it counts among the most stimulating works of a master thinker.

Table of Contents
Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics Introduction A Note on the Translation and Commentary
INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON AESTHETICS

Chapter I: The Range of Aesthetic Defined, and Some Objections against the Philosophy of Art Refuted
[α Aesthetic confined to Beauty of Art
β Does Art merit Scientific Treatment?
Îł Is Scientific Treatment appropriate to Art?
δ Answer to β
ε Answer to γ]

Chapter II: Methods of Science Applicable to Beauty and Art
[1. Empirical Method - Art-scholarship
(a) Its Range
(b) It generates Rules and Theories
(c) The Rights of Genius
2. Abstract Reflection
3. The Philosophical Conception of Artistic Beauty, general notion of]

Chapter III: The Conception of Artistic Beauty
Part I - The Work of Art as Made and as Sensuous
1. Work of Art as Product of Human Activity
[(a) Conscious Production by Rule
(b) Artistic Inspiration
(c) Dignity of Production by Man
(d) Man's Need to produce Works of Art]
2. Work of Art as addressed to Man's Sense
[(a) Object of Art - Pleasant Feeling?
(b) Feeling of Beauty - Taste
(c) Art-scholarship
(d) Profounder Consequences of Sensuous Nature of Art
(α) Relations of the Sensuous to the Mind
(αα) Desire
(ββ) Theory
(γγ) Sensuous as Symbol of Spiritual
(β) The Sensuous Element, how Present in the Artist
(Îł) The Content of Art Sensuous]

Part II - The End of Art
3. [The Interest or End of Art
(a) Imitation of Nature?
(α) Mere Repetition of Nature is -
(αα) Superfluous
(ββ) Imperfect
(γγ) Amusing Merely as Sleight of Hand
(β) What is Good to Imitate?
(Îł) Some Arts cannot be called Imitative
(b) Humani nihil - ?
(c) Mitigation of the Passions?
(α) How Art mitigates the Passions
(β) How Art purifies the Passions
(αα) It must have a Worthy Content
(ββ) But ought not to be Didactic
(γγ) Nor explicitly addressed to a Moral Purpose
(d) Art has its own Purpose as Revelation of Truth]

Chapter IV: Historical Deducation of the True Idea of Art in Modern Philosophy
1. Kant
[(a) Pleasure in Beauty not Appetitive
(b) Pleasure in Beauty Universal
(c) The Beautiful in its Teleological Aspect
(d) Delight in the Beautiful necessary though felt]
2. Schiller, Winckelmann, Schelling
3. The Irony

Chapter V: Division of the Subject
[1. The Condition of Artistic Presentation is the Correspondence of Matter and Plastic Form
2. Part I - The Ideal
3. Part II - The Types of Art
(α) Symbolic Art
(β) Classical Art
(Îł) Romantic Art
4. Part III - The Several Arts
(α) Architecture
(β) Sculpture
(Îł) Romantic Art, comprising
(i) Painting
(ii) Music
(iii) Poetry
5. Conclusion]

Commentary

]]> 197 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 014043335X Thomas 0 to-read 3.91 Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics
author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.91
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> Sweat 29633728
Based on Nottage's extensive research and interviews with real residents of Reading, Sweat is a topical reflection of the present and poignant outcome of America's economic decline.]]> 112 Lynn Nottage 1559365323 Thomas 4 4.03 2017 Sweat
author: Lynn Nottage
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class]]> 56876312 90 Catherine Liu 1452966044 Thomas 0 to-read 3.84 2021 Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class
author: Catherine Liu
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> If Only 203166817 A groundbreaking but timeless early work from one of the world's most heralded novelists

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.

So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.]]> 352 Vigdis Hjorth 1839768886 Thomas 0 to-read 3.36 2001 If Only
author: Vigdis Hjorth
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> Long Live the Post Horn! 53168757
This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Vigdis Hjorth's trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.]]> 240 Vigdis Hjorth Thomas 0 to-read 3.76 2012 Long Live the Post Horn!
author: Vigdis Hjorth
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> The Road 6288
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,� are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.]]> 241 Cormac McCarthy 0307265439 Thomas 5 3.99 2006 The Road
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming]]> 8117426 330 Catherine Keller Thomas 0 to-read 4.33 2002 The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming
author: Catherine Keller
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/20
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]]> The Argonauts 22929741
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.]]> 160 Maggie Nelson 1555977073 Thomas 0 4.04 2015 The Argonauts
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/20
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]]> Miss Furr and Miss Skeene 35452906 Geography and Plays, 1922. Also reprinted in Vanity Fair, July 1923.]]> Gertrude Stein Thomas 0 3.51 Miss Furr and Miss Skeene
author: Gertrude Stein
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.51
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/20
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]]> <![CDATA[Stars in Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863]]> 44246 290 Shelby Foote 0679601120 Thomas 3 4.45 1994 Stars in Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863
author: Shelby Foote
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/19
date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> Going to Meet the Man 38469 This is an older edition of ISBN 9780679761792.

"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.

By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.]]> 249 James Baldwin Thomas 0 to-read 4.38 1965 Going to Meet the Man
author: James Baldwin
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination]]> 37405 Beloved and Jazz now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.

Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.

Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.]]> 104 Toni Morrison 0674673778 Thomas 5 4.33 1992 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
author: Toni Morrison
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves:
review:
This should be required reading in high school
]]> A Severed Head 11253 204 Iris Murdoch 0140020039 Thomas 0 to-read 3.77 1961 A Severed Head
author: Iris Murdoch
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Tender Buttons 778310 96 Gertrude Stein 0486298973 Thomas 5 3.68 1914 Tender Buttons
author: Gertrude Stein
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1914
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves:
review:
Still an outrageous piece of writing
]]> God Without Being 790671
This volume, the first translation into English of the work of this leading Catholic philosopher, offers a contemporary perspective on the nature of God.]]> 284 Jean-Luc Marion 0226505413 Thomas 0 to-read 4.14 1982 God Without Being
author: Jean-Luc Marion
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Nocilla Dream 1921948 226 Agustín Fernández Mallo 8493492361 Thomas 0 to-read 3.54 2006 Nocilla Dream
author: Agustín Fernández Mallo
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity]]> 52677146 Circling the Elephant affirms that the best way to be truly open to the mystery of the infinite is to move away from defensive postures of religious isolationism and self-sufficiency and to move, in vulnerability and openness, toward the mystery of the neighbor.



Employing the ancient Indian allegory of the elephant and blind(folded) men, John J. Thatamanil argues for the integration of three often-separated theological projects: theologies of religious diversity (the work of accounting for why there are so many different understandings of the elephant), comparative theology (the venture of walking over to a different side of the elephant), and constructive theology (the endeavor of re-describing the elephant in light of the other two tasks).

Circling the Elephant also offers an analysis of why we have fallen short in the past. Interreligious learning has been obstructed by problematic ideas about "religion" and "religions," Thatamanil argues, while also pointing out the troubling resonances between reified notions of "religion" and "race." He contests these notions and offers a new theory of the religious that makes interreligious learning both possible and desirable.

Christians have much to learn from their religious neighbors, even about such central features of Christian theology as Christ and the Trinity. This book envisions religious diversity as a promise, not a problem, and proposes a new theology of religious diversity that opens the door to robust interreligious learning and Christian transformation through encountering the other.]]> 320 John J. Thatamanil 0823287734 Thomas 0 to-read 4.31 Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity
author: John J. Thatamanil
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.31
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament]]> 520340 256 John J. Thatamanil 0800637933 Thomas 0 to-read 4.23 2006 The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament
author: John J. Thatamanil
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell]]> 3120276
The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters―they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977.

Presented in Words in Air is the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. The substantial, revealing―and often very funny―interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.]]> 928 Elizabeth Bishop 0374185433 Thomas 0 to-read 4.25 2000 Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
author: Elizabeth Bishop
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2000
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]]> <![CDATA[Scene & Structure (Elements of Fiction Writing)]]> 190209
And the reader is hooked. But whether or not readers will stay on for the entire wild ride will depend on how well the writer structures the story, scene by scene.

This book is your game plan for success. Using dozens of examples from his own work - including "Dropshot," "Tiebreaker" and other popular novels - Jack M. Bickham will guide you in building a sturdy framework for your novel, whatever its form or length. You'll learn how to:
-"worry" your readers into following your story to the end
-prolong your main character's struggle while moving the story ahead
-juggle cause and effect to serve your story action
As you work on crafting compelling scenes that move the reader, moment by moment, toward the story's resolution, you'll see why believable fiction must make more sense than real life.
Every scene should end in disastersome scenes should be condensed, and others built big.
Whatever your story, this book can help you arrive at a happy ending in the company of satisfied readers.]]> 176 Jack M. Bickham 0898799066 Thomas 0 to-read 4.09 1993 Scene & Structure (Elements of Fiction Writing)
author: Jack M. Bickham
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1993
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]]> State of Exception 85825
The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt.

In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.]]> 104 Giorgio Agamben 0226009254 Thomas 0 to-read 4.06 2003 State of Exception
author: Giorgio Agamben
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2003
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]]> Remains of Life 33197478
Nearly seventy years later, Chen Guocheng, a writer known as Wu He, or "Dancing Crane," investigated the long forgotten Musha Incident to search for any survivors and their descendants. The result is Wu He's novel Remains of Life, which imagines the impetus behind this disturbing event and questions its legitimacy and accuracy. In his novel, Wu He walks a tightrope between the primitive and the civilized, beauty and violence, fact and fiction.His is a one-of-a-kind work and a milestone in Chinese literature, winning nearly every major national literary award upon its publication in Taiwan, including the Taipei Creative Writing Award for Literature, the China Times's Ten Best Books of the Year Award, the United Daily Readers's Choice Award, Ming Pao's Ten Best Books of the Year Award, and the Kingstone Award for the Most Influential Book of the Year.]]> 333 Wu He 023116601X Thomas 0 to-read 3.77 2000 Remains of Life
author: Wu He
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2000
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]]> Practical Mysticism 13013618
Underhill is at her simplest here, yet her language is still poetic and enjoyable to read. She invites the reader to become involved in mysticism ("the art of union with reality"), giving simple examples of how it is relevant to everyday people. Underhill was greatly influenced by mystics such as St. Teresa, Ruysbroeck, St. Augustine, and Thomas a Kempis, and examples from these writers, as well as poets like Keats and Whitman, are sprinkled throughout the book. A fine place to start before diving into her more intense works, Practical Mysticism has captivated generations of readers, and is still the premier text for the introductory study of mysticism.

(Copied from , which also hosts the downloadable ebook).]]> 74 Evelyn Underhill 1463705069 Thomas 0 to-read 3.93 1914 Practical Mysticism
author: Evelyn Underhill
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1914
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness]]> 193586 356 Evelyn Underhill 1420925016 Thomas 0 to-read 3.88 1911 Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness
author: Evelyn Underhill
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1911
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics]]> 402568 368 Hans W. Frei 0300026021 Thomas 0 to-read 3.78 1974 The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics
author: Hans W. Frei
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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]]> Edinburgh 272433 212 Alexander Chee 0312305036 Thomas 0 4.13 2001 Edinburgh
author: Alexander Chee
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell]]> 31939522
Moi first introduces Wittgenstein’s vision of language and theory, which refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or representation, considers theory’s desire for generality doomed to failure, and brings out the philosophical power of the particular case. Contrasting ordinary language philosophy with dominant strands of Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought, she highlights the former’s originality, critical power, and potential for creative use. Finally, she challenges the belief that good critics always read below the surface, proposing instead an innovative view of texts as expression and action, and of reading as an act of acknowledgment. Intervening in cutting-edge debates while bringing Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell to new readers, Revolution of the Ordinary will appeal beyond literary studies to anyone looking for a philosophically serious account of why words matter.]]> 304 Toril Moi 022646444X Thomas 0 to-read 4.52 2017 Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell
author: Toril Moi
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2017
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]]> The Blue Flower 11728 The Blue Flower is also a charming, wry, and witty look at domestic life. Fritz's family--his eccentric father and high-strung mother; his loving sister, Sidonie; and brothers Erasmus, Karl, and the preternaturally intelligent baby of the family, referred to always as the Bernhard--are limned in deft, sure strokes, and it is in his interactions with them that the ephemeral quality of genius becomes most tangible. Even his unlikely love affair with young Sophie von KĂĽhn makes perfect sense as Penelope Fitzgerald imagines it.

The Blue Flower is a magical book--funny, sad, and deeply moving. In Fritz Fitzgerald has discovered a perfect character through whom to explore the meaning of love, poetry, life, and loss. In The Blue Flower readers will find a work of fine prose, fierce intelligence, and perceptive characterization.

]]> 226 Penelope Fitzgerald 0395859972 Thomas 0 to-read 3.44 1995 The Blue Flower
author: Penelope Fitzgerald
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1995
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]]> The Book of Night Women 4682558 The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel, a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling. It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they and she will come to both revere and fear.

The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age and reveals the extent of her power, they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings and desires and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman in Jamaica, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link.

Lilith's story overflows with high drama and heartbreak, and life on the plantation is rife with dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion between slave and master, between slave and overseer, and among the slaves themselves. Lilith finds herself at the heart of it all. And all of it told in one of the boldest literary voices to grace the page recently--and the secret of that voice is one of the book's most intriguing mysteries.]]> 417 Marlon James 1594488576 Thomas 0 to-read 4.36 2009 The Book of Night Women
author: Marlon James
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2009
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]]> <![CDATA[Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative]]> 41735103 The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: "For centuries there's been one path through fiction we're most likely to travel―one we're actually told to follow―and that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides...But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?"

W. G. Sebald's Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc―or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her "museum of specimens" include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison.

Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let's leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.

Runtime: 5. 84 hours]]> 272 Jane Alison 1948226138 Thomas 0 to-read 4.08 2019 Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative
author: Jane Alison
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2019
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]]> The Rule of Metaphor 217552 464 Paul Ricœur 0415312809 Thomas 0 to-read 4.10 1975 The Rule of Metaphor
author: Paul Ricœur
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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]]> On Translation 779025
Reminding us that The Bible, the Koran, the Torah and the works of the great philosophers are often only ever read in translation, Ricoeur reminds us that translation not only spreads knowledge but can change its very meaning. In spite of these risk, he argues that in a climate of ethnic and religious conflict, the art and ethics of translation are invaluable.

Drawing on interesting examples such as the translation of early Greek philosophy during the Renaissance, the poetry of Paul Celan and the work of Hannah Arendt, he reflects not only on the challenges of translating one language into another but how one community speaks to another. Throughout, Ricoeur shows how to move through life is to navigate a world that requires translation itself.

Paul Ricoeur died in 2005. He was one of the great contemporary French philosophers and a leading figure in hermeneutics, psychoanalytic thought, literary theory and religion. His many books include Freud and Philosophy and Time and Narrative.]]> 72 Paul Ricœur 0415357780 Thomas 0 to-read 3.77 1995 On Translation
author: Paul Ricœur
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1995
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]]> <![CDATA[Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning]]> 125877 Ricoeur, Paul 108 Paul Ricœur 0912646594 Thomas 0 to-read 3.99 1976 Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning
author: Paul Ricœur
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1976
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]]> Memory, History, Forgetting 125876 Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.

Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.

A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.

“His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”â€�Library JournalĚý

“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”� New York Times Book Review

]]> 624 Paul Ricœur 0226713423 Thomas 0 to-read 4.08 2000 Memory, History, Forgetting
author: Paul Ricœur
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.08
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]]> <![CDATA[Time and Narrative, Volume 1 (Time & Narrative)]]> 125880 Time and Narrative builds on Paul Ricoeur's earlier analysis, in The Rule of Metaphor, of semantic innovation at the level of the sentence. Ricoeur here examines the creation of meaning at the textual level, with narrative rather than metaphor as the ruling concern.

Ricoeur finds a "healthy circle" between time and narrative: time is humanized to the extent that it portrays temporal experience. Ricoeur proposes a theoretical model of this circle using Augustine's theory of time and Aristotle's theory of plot and, further, develops an original thesis of the mimetic function of narrative. He concludes with a comprehensive survey and critique of modern discussions of historical knowledge, understanding, and writing from Aron and Mandelbaum in the late 1930s to the work of the Annales school and that of Anglophone philosophers of history of the 1960s and 1970s.

"This work, in my view, puts the whole problem of narrative, not to mention philosophy of history, on a new and higher plane of discussion."—Hayden White, History and Theory

"Superb. . . . A fine point of entrance into the work of one of the eminent thinkers of the present intellectual age."—Joseph R. Gusfield, Contemporary Sociology

]]> 281 Paul Ricœur 0226713326 Thomas 0 to-read 4.19 1983 Time and Narrative, Volume 1 (Time & Narrative)
author: Paul Ricœur
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1983
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]]> <![CDATA[Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals]]> 253953 528 Iris Murdoch 0099433559 Thomas 0 to-read 3.88 1992 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
author: Iris Murdoch
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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]]> My Tender Matador 638335 176 Pedro Lemebel 0802141870 Thomas 0 to-read 4.34 2001 My Tender Matador
author: Pedro Lemebel
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Necropolitics (Theory in Forms)]]> 44901216 Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its “nocturnal body�---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.]]> 224 Achille Mbembe 1478005858 Thomas 0 to-read 4.24 2016 Necropolitics (Theory in Forms)
author: Achille Mbembe
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2016
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]]> The Emancipated Spectator 6329687
In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image , Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?]]> 134 Jacques Rancière 184467343X Thomas 0 to-read 4.02 2008 The Emancipated Spectator
author: Jacques Rancière
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics]]> 6772373 368 Gabriel Rockhill 0822345064 Thomas 0 to-read 3.94 2009 Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics
author: Gabriel Rockhill
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Travels in Icaria (Utopianism and Communitarianism)]]> 1298209
Clarisdell's amazement is constant. Foreign affairs are conducted by the community. Money and domestic commerce do not exist. Everyone gives to and draws from the common pot in equal measure. No pastoral idyll, the narrative describes a modern machine-age economy with social policies free education, equality for the sexes, strict family/moral ties that reflect enlightenment. Crime here is a myth; arts and culture are treasured commodities.

Cabet described a totally integrated "community of goods" in the fifty years following the great revolution of 1782. Published at personal risk, his bold allegory gave birth to a real Icarian community that lasted into the late 1800s.]]> 256 Étienne Cabet 0815630093 Thomas 0 to-read 2.86 1840 Travels in Icaria (Utopianism and Communitarianism)
author: Étienne Cabet
name: Thomas
average rating: 2.86
book published: 1840
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839-1851]]> 2652280
But socialism was something more than an idea, especially in the 1840s. For a minority of working people, it was also becoming a source of political identity; men and women were beginning to make conscious decisions to link themselves with socialist organizations or at least to describe themselves as socialists or communists of this or that persuasion. The dimensions of this affiliation, the kinds of people who made this commitment, their rationale for doing so, and the deeper social and economic forces that motivated them all remain obscure.

To explore this larger problem, I undertook a study of the Icarian communist movement and the work of its leader, Etienne Cabet. The result is the first full history of a pre-Marxian socialist movement in France and the popular influence wielded by a prominent utopian socialist. (From the Introduction.)]]> 336 Christopher H. Johnson 0801408954 Thomas 0 to-read 4.00 1974 Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839-1851
author: Christopher H. Johnson
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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]]> Uncle Vanya 231560 116 Anton Chekhov 1406507881 Thomas 5 plays 3.86 1897 Uncle Vanya
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1897
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/21
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: plays
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]]> <![CDATA[The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South]]> 178707 335 Eugene D. Genovese 0819562084 Thomas 0 to-read 3.72 1965 The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South
author: Eugene D. Genovese
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made]]> 327841 864 Eugene D. Genovese 0394716523 Thomas 0 to-read 4.03 1974 Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
author: Eugene D. Genovese
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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]]> The Fortress of Solitude 9799 Motherless Brooklyn, a daring, riotous, sweeping novel that spins the tale of two friends and their adventures in late 20th-century America.

This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They live in Brooklyn and are friends and neighbours; but since Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple.

This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the simplest decisions—what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money—are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is also the story of 1990s America, when nobody cared anymore.

This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: they would screw up their lives.]]> 528 Jonathan Lethem 0571219357 Thomas 4 3.85 2003 The Fortress of Solitude
author: Jonathan Lethem
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
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Is Jonathan Lethem invited to the cookout?
]]> <![CDATA[The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)]]> 35068705
When Rin aced the Keju—the Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to learn at the Academies—it was a shock to everyone: to the test officials, who couldn’t believe a war orphan from Rooster Province could pass without cheating; to Rin’s guardians, who believed they’d finally be able to marry her off and further their criminal enterprise; and to Rin herself, who realized she was finally free of the servitude and despair that had made up her daily existence. That she got into Sinegard—the most elite military school in Nikan—was even more surprising.

But surprises aren’t always good.

Because being a dark-skinned peasant girl from the south is not an easy thing at Sinegard. Targeted from the outset by rival classmates for her color, poverty, and gender, Rin discovers she possesses a lethal, unearthly power—an aptitude for the nearly-mythical art of shamanism. Exploring the depths of her gift with the help of a seemingly insane teacher and psychoactive substances, Rin learns that gods long thought dead are very much alive—and that mastering control over those powers could mean more than just surviving school.

For while the Nikara Empire is at peace, the Federation of Mugen still lurks across a narrow sea. The militarily advanced Federation occupied Nikan for decades after the First Poppy War, and only barely lost the continent in the Second. And while most of the people are complacent to go about their lives, a few are aware that a Third Poppy War is just a spark away . . .

Rin’s shamanic powers may be the only way to save her people. But as she finds out more about the god that has chosen her, the vengeful Phoenix, she fears that winning the war may cost her humanity . . . and that it may already be too late.]]> 545 R.F. Kuang 0062662597 Thomas 0 to-read 4.16 2018 The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy]]> 267671 324 Shelby Foote 0393317684 Thomas 0 to-read 4.20 1996 The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy
author: Shelby Foote
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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]]> Ragtime 175675 Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, NY, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. Almost magically, the line between fantasy & historical fact, between real & imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud & Emiliano Zapata slip in & out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family & other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler & a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.]]> 320 E.L. Doctorow 0812978188 Thomas 0 to-read 3.88 1975 Ragtime
author: E.L. Doctorow
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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]]> The March 24914 --back cover]]> 363 E.L. Doctorow 0812976150 Thomas 0 to-read 3.75 2005 The March
author: E.L. Doctorow
name: Thomas
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Last Full Measure (The Civil War Trilogy, #3)]]> 29923 here.

In the Pulitzer prize-winning classic The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara created the finest Civil War novel of our time. In the bestselling Gods and Generals, Shaara's son, Jeff, brilliantly sustained his father's vision, telling the epic story of the events culminating in the Battle of Gettysburg. Now, Jeff Shaara brings this legendary father-son trilogy to its stunning conclusion in a novel that brings to life the final two years of the Civil War.

As The Last Full Measure opens, Gettysburg is past and the war advances to its third brutal year. On the Union side, the gulf between the politicians in Washington and the generals in the field yawns ever wider. Never has the cumbersome Union Army so desperately needed a decisive, hard-nosed leader. It is at this critical moment that Lincoln places Ulysses S. Grant in command--and turns the tide of war.

For Robert E. Lee, Gettysburg was an unspeakable disaster--compounded by the shattering loss of the fiery Stonewall Jackson two months before. Lee knows better than anyone that the South cannot survive a war of attrition. But with the total devotion of his generals--Longstreet, Hill, Stuart--and his unswerving faith in God, Lee is determined to fight to the bitter end.

Here too is Joshua Chamberlain, the college professor who emerged as the Union hero of Gettysburg--and who will rise to become one of the greatest figures of the Civil War.

Battle by staggering battle, Shaara dramatizes the escalating confrontation between Lee and Grant--complicated, heroic, deeply troubled men. From the costly Battle of the Wilderness to the agonizing siege of Petersburg to Lee's epoch-making surrender at Appomattox, Shaara portrays the riveting conclusion of the Civil War through the minds and hearts of the individuals who gave their last full measure.

Full of human passion and the spellbinding truth of history, The Last Full Measure is the fitting capstone to a magnificent literary trilogy.

From the Hardcover edition.]]> 640 Jeff Shaara Thomas 0 to-read 4.23 1998 The Last Full Measure (The Civil War Trilogy, #3)
author: Jeff Shaara
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Gods and Generals (The Civil War Trilogy, #1)]]> 29925 The Killer Angels, Jeff Shaara explores the lives of Generals Lee, Hancock, Jackson and Chamberlain as the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg approaches.

Shaara captures the disillusionment of both Lee and Hancock early in their careers, Lee's conflict with loyalty, Jackson's overwhelming Christian ethic and Chamberlain's total lack of experience, while illustrating how each compensated for shortcomings and failures when put to the test.

The perspectives of the four men, particularly concerning the battles at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, make vivid the realities of war.]]> 498 Jeff Shaara 1841580651 Thomas 0 to-read 4.08 1996 Gods and Generals (The Civil War Trilogy, #1)
author: Jeff Shaara
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Killer Angels (The Civil War Trilogy, #2)]]> 682804 The Killer Angels is unique, sweeping, unforgettable—a dramatic re-creation of the battleground for America's destiny.]]> 345 Michael Shaara 0345348109 Thomas 4 4.32 1974 The Killer Angels (The Civil War Trilogy, #2)
author: Michael Shaara
name: Thomas
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves:
review:

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