The document that was associated with the divine name Yahweh/Jehovah was called J. The document that was identified as referring to the deity as God (in Hebrew, Elohim) was called E. The third document, by far the largest, included most of
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“Shuggie heard the nurse say to a male attendant that she thought for sure Agnes was a working girl. “She is not,� said Shuggie, quite proudly. “My mother has never worked a day in her life. She’s far too good-looking for that.� The matted mink coat gave her an air of superiority, and her black strappy heels clacked out a slurred beat on the long marble hallway.”
― Shuggie Bain
― Shuggie Bain

“Mormon out of whole cloth. He pronounced Mormonism a “myth fraternity,� and slipped into a profound spiritual crisis that lasted until his death, of a heart attack, in 1983. “You can’t set Book of Mormon geography down anywhere,� he wrote in 1976, “because it is fictional and will never meet the requirements of the dirt-archaeology. What is in the ground will”
― Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier
― Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier

“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.”
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“The only place I went wrong, he writes, was expecting things to be perfect. Abruptly, he signals for a turn, and when the light changes he heads east instead of continuing north.”
― Redhead by the Side of the Road
― Redhead by the Side of the Road

“It was the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank AG, not my fictitious RhineBank, that financed the construction of the extermination camp at Auschwitz and the nearby factory that manufactured Zyklon B pellets. And it was Deutsche Bank that earned millions of Nazi reichsmarks through the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses. Deutsche Bank also incurred massive multibillion-dollar fines for helping rogue nations such as Iran and Syria evade US economic sanctions; for manipulating the London interbank lending rate; for selling toxic mortgage-backed securities to unwitting investors; and for laundering untold billions� worth of tainted Russian assets through its so-called Russian Laundromat. In 2007 and 2008, Deutsche Bank extended an unsecured $1 billion line of credit to VTB Bank, a Kremlin-controlled lender that financed the Russian intelligence services and granted cover jobs to Russian intelligence officers operating abroad. Which meant that Germany’s biggest lender, knowingly or unknowingly, was a silent partner in Vladimir Putin’s war against the West and liberal democracy. Increasingly, that war is being waged by Putin’s wealthy cronies and by privately owned companies like the Wagner Group and the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg troll factory that allegedly meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. The IRA was one of three”
― The Cellist
― The Cellist

Join us as we read the backlist of Man Booker Prize winners and the nominees each year for the MBP!
Joe’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Joe’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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