1,446 books
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1,345 voters
“It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rocking of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease. The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim--even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon--feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. this is in my opinion why writers--like insomniacs--are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.”
― Wonder Boys
― Wonder Boys
“In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”
― How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
― How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
“Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else...”
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Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else...”
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“No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”
― Invisible Monsters
― Invisible Monsters
“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.”
― Jesus’ Son
― Jesus’ Son
River’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at River’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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