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Brenda

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Brenda is Currently Reading

Brenda is currently reading

Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

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— Mar 11, 2026 12:24PM

Feb 25, 2026 06:07PM

Brenda’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for Pilgrimage of Desire: An Explorer's Journey Through the Labyrinths of Life

Pilgrimage of Desire: An Explorer's Journey Through the Labyrinths of Life by Alison Gresik

4 highlights

writing was there for me the whole time, waiting for me to realize that the stories I had to tell were just as important as everyone else’s and that I could learn the skill needed to tell them.

A High Wind in Jamaica

by Richard Hughes

2 highlights
Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

1 highlight

See Brenda’s 4 books with notes and highlights…

“He says, "I would walk around the township and I could point them out, which girls had been abused. You could see it in them. There's a luminosity to incest. The taboo is so strong and the damage so great. Luminosity--do you understand? It travels across oceans and down generations. They shine with it.”
― Emma Brockes, She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me

tags: abuse, incest, luminocity, sexual-abuse, shining, taboo

7 likes

“See how community is only a good thing when you're a part of it.”
― Sara Baume

tags: isolation, loneliness, longing, outcasts

6 likes

“Moth: I gave you my life.

Flame: I allowed you to kiss me.”
― Hazrat Inayat Khan

tags: fate, poetry, tragedy

57 likes

“I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.”
― Neil Gaiman

tags: escape, fiction, learn, life, poison

11 likes

“Children who are victimized through sexual abuse often begin to develop deeply held tenets that shape their sense of self: 'My worth is my sexuality. I'm dirty and shameful. I have no right to my own physical boundaries.' That shapes their ideas about the world around them: 'No one will believe me. Telling the truth results in bad consequences. People can't be trusted.' It doesn't take long for children to being to act in accordance with these belief systems.
For girls who have experienced incest, sexual abuse, or rape, the boundaries between love, sex, and pain become blurred. Secrets are normal, and shame is a constant.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us

tags: beliefs, children, incest, love, pain, rape, secrets, sex, sexual-abuse, sexuality, shame, victims

33 likes

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Brenda’s Groups

Graphic Novel Reading Group — 5405 members — last activity Mar 07, 2026 09:10PM
This is a place where lovers of the Sequential Art form of Literature (graphic novels, comic books, manga, etc.) can get together and talk about their ...more

The Life of a Book Addict — 12131 members — last activity Mar 07, 2026 10:39AM
We now read at "On the Same Page." ...more

Writers and Readers — 3107 members — last activity Mar 01, 2026 12:29AM
A group for writers and readers to meet and discuss books and the writing process. The group allows promotion of books, but please post in the designa ...more

¡ POETRY ! — 22550 members — last activity Mar 04, 2026 01:17PM
No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read it!) Goodreads honors wordsmiths: poets and poetry promoted and prompted here. ~~~ "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." -- Carl Sandburg “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.” —Anne Sexton On Clouds – “…what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about…” —Yevgeny Zamyatin “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.” —Donald Hall “Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.” —Boris Pasternak “Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.” —Charles Simic “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” —Gustave Flaubert “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” —Allen Ginsberg. ~~~~~ Amy King, Moderator Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the WNBA Award (Women’s National Book Association). Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. ...more

Goodreads Authors/Readers — 56206 members — last activity 1 hour, 42 min ago
This group is dedicated to connecting readers with Goodreads authors. It is divided by genres, and includes folders for writing resources, book websit ...more

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