Suzanne

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No Two Persons
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by Erica Bauermeister (Goodreads Author)
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Hang the Moon
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by Jeannette Walls (Goodreads Author)
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How to Raise an A...
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  (page 140 of 368)
"I find myself talking about this book a lot. And it's already inspired me to make some parenting changes. Am embarrassed to admit it but we are still waking our 8th grader up each morning for school. I'm belatedly remembering I was responsible for getting myself up in time for school from 6th grade." Dec 09, 2015 07:49AM

 
See all 6 books that Suzanne is reading…
Book cover for Fear: Trump in the White House
It was no less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the president of the United States and his constitutional authority.
Suzanne
1% into the book and we're already in coup d'etat territory.
Adam and 4 other people liked this
William Tarbush
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William Tarbush
Thanks for your answer.
Jeff
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Jeff
I just impulse-bought this book to join in on the KNH highlighting action.
Eric Franklin
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Eric Franklin
Attaboy, Jeff. I can feel the DSI already.
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Robin Sloan
“I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice-and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium.”
Robin Sloan, Sourdough

Timothy Snyder
“As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.

The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.

The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.

Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.”

The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.”
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Celeste Ng
“Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less. As a baby Pearl had clung to her; she’d worn Pearl in a sling because whenever she’d set her down, Pearl would cry. There’d scarcely been a moment in the day when they had not been pressed together. As she got older, Pearl would still cling to her mother’s leg, then her waist, then her hand, as if there was something in her mother she needed to absorb through the skin. Even when she had her own bed, she would often crawl into Mia’s in the middle of the night and burrow under the old patchwork quilt, and in the morning they would wake up tangled, Mia’s arm pinned beneath Pearl’s head, or Pearl’s legs thrown across Mia’s belly. Now, as a teenager, Pearl’s caresses had become rare—a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug—and all the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”
Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

Jason Fagone
“It's not quite true that history is written by the winners. It's written by the best publicists on the winning team.”
Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

Ursula K. Le Guin
“The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.”
Ursula K Le Guin

9277 Outlander Series — 6386 members — last activity Dec 10, 2022 06:29AM
For fans of Diana Gabaldon and the Outlander Series. Feel free to post, poll, invite, and discuss. Please take a moment to read the rules found in ' ...more
120138 The Big Bath Read 2014 — 54 members — last activity Mar 10, 2014 01:46AM
This is a group celebrating The Big Bath Read 2014: The Sea Change by Joanna Rossiter. Every year the Independent Bath Literature Festival chooses a B ...more
179584 Our Shared Shelf — 229851 members — last activity Mar 21, 2023 09:42PM
OUR SHARED SHELF IS CURRENTLY DORMANT AND NOT MANAGED BY EMMA AND HER TEAM. Dear Readers, As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading ...more
9150 Goodreads Company Book Club — 111 members — last activity Dec 05, 2016 04:45PM
Book club for Goodreads employees and alumni. We're a reading machine! In addition to this group, we have some other interest-specific reading groups ...more
216431 Think Big Book Club — 62 members — last activity Apr 19, 2017 05:26PM
A book club for Goodreads employees who want to Think Big. We'll read and discuss one book (every other month) around how others have thought big abou ...more
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year in books
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