Just another writer
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Beautiful Sentences: Yiyun Li
Instead, we read other people’s stories, more real than our own; after all, inadequate makers of our own lives, we were no match for those masters. Yiyun Li, “Kindness.”
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Beautiful Sentences: Steven Millhauser
One explanation says that we ourselves are phantoms. Arguments drawn from cognitive science claim that our bodies are nothing but artificial constructs of our brains: we are the dream-creations of electrically charged neurons. The world itself is a great seeming. One virtue of this explanation is that it accounts for the behavior of our phantoms:…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 417.7 MCW The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
I continue to circle towards the foreign language shelves, but there’s still some space left in the Dewey Decimal system before I get there. The 410s are linguistics, pretty much indistinguishable by the collection at the local library from the 400s, language. From there I selected this book, caught by the punning title. Like Harrison…
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Beautiful Sentences: Yiyun Li
You think you will remember every moment, every detail, but the truth is I can’t remember much about it. Can’t even remember how long we were at it. Yiyun Li, “Kindness.”
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Dewey Decimal Project: 408.9 HAR The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages
When I looked at the 400s, it seemed a big chunk of the books were missing. Pretty much everything from 430 on. They had been there earlier when I had originally scoped out the library and considered the project before me, but now they were missing. A quick walk around the third floor solved the mystery:…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 391.6 YAL A History of the Breast
The 390s comprise “Customs, etiquette and folklore” which had a lot of books about fashion at my local library. I’m not that interested in fashion, but breasts, on the other hand, struck me as something worthy of spending a book reading about. Yalom writes here about how breasts became eroticized in eroticized in Western culture, which…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 381.45 MIL Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption
The 380s: Commerce, Communications & Transportation. I was tempted to read something about trains when I got here, but then I spotted this, a book about bookselling (with an implicit critique of capitalism in its title!). As my dream in life has been to retire into bookselling, I thought there could be no better option for…
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Beautiful Sentences: Christine Sneed
Rejection is the relentless, powerful hazing that disables ninety-seven out of a hundred talented people. Christine Sneed, “The First Wife.”