From Book to Book

A scrapbook of books that I have read recently

[frombooktobook]

[frombooktobook]

[frombooktobook]

But I was waiting to see what designer she would turn up in! I go to all this trouble, and she doesn't even bother to make the effort. What's the whole fucking point of this wedding?

Crazy Rich Asians - Kevin Kwan

[frombooktobook]

Aiyoooooh, finish everything on your plate, girls! Don't you know there are children starving in American?

Crazy Rich Asians - Kevin Kwan

[frombooktobook]

[frombooktobook]

[shaelit]

“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when rich people move into the hood, where it’s a little bit broken and a little bit forgotten, the first thing they want to do is clean it up. But it’s not just the junky stuff they’ll get rid of. People can be thrown away too, like last night’s trash left out on sidewalks or pushed to the edge of wherever all broken things go. What those rich people don’t always know is that broken and forgotten neighborhoods were first built out of love.” - Pride, Ibi Zoboi

[rae-laxing-deactivated20230319]

“Read to travel,” Papi always says. Every book is a different hood, a different country, a different world. Reading is how I visit places and people and ideas.

Pride by Ibi Zoboi  (via literaery-me)

[frombooktobook]

[intpatypical]

For the rest of the week, I experienced Rome as they did; as a place of history, but also as a place of life, of food and traffic and conflict and thunder. The city was no longer a museum; it was as vivid to me as Buck’s Peak. The Piazza del Popolo. The Baths of Caracalla. Castel Sant'Angelo. These became as real to my mind as the Princess, the red railway car, the Shear. The world they represented, of philosophy, science, literature - an entire civilisation- took on a life that was distinct from the life I had known. At the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, I stood before Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and did not once think about chickens. I don’t know what caused the transformation, why suddenly I could engage with the great thinkers of the past, rather than revere them to the point of muteness. But there was something about that city, with its white marble and black asphalt, crusted with history, ablaze in traffic lights, that showed me I could admire the past without being silenced by it.

Educated, Tara Westover (via intpatypical)

[booksandher-deactivated20200517]

“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was”.

- Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir

[kxowledge]

We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.

Tara Westover, Educated (via kxowledge)

[kxowledge]

The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.

Tara Westover, Educated (via kxowledge)

[kxowledge]

Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.

Tara Westover, Educated (via kxowledge)

[nprbooks]

Image courtesy of Paul Stuart/Random House

Growing up in rural Idaho, Tara Westover had no birth certificate, never saw a doctor and didn’t go to school. Her parents were religious fundamentalists who stockpiled food, mistrusted the government and believed in strict gender roles for their seven children. 

But Westover defied her family’s expectations when she enrolled in Brigham Young University at 17. She writes about her awkward transition into the mainstream and her painful struggles with her family in Educated: A Memoir. 

Memoirist Retraces Her Journey From Survivalist Childhood To Cambridge Ph.D.

[frombooktobook]

[my-faith-is-my-fortune]

Octavia E. Butler, born in Pasadena, California, The United States June 22, 1947 died February 24, 2006.

Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant.