johnrakestraw

johnrakestraw , 1 day ago to bookstodon group

Ann Patchett: “If a person of any age picked up the cello for the first time and said, ‘I’ll be playing at Carnegie Hall next month!’ you would pity their delusion, yet beginning fiction writers all across the country polish up their best efforts and send them off to The New Yorker” (‘This is the story of a happy marriage,’ p. 28).

Would that I had even a small bit of that courage (or audacity).

@bookstodon #writersBlock #perfectionism

seanbala , 4 days ago to bookstodon group

At the store and came across a pretty discounted hardcover copy of "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver. It is worth purchasing a physical copy? I usually try to stick to library books and purchase books I really like, but the library wait list is long and the price is tempting.

About to travel and was looking for something good to read.

#books #bookstodon #reading #readingcommunity #literature #barbarakingsolver #demoncopperhead @books @bookstodon

bibliolater , 4 days ago to bookstodon group

Irvine Welsh: ‘If reading gives you comfort, you’re not doing it right’

“The Scottish author on having his mind changed by Orwell, how Trainspotting was influenced by Ulysses, and his wariness of novels created with AI”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/21/irvine-welsh-if-reading-gives-you-comfort-youre-not-doing-it-right

#Read #Reading #Book #Books #Ebook #Ebooks #Bookstodon @bookstodon

johnrakestraw , 5 days ago to bookstodon group

We’re all – trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria – pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where #ecological and #evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of self into relationship.
#interconnections #relationships @bookstodon
--David Haskell, The Songs of Trees

johnrakestraw , 1 month ago to bookstodon group

An interesting piece about #writing, #reading, and a bit on collecting #firstEditions. There’s some irony in owning a first edition of #greatGatsby owned earlier by Dorothy Scarritt, Oppenheimer’s secretary at Los Alamos. And I had only a little twinge reading that one who just turned 40 might expect to read only 480 more books carefully if one manages to read one book a month.

Gift link: https://wapo.st/3K8hmHn

@bookstodon #bookstodon

johnrakestraw , 1 month ago to bookstodon group

Rebecca Solnit: "Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand." @bookstodon #hope #socialJustice

johnrakestraw , 3 months ago to bookstodon group

Blog post: Rachel Cohen's "A Chance Meeting: American Encounters" is a wonderful book offering vignettes of meetings between individuals who helped to shape American culture. Mark Twain and Willa Cather, William James and Gertrude Stein, and others. The conversations are interesting in themselves; they also have me thinking about how encounters with people and books have shaped the person I've become.

https://johnrakestraw.com/post/chance-meetings-and-the-forming-of-an-identity/

#amReading @bookstodon #MarkTwain #introversion #Solitude

johnrakestraw , 4 months ago to bookstodon group

"... a highly refined error is likely to keep us permanently estranged from truth, and will do so all the more readily in proportion as we find it difficult to realise that it is an error. One who thinks of conveying to mankind truths masked and rouged, may be truth’s pimp, but has never been truth’s lover" (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, quoted by Rosa Luxemburg, 'Socialism or Barbarism,' p. 250.
@bookstodon #SundaySentence

johnrakestraw , 5 months ago to bookstodon group

#SundaySentence @bookstodon “Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.”
Fyodor #Dostoevsky, ‘The Idiot’ (Part IV, Chapter 3)