Nine books that month. Some hits, some misses. All worth talking about.
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"Multiple failures colliding in a complex system. Ever heard a better definition of human life?" Bakerton: a small Pennsylvania town dying slowly. Wasn't always this way. The town once thrived on coal mining. Then the mines closed. People left. What remains isn't pretty.
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"We're not just the sum of what happened to us. We're proof of how we interpreted those events." Wouldn't have picked this up without Nicole's enthusiastic review. Lucky I did. Kennedy writes about lives shaped by accident and choice in equal measure.
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"The rich got richer. That helped the poor be patient. Cleverness started replacing actual work." Lemaître decided to write a sequel to his Goncourt winner. Smart move. This continuation hits just as hard as the original.
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"America itself is an illusion, the biggest one. White people believe with their whole hearts they have the right to take the land. Kill the Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. If there was any justice in this world..." Whitehead makes the railroad literal. Works better than you'd think.
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"An unreal world was much bigger than a real one. Gave you enough room to be yourself and not yourself at the same time." I'd drifted away from Auster recently. Last one I read didn't do it for me. This one brought me back. Four versions of one life. All equally real.
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"There's something strange in me, Mevlut answered. No matter what I do, I feel terribly alone in this world." Walk a city for hours and you'll understand it. Young Mevlut learns this truth selling boza through Istanbul's streets at night.
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"We'll have to go back to paper, ink and the concept of memory. Not 'live' memory, but living memory. The memory in our brains. - You think we'll still know how to use our brains?" Looks like I didn't learn my lesson about Bilal. His art pulls me in every time.
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The invisible dictatorship of digital. "In China, they already see the United States as yesterday's dominant nation and Google as tomorrow's." What kind of world are the tech giants building? And are we just letting them do it?
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Started doing this title game every year. A way to close the book on last year's reading before diving into January's new releases. Used my favorite titles to build a sentence. Came out weird. Always does.
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