Home Remedies - Xuan Juliana Wang
Black Skin White Masks - Frantz Fanon
A Random Walk Down Wall Street - Burton Malkiel
The Souls of the Black Folk - WEB Du Bois
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard
Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis - James Rickards
American Wolf - Nate Blakeslee
The Seven Good Years - Etkar Keret
The Third Plate - Dan Barber
Woman Warrior - Maxine Long Kingston
Yellow - Frank Wu
Black Skin White Masks - Frantz Fanon
A Random Walk Down Wall Street - Burton Malkiel
The Souls of the Black Folk - WEB Du Bois
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard
Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis - James Rickards
American Wolf - Nate Blakeslee
The Seven Good Years - Etkar Keret
The Third Plate - Dan Barber
Woman Warrior - Maxine Long Kingston
Yellow - Frank Wu
“Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage ground”
Via Negativa
‘We don’t do it because we know what it means... we do it to find out what it means’
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong
The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.
No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what is the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely? The Vietnameses I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level.
It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear. Or now-- as Lan called to me, “Little Dog, get over here and help me help your mother.” And we knelt on each other each side of you, rolling out the hardened cords in your upper arms, then down to your wrists, your fingers. For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense-- that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.
Free Food for Millionaires - Lee Min Jin
Everything with Koreans, Casey thought, was about avoiding shame.
She was one of those Korean girls who thought she was as good as white and that the world was fair, and it tickled him to see her reduced to this position-- to have to ask a member of the immigrant tribe for a patch of floor to sleep on and to ask another member to pull a favor on her behalf. Where are all of your little white friends now? he wanted to say th her. She was acting like a rich white girl, and Ted knew that life did not let you lie to yourself for very long. In that way, you had to admit, life was quite fair.
...how quickly you got your food revealed the likelyhood of achieving your goals.
“Why do atheists constantly harp on Christian hypocrisies? Why don’t you fucking dodgers just get your own set of beliefs to critique yourselves against? I never said I was a good person or a good Christian...”
And by the time you’re my age-- you’ll see that for every day and every last moment spent, you were making a choice. And you’ll see that the time you had, that you were given, was wasted. It’s gone.
Girl, Woman, Other - Bernadine Evaristo
...failsafe Birkies in summer
...because it’s such a privilege to not die prematurely,
...his one domestic duty was to bring home the meat for Sunday lunch from the butcher’s - a suburban kind of hunter-gatherer thing
she then regretted never telling him she loved him, he was her father, a good man, of course she loved him, she knew that now he was gone,, he was a partiarch but her mother was right when she said, he’s of his time an culture, Amma
...by the way, I’m humanitarian, which is on a much higher plane than feminism do you even know what that is?
English people like to waste their money in expensive supermarkets on overpriced goods in fancy packaging, and then dare to complain in the bus queue about the economy going down the drain while giving me filthy looks, when it is them, yes, them who are going down the drain with their susceptibility to fancy advertising that causes a slump in their personal finances as a consequence
Great Aunt Myrtle drilled it into me to be a person with knowledge, not just opinions
Shirley had long felt angry on behalf of her brothers who’d also been harassed by the police since they wre young
all black men had to learn to handle it, all black men had to be tough
Carole, her first and greatest achievement, never reported back as instructed, not once, not so much as a phone call or a thank you postcard since the day she left school over a decade ago now
it makes Shirley feel
well, used
Penelope came to the conclusion that marrying someone whwen you’re in love with them was perhaps not such a good idea, better to wait ten years (ten, twenty, thirty, never?) to see if you’re compatible after the passion has subsided and reality set in
whom were Asian
well-educated and well-spoken
so hardly Asian at all
this was exactly what she needed
solitude
to register what she was feeling
forcing herself to become deaf to all sound except her own
it felt like meditation as she concentrated on the concertina of her own breathing
presents are piled underneath the tree, people giving each other things for the sake of it, nothing to do with religion, Christmas should be called Greedymas
a time when people overeat and over-indulge in the name of Jesus Christ
Sylvester says they sold their lefty student principles, if they ever had them, as soon as they left university and accepted an overpaid starter-salary in a morally objectionable corporate job offering lucrative career prospects and inflated annual bonuses which soon turned them into filthy-rich Tories with a hatred of the social welfare infrastructures they’re actively not contributing to through tax avoidance and evason while hypocritically scorning the underclasses as the scourge of society who sponge off the state when they’re the ones who are the biggest scroungeres on society with no sense of community responsibility other than a very self-aggrandizing, tax-deductible form of fashionable charity they like to call philanthropism!
feminism needs tectonic plates to shift, not a trendy make-over
this is not about feeling something or about speaking words this is about being together.
Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
Meanwhile as we pour our millions into research and invest all our hopes in vast programs to find cures for established cases of cancer, we are neglecting the golden opportunity to prevent, even while we seek to cure.
The truth, seldom mentioned but there for anyone to see, ist hat nature is not so easilly molded...
The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting in a constant state of adustment. Man, too is part o fthis balance. Sometimes the balance is in his favor; sometimes-- and all too often though his own activities-- it is shifted to his disadvantage.