Wander 〰
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2025 in Book Quotes
hey there👋 Thanks for stopping by~ This is the 5th consecutive year I’ve continued the tradition of reading (at least) a book a week! I stopped book counting this year to stay more aligned with the practice of enjoying books vs. quantifying them. I’ve continued Virtual Book Club (hovering around 100 members on a rolling…
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Review: Hold Everything Dear
Book Specs 📖 One Sentence Synopsis🔖 A series of philosophically political essays from the “War on Terror” to the consumerist society, and how we can combat feelings of despair using artistic expression. Notes/Thoughts📝 “Quotes”🗣 ” Despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat, makes for a stance towards the world…” “Our poems like…
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Review: The Summer Book
Book Specs 📖 One Sentence Synopsis🔖 Twenty-two vignettes of six-year old Sophie and her Grandmother on an island in the Gulf of Finland in the summertime Notes/Thoughts📝 “Quotes”🗣 “There is nothing sentimental about this world. Like the weather, this world asks only to be acknowledged. There is nothing comforting about it, and yet if you…
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Review: Septology
Book Specs 📖 One Sentence Synopsis🔖 A hypnotic and chaotic narrative about a widowed painter in Norway that finds his doppelgänger and goes on a journey of spiritual self-discovery. Notes/Thoughts📝 “Quotes”🗣 “It’s always, always the darkest part of the picture that shines the most, and I think that that might be because it’s in the…
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Review: Love in A Fallen City
Book Specs 📖 One Sentence Synopsis🔖 Passionate, lustful, tragic love stories in Shanghai. (Who said Chinese people don’t got rizz?) Notes/Thoughts📝 “Quotes”🗣 “When you came you were one kind of person. Now you are another kind of person. You have changed and your home must change along with you. You can try to go back…
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Review: Taiwan Travelogue
Book Specs 📖 One Sentence Synopsis🔖 Aoyama Chizuko, a well-known Japanese novelist, is sponsored by the colonial government to conduct a one-week lecture series in Taiwan where she develops and ravenous appetite for local food and an interesting relationship with her interpreter. Notes/Thoughts📝 “Quotes”🗣 “Travelling is living in a foreign place. As in, experiencing all…
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Review: Bloom & Other Poems
Book Specs 📖 One Sentence Synopsis🔖 A jubilant tirade on modernity, historical iinfluences, and other wandering thoughts from Chinese Poet 西川。 Notes/Thoughts📝 “Quotes”🗣 “bloom barbaric blossoms bloom unbearable blossoms bloom the deviant the unreasonable the illogical like a heavy downpour on a million square kilometres of desert bloom fantastical indulgence in case even fantasies bloom…
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Review: I’m Glad My Mom Died
Book Specs 📖 One Sentence Synopsis🔖 Former Nickelodeon child actor reveals her abusive relationship with her mom. Notes/Thoughts📝 “Quotes”🗣 “I don’t like knowing people in the context of things. “Oh, that’s the person I work out with. That’s the person I’m in a book club with. That’s the person I did that show with.” Because…
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Review: Things in Nature Merely Grow
Book Specs 📖 One Sentence Synopsis🔖 Yiyun Li shares the tragic loss of her sons to suicide. Notes/Thoughts📝 “Quotes”🗣 “Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life. “ “And yet life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies.” “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but…
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Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Book Specs 📖 One Sentence Synopsis🔖 Follow the tragedy of seven generations of the Buendia family as they repeat their histories, experiences, and passions. Notes/Thoughts📝 “Quotes”🗣 “Children inherit their parents’ madness” “He was weary of the uncertainty, of the vicoius circle of that eternal war that always found him in the same place, but always…
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Review: Elena Knows
Book Specs 📖 One Sentence Synopsis🔖 Elena, a mother with advanced Parkinson’s, investigates her daughter’s suicide. Notes/Thoughts📝 “Quotes”🗣 “She doesn’t have a timetable. Her time is measured in pills.” “Never isn’t a word hat applies to our species, there are so many things that we think applies to our species, there are so many things…
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