224 books
—
304 voters
M. Monahan
https://www.goodreads.com/monahanvariety
“This duck tells me nothing!”
― The Rook
― The Rook
“Now, do you mind telling me why you have all these guns lying around? Are you afraid the paperwork will rise up against you?'
'Oh, no. I'm going to use the guns as paperweights.”
― The Rook
'Oh, no. I'm going to use the guns as paperweights.”
― The Rook
“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”
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“Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.”
― A Company of Swans
― A Company of Swans
“You know, Elise, sometimes our lives have moments of great disappointment. It's difficult at the time, but we have to move beyond.”
― The Mating
― The Mating
The Perks Of Being A Book Addict
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This group is for anyone who loves books from different genres. Every month we have group Books of the Month which you can join, reading challenges, a ...more
This group is for anyone who loves books from different genres. Every month we have group Books of the Month which you can join, reading challenges, a ...more
Our Shared Shelf
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— last activity Sep 24, 2024 03:02PM
OUR SHARED SHELF IS CURRENTLY DORMANT AND NOT MANAGED BY EMMA AND HER TEAM. Dear Readers, As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading ...more
OUR SHARED SHELF IS CURRENTLY DORMANT AND NOT MANAGED BY EMMA AND HER TEAM. Dear Readers, As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading ...more
M. Monahan’s 2023 Year in Books
Take a look at M. Monahan’s Year in Books. The good, the bad, the long, the short—it’s all here.
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