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✿ ♡ ⋆｡˚ Akeelah

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✿ ♡ ⋆｡˚ Akeelah’s would-read-again shelf

The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales by Chris Baldick

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales o... by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

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would-read-again‎ (33)
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gothica‎ (22)
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✿ ♡ ⋆｡˚ Akeelah is Currently Reading

✿ ♡ ⋆｡˚ Akeelah is currently reading

All the Bright Places

by Jennifer Niven (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading, 2026-readlist

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progress:

(page 204 of 388)
— May 22, 2026 06:39PM

Mar 08, 2026 12:07PM

✿ ♡ ⋆｡˚ Akeelah is currently reading

The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth: Entrepreneurship for Weirdos, Misfits, and World Dominators

by Chris Brogan

bookshelves: 2025-readlist, currently-reading

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✿ ♡ ⋆｡˚ Akeelah said: " "The premise of this book is really simple: How can I do business my way and be successful, when the way I think and the goals I have aren’t in line with conventional thinking?"

- As a freak who's going into business, this was an important read for me "The premise of this book is really simple: How can I do business my way and be successful, when the way I think and the goals I have aren’t in line with conventional thinking?"

- As a freak who's going into business, this was an important read for me. As I like to say, "I can do anything at all but fit in."
- Great quotes, including:
+ "Complexity serves nothing but our ego. Be able to say what you do in a way that people can understand."
+ "If you’re writing a book, TV isn’t your friend. If you're working on losing weight, avoid the drive-through windows. There’s no “both” in discipline. You are, or you are not."
+ "That’s the trick. Until someone else does something once, no one will think it can be done. Until someone else repeats it, everyone will think you’re lucky. By the time everyone’s doing it, who cares?"
+ "We are owned by the things we own."
+ "I have rules about meetings. Less than 20 minutes unless you pay me a heck ofa lot to sit there. Ten minutes if I can manage it, which is not too often. Sometimes, but rarely, an e-mail can fix it." (Felt that in my soul)
+ "Dwelling on the past and worrying about the future are a tax on the hours you have left on this
planet. Why pay more taxes than necessary?"
- Overuse of brackets and emdashes
- Lots of promotion of friends' sites and author's personal sites (felt advertise-y in some areas). However, some of it -- the sites still active and actually successful -- did it's job to inspire, such as how straight out of college, Alexis Ohanian cofounded the very successful Reddit (reddit.com), sometimes called the “front page of the Internet.
- Compared himself to Oprah and Howard Stern: "You hope to cultivate readers, but you exist to improve the potential for advertisers to reach customers who engage with their ads. That’s what
makes the business work. Unless you're Oprah. Or Howard Stern. Or me." Found that odd and randomly placed.
- Editorial errors, such as, "I once asked an executive *about* *to* speak at an event what he did for Unilever." ; "Lada Gaga" ; etc.
- Love some of the unordinary vocabulary, such as brethren and [...]
- Make a fun science out of measuring successful - "fun" as in self-defined and abstract, thus attainable
- The author, Chris Brogan, gave out his contact information (chris@hbway.com) to connect with fellow freaks. Genuine connection or possible exploitation?
- Sometimes, it's okay to quit if something isn't working or its too costly (physically, emotionally, mentally, etc.) to keep going *that route.* "Success came after learning what to do, what not to do, and how many aspects of life I can quit."
- Learn how to ask better questions... the ones that will get you in the door, make you memorable, and ones that others are too afraid to ask. Ask questions that match the person’s expertise. Ask questions that the other person can answer briefly enough, but that will give you something to do later. Ask questions to more than one person with similar expertise, but never ask someone to validate or retort someone else’s answer. Never, ever, ever ask someone questions if the answers can easily be found by using Google search and/or YouTube.
- Some things are unknowable. The unknowable is an opportunity. It means that it’s not a no. Also, it's okay to be dumb and wrong.
- It's okay to have fun projects, even in business. Enjoy the journey and not just the destination, otherwise you'll get to Emerald City but resent the yellowbrick road.
- Business is about standing out, not fitting in. Freaks thrive in that arena.
- ...more "

progress:

(page 79 of 208)
— Dec 11, 2025 07:33PM

Dec 11, 2025 07:34PM · see review

✿ ♡ ⋆｡˚ Akeelah is currently reading

The Odyssey

by Homer

bookshelves: currently-reading, 2025-readlist, 2026-readlist

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progress:

(page 25 of 541)
— Jul 01, 2025 03:17PM

Dec 07, 2025 12:50PM

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✿ ♡ ⋆｡˚ Akeelah’s Quotes

“I loved him.'

'You didn't know him.'

'Of course I knew him. I listened to him sing every single day. The things he sings about, that's him. I know him better than I know you. He understood me.”
― Nick Hornby, About a Boy

tags: celebrities, idolisation, idols, kurt-cobain, nirvana, singers

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“Friends are nothing but a known enemy.”
― Kurt Cobain

tags: kurt-cobain

406 likes

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

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