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So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.
“One day,’ I told him, ‘God will turn out all the lights to remind people like you that in the dark, you won’t be able to tell who is white like you and who ain’t. We’ll have to treat one another equally. We’ll learn it’s not our skin color that makes us good or bad. And only when we learn that, will God turn the lights back on.”
― Betty
― Betty
“Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realize how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure, and saw that I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing.”
― Lincoln in the Bardo
― Lincoln in the Bardo
“...my father had been born from the minds of writers. I believed the Great Creator had flown these writers on the backs of thunderbirds to the moon and told them to write me a father. Writers like Mary Shelley, who wrote my father to have a gothic understanding of the tenderness of all monsters. It was Agatha Christie who created the mystery within my father and Edgar Allan Poe who gave darkness to him in ways that lifted him to the flight of the raven. William Shakespeare wrote my father a Romeo heart at the same time Susan Fenimore Cooper composed him to have sympathy toward nature and a longing for paradise to be regained. Emily Dickinson shared her poet self so my father would know the most sacred text of mankind is in the way we do and do not rhyme, leaving John Steinbeck to gift my father a compass in his mind so he would always appreciate he was east of Eden and a little south of heaven. Not to be left out, Sophia Alice Callahan made sure there was a part of my father that would always remain a child of the forest, while Louisa May Alcott penned the loyalty and hope within his soul. It was Theodore Dreiser who was left the task of writing my father the destiny of being an American tragedy only after Shirley Jackson prepared my father for the horrors of that very thing.”
― Betty
― Betty
“I often turn to children’s books at times like these, when I’m yearning to escape into a world that is beautifully rendered and complex, yet soothingly familiar.”
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“The glow of a cigarette in the dark. All the stars, the planets, the galaxies, the infinite edges. It’s all in the small glowin’ tip of a cigarette in the hand of a man leanin’ back against a wall, watchin’ a girl walk by on her way home, knowin’ she’ll never get there.”
― Betty
― Betty
The Seasonal Reading Challenge
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Do you want to broaden your reading horizons and discover new books, authors and genres? Do you love reading challenges? Do you live for competition? ...more
Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge
— 26937 members
— last activity Apr 24, 2026 04:54AM
An annual reading challenge to to help you stretch your reading limits and explore new voices, worlds, and genres! The challenge begins in January, bu ...more
Our Shared Shelf
— 222858 members
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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
Emily’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Emily’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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