Jo Toon

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https://desimplify.substack.com

https://www.goodreads.com/jotoon

Jo’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (162)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (2048)
did-not-finish‎ (0)
history‎ (501)
philosophy‎ (263)
religion‎ (190)
favorites‎ (184)
historical-fiction‎ (180)
society-and-culture‎ (179)
fantasy‎ (168)

biography‎ (167)
science‎ (151)
classics‎ (126)
literary-fiction‎ (120)
politics‎ (117)
language-literature‎ (105)
science-fiction‎ (97)
mystery-thriller‎ (88)
psychology‎ (79)
intellectual-history‎ (77)
contemporary-fiction‎ (38)

humor‎ (34)
plays‎ (33)
economics‎ (26)
non-fiction‎ (25)
juvenile‎ (20)
romance‎ (20)
essays‎ (19)
narrative-nonfiction‎ (19)
satire‎ (19)
art-and-music‎ (16)
poetry‎ (16)

better-living‎ (15)
chick-lit‎ (7)
education‎ (5)
young-adult‎ (5)
picture-books‎ (4)
reference-works‎ (3)
womens-fiction‎ (3)
graphic-novels‎ (1)

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“... story is more than just a discarded by-product of your bare experience. Story is its own bare experience. Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

tags: books, story

0 likes

“No, if you haven’t lived through 1998, you don’t know what sanctimony is.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

2 likes

“The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

11 likes

“Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

29 likes

“Should we only portray the world we wanted to see? Should we consider certain stories “damaging,” and restrict them from a general audience, not trusting them to take in the story without internalizing the messaging? Hadn’t we all agreed that morality in art was bad? But art did cause damage, and I was affected by films I had seen when I was young, and I was ashamed when I watched an old film and saw racist depictions I hadn’t seen before, and I was glad to be ashamed. But did we all have to see ourselves in the presentations of types? Did I have to feel like every wife and mother was presenting an overarching narrative of Wife and Mother that reinforced or rejected my own experience?”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

24 likes

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