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Marlene

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Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville

The Painter of Battles by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

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Marlene is Currently Reading

Marlene is currently reading

The Shortest Day

by Colm Tóibín

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Feb 20, 2026 08:39AM

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Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

by Richard Miller

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Jul 25, 2025 07:23PM

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I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

by Keith McNally

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May 27, 2025 06:12AM

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Marlene’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

4 notes & 326 highlights

IN LATER YEARS, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay

Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

3 notes & 122 highlights

“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

tags: one-hundred-years-of-solitude

291 likes

“I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life.”
― Diane Ackerman

47 likes

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

tags: books, library, longing

3468 likes

“Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles

tags: ireland, moderation

31 likes

“What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

175 likes

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¡ POETRY ! — 22545 members — last activity Mar 26, 2026 07:46PM
No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read it!) Goodreads honors wordsmiths: poets and poetry promoted and prompted here. ~~~ "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." -- Carl Sandburg “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.” —Anne Sexton On Clouds – “…what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about…” —Yevgeny Zamyatin “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.” —Donald Hall “Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.” —Boris Pasternak “Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.” —Charles Simic “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” —Gustave Flaubert “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” —Allen Ginsberg. ~~~~~ Amy King, Moderator Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the WNBA Award (Women’s National Book Association). Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. ...more