Joe

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Joe is Currently Reading

Joe is currently reading

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

by James Clear (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

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progress:

(page 13 of 319)
— Nov 12, 2025 10:12PM

Nov 12, 2025 10:12PM

Joe is currently reading

The 57 Bus

by Dashka Slater (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: history-and-biography, politics, novels-and-novellas, poetry-and-verse, kidlit-ya, currently-reading

Reading for the 3rd time

read in September 2018

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Joe said: " An excerpt from Dashka Slater’s article in The New York Times, “The Fire on the 57 Bus in Oakland” (January 29, 2015), on which The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives is based.

“It was close to 5 o’clock on th An excerpt from Dashka Slater’s article in The New York Times, “The Fire on the 57 Bus in Oakland” (January 29, 2015), on which The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives is based.

“It was close to 5 o’clock on the afternoon of Nov. 4, 2013, and Sasha Fleischman was riding the 57 bus home from school. An 18-year-old senior at a small private high school, Sasha wore a T-shirt, a black fleece jacket, a gray newsboy cap and a gauzy white skirt. For much of the long bus ride through Oakland, Calif., Sasha — who identifies as agender, neither male nor female — had been reading a paperback copy of ‘Anna Karenina,’ but eventually the teenager drifted into sleep, skirt draped over the edge of the bus seat.

As Sasha slept, three teenage boys laughed and joked nearby. Then one surreptitiously flicked a lighter. The skirt went up in a ball of flame. Sasha leapt up, screaming, ‘I’m on fire!’ Two other passengers threw Sasha to the ground and extinguished the flames, but Sasha’s legs were left charred and peeling. Taken by ambulance to a San Francisco burn unit, Sasha would spend the next three and a half weeks undergoing multiple operations to treat the second- and third-degree burns that ran from thigh to calf.

Richard Thomas, the 16-year-old boy who lit the skirt on fire, was arrested the following day. Citing the severity of the crime, the Alameda County district attorney, Nancy O’Malley, charged Thomas as an adult, stripping him of the protections — including anonymity — customarily afforded to juveniles. Charged with two felonies, each with a hate-crime clause that increased the time he would serve if convicted, Thomas faced the possibility of life imprisonment.

Oakland is a city of more than 400,000 people, but it can often feel like a small town. The attack happened in my neighborhood, on a bus my own teenager sometimes takes home from school. Sasha Fleischman’s family and my family have close friends in common. Richard Thomas once attended my son’s high school. But even when events unfold practically on your doorstep, it isn’t always easy to make sense of them.”

Slater’s book sheds much light on a few topics that have been of particular interest to me in recent months: gender inclusivity, neurodiversity, racial inequity, and the effects of childhood trauma on adolescent behavior. If literature does indeed help instill strong feelings of empathy within people, then Slater’s book should help readers better understand the attacker and the attacked. That being said, Slater’s prose is rife with clichés, platitudes, redundancies, and heavy-handed calls to action, it meanders and rambles, it occasionally portrays Oakland and its residents in somewhat narrow and superficial ways (in one instance, Slater describes Oakland High’s students as moving toward “a future as hazy as weed smoke”), and it relies on its ability to resonate with Bay Area residents—natives, in particular—by means of awkward code switching and interspersions of the words “hecka” and “hella”; however, Slater’s strengths lie not in her abilities as an aesthete, poet, or writer of the Capotean true crime non-fiction novel, but as a journalist, and the book is not without its strong moments: the issues are so salient and real, the story so powerfully catastrophic, and the message so significant that people should not pass up the opportunity to read this book when the time comes, as long as they remember that the story is not Slater’s nearly as much as it is Sasha and Richard’s. ...more "

progress:

(page 96 of 320)
— Nov 04, 2025 06:59AM

Mar 21, 2025 03:44PM · see review

Joe is currently reading

Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

by Zaretta Hammond

bookshelves: education, currently-reading

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progress:

(page 25 of 192)
— Sep 29, 2025 07:52PM

Sep 29, 2025 07:52PM

Joe’s Quotes

“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

tags: art

899 likes

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

2208 likes

“But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

tags: fictional-truth, on-fiction

426 likes

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

5073 likes