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LauraT

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LauraT is Currently Reading

LauraT is currently reading

L'uomo delle castagne

by Søren Sveistrup

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(page 100 of 560)
— Aug 22, 2026 10:36AM

Aug 22, 2026 10:35AM

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Poetic Justice (A Kate Fansler Mystery, #3)

by Amanda Cross

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(page 95 of 213)
— Aug 22, 2026 10:36AM

Aug 22, 2026 10:33AM

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A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara (Goodreads Author)

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Reading for the 3rd time

read in July 2021

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LauraT said: " One of the best books I've read in the last few years.
A complex book; a VERY complex book. Looked at first sight it could be seen - and actually read - as a Victorian novel: a novel where 4 boys meet, and grow - together. A real "bildungsroman" of o One of the best books I've read in the last few years.
A complex book; a VERY complex book. Looked at first sight it could be seen - and actually read - as a Victorian novel: a novel where 4 boys meet, and grow - together. A real "bildungsroman" of old times.
And it is a bildungsroman, it is indeed. Still it is much more than that.
Staring from the writing style – I know that she didn’t invent the technique of postponing the clarification of what hinted, but I think Yanagihara is a rea Master in this, and it keeps you chained to the novel till the very last page. And it is a LONG novel indeed!
But what makes it a real XXI Century masterpiece is, in my opinion, the description of pain, a pain so big, so huge, that can never be defeated. Notwithstanding friends – probably this is a book on friendship – love, support. If you are in pain, there’s nothing you can really do to escape that. Predestination at its hight
Like Dickens somehow said…
A "book-friend" of mine wrote "An epic read of modern lit"; probably the best description

"It would be so much easier if he didn’t have these feelings at all. And so what if he did? he argued with himself. Everyone had feelings that they knew better than to act upon because they knew that doing so would make life so much more complicated. He had whole pages of dialogue with himself, imagining the lines—his and JB’s, both spoken by him—typeset on white paper.
But still, the feelings persisted. "

“Stop trying to fix me, Willem,” Jude spits back at him. “What am I to you? Why are you with me anyway? I’m not your goddamned charity project[...]”

"He had played the husband, and while he had long ago realized that it had been, really, an awful play (it had included lines like “This isn’t Tosca, you know! This is life!”), he had never forgotten the final monologue he had delivered in the second act, when the wife announces that she wants to leave, that she doesn’t feel fulfilled in their marriage, that she’s convinced that someone better awaits her:
SETH: But don’t you understand, Amy? You’re wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person—sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty—and you get to pick three of those things. Three—that’s it. Maybe four, if you’re very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere."

It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to do is open one’s mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are there together, floating through the climate. Or maybe he is closer still: maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor’s house, purring when I reach out my hand to it

Contracts are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or an inheritance: in its purest, truest, broadest sense, contracts govern every realm of law. When we choose to live in a society, we choose to live under a contract, and to abide by the rules that a contract dictates for us—the Constitution itself is a contract, albeit a malleable contract, and the question of just how malleable it is, exactly, is where law intersects with politics—and it is under the rules, explicit or otherwise, of this contract that we promise not to kill, and to pay our taxes, and not to steal. But in this case, we are both the creators of and bound by this contract: as citizens of this country, we have assumed, from birth, an obligation to respect and follow its terms, and we do so daily [...] you will also be asked to consider law itself as a series of contracts. Some are more fair—and this one time, I’ll allow you to say such a thing—than others. But fairness is not the only, or even the most important, consideration in law: the law is not always fair. Contracts are not fair, not always. But sometimes they are necessary, these unfairnesses, because they are necessary for the proper functioning of society. In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and, as important, between what is fair and what is necessary. You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations. You will learn to see your life—all of our lives—as a series of agreements, and it will make you rethink not only the law but this country itself, and your place in it.”

“And then I went to college, and I met people who, for whatever reason, decided to be my friends, and they taught me — everything, really. They made me, and make me, into someone better than I really am.
“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are — not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving — and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad — or good — it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.” ...more "

progress:

(page 290 of 816)
— Aug 12, 2026 08:32AM

Aug 12, 2026 08:17AM · see review

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LauraT’s Quotes

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

8642 likes

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
― Ray Bradbury

tags: censorship

2656 likes

“Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes”
― Daniel Pennac

tags: books, reading, rights

7004 likes

“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

[Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

tags: ideas, lies, myth, opinion, thought, truth

423 likes