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262 reviews

Ashish Kumar

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Ashish’s best-books-of-2019 shelf

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

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Ashish’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (340)
currently-reading‎ (1)
read‎ (347)

lgbt‎ (23)
short-stories‎ (13)
poetry‎ (12)

non-fiction‎ (11)
best-books-of-2018‎ (9)
best-books-of-2019‎ (7)

booker-books‎ (7)
agatha-christie‎ (6)
booker-international-books‎ (1)

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Ashish is Currently Reading

Ashish Kumar is currently reading

Nautch Boy: A Memoir of My Life in the Kothas

by Manish Gaekwad (Goodreads Author)

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Jan 08, 2026 08:53AM

Ashish’s Quotes

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

tags: sin

10916 likes

“I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

1421 likes

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

tags: books, morality, reading, writing

7416 likes

“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

tags: homosexuality, identity, lesbian, life, religion, romance, thoughts

782 likes

“Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts, the rage addicts, the poverty addicts , and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and the tenderness the substances engender. An addict, if you don't mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, from the world's traffic and currency.”
― Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

tags: addicts

34 likes

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Ashish’s Groups

The Song of Achilles Readalong — 27 members — last activity May 31, 2018 10:09AM
A place to discuss Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles hosted by JessicaReadsThings! ...more

¡ POETRY ! — 22580 members — last activity Dec 24, 2025 01:37PM
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

Bangalore bookworms and bibliophiles (BBB) — 2848 members — last activity Dec 26, 2025 08:23AM
A place for book lovers of Bangalore to meet, connect and have conversations (online and real life!) Just discussion about books! By book lovers! No ...more