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Venkataragavan

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Venkataragavan’s favorite books

The Eleventh Commandment by Jeffrey Archer

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Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

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Venkataragavan’s Bookshelves

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Venkataragavan is Currently Reading

Venkataragavan is currently reading

The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman

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The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins (Goodreads Author)

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Venkataragavan’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century

Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century by Shashi Tharoor

48 notes & 751 highlights

So India’s nationalist leaders were suspicious of every foreigner with a briefcase, seeing him as the thin edge of a neo-imperial wedge.

Venkataragavan’s Quotes

“Refusal to accept the flow of the world is the root of all misery.”
― Devdutt Pattanaik, Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata

57 likes

“How come we play war and not peace?"
"Too few role models.”
― Bill Watterson

tags: peace, play, war

451 likes

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”
― Benjamin Franklin

tags: growth, new-year

585 likes

“One may smile, and smile, and be a villain; at least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

1196 likes

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

tags: adventure, change, discworld, growth, travel

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¡ POETRY ! — 22607 members — last activity Nov 19, 2025 04:25PM
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

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