Discover new books on Goodreads
Meet your next favorite book
We do our walls in neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose.
“The tough part, of course, have to do with finding love, and then taking that sledgehammer and breaking out of the box long enough to hold onto it, which in itself is no small feat. That job involves naming desires, and it involves understanding what stands in its way, and it involves mustering the strength and courage and self-acceptance to smash through the constraints, consequences be damned. The key - the bridge to the shore - is agency, a feeling (almost always hard-won) that marries entitlement with power: I deserve to be filled becomes I can be filled, I can make it happen.”
―
―
“When anxiety about the body runs deeply enough, adherence to the rules - don’t eat, keep the mouth shut, pack up the butane-powered curling iron, starve yourself half crazy - comes to feel voluntary, the mandates self-generated and freely embraced.”
―
―
“So much of this is waved away as female vanity - this tedious nattering about calories and fat - but I find it poignant and painful in a low-level but chronic way…Hidden within that exchange is an entire set of mathematical principles, equations that can dictate a woman’s most fundamental approach to hunger. Mastery over the body - its impulses, its needs, its size - is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem.”
―
―
“The Butcher's egoless brutality, hammered linear by what she could not know, less than primitive, was for all its horror, still human. Though bloody handed, he was safer than the precision of the world linguistically corrected...Jebel's cruelties, kindnesses, existed in the articulate limits of civilization. But this red bestiality - fascinated her!”
― Babel-17
― Babel-17
“At that point on the continuum of cultural history, several degrees from active or meaningful talk about what beauty and power and confidence actually meant, I thought I should know, intuitively, how to be that woman, how to combine sexuality and ambition, how to navigate all those fuzzy lines between femininity and authority, relationships and autonomy. And not knowing these things intuitively, I thought I was missing something, or had missed something, or (more hopefully) might acquire something if only I looked in the right place...if only, if only. This is what's insidious about consumerism: It's not that it encourages us to shop but that it encourages us to forget, not that it sparks need but that it dilutes it, shrink-wraps it and flings it into the handiest and most tangible containers.”
―
―
Goodreads Librarians Group
— 333368 members
— last activity 1 minute ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
Minorities in Fantasy and Science Fiction
— 354 members
— last activity Apr 25, 2026 09:46AM
When I was a little girl I wanted to be Storm from X-Men. She was the only kick-butt black female super heroine in the world who could fly and "make i ...more
Michelle’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Michelle’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
10,542 books
|
4,207 friends
576 books
|
1,818 friends
759 books
|
77 friends
618 books
|
310 friends
136 books
|
6 friends
188 books
|
73 friends
36 books
|
2 friends
81 books
|
43 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Michelle
Lists liked by Michelle