Author: D. A. Hosek
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Dewey Decimal Project: 422 RIC How Happy Became Homosexual : And Other Mysterious Semantic Shifts
As I get into the 420s the books are now shelved in the foreign language section. The 420s are the English language and most of what’s hear are books for ESL learners, so the pickings are slim. I spot this book and the title catches my attention, I’m curious about the transition of the meaning…
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Beautiful Sentences: Yiyun Li
Instead, we read other people’s stories, more real than our own; after all, inadequate makers of our own lives, we were no match for those masters. Yiyun Li, “Kindness.”
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Beautiful Sentences: Steven Millhauser
One explanation says that we ourselves are phantoms. Arguments drawn from cognitive science claim that our bodies are nothing but artificial constructs of our brains: we are the dream-creations of electrically charged neurons. The world itself is a great seeming. One virtue of this explanation is that it accounts for the behavior of our phantoms:…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 417.7 MCW The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
I continue to circle towards the foreign language shelves, but there’s still some space left in the Dewey Decimal system before I get there. The 410s are linguistics, pretty much indistinguishable by the collection at the local library from the 400s, language. From there I selected this book, caught by the punning title. Like Harrison…
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Beautiful Sentences: Yiyun Li
You think you will remember every moment, every detail, but the truth is I can’t remember much about it. Can’t even remember how long we were at it. Yiyun Li, “Kindness.”
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Dewey Decimal Project: 408.9 HAR The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages
When I looked at the 400s, it seemed a big chunk of the books were missing. Pretty much everything from 430 on. They had been there earlier when I had originally scoped out the library and considered the project before me, but now they were missing. A quick walk around the third floor solved the mystery:…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 391.6 YAL A History of the Breast
The 390s comprise “Customs, etiquette and folklore” which had a lot of books about fashion at my local library. I’m not that interested in fashion, but breasts, on the other hand, struck me as something worthy of spending a book reading about. Yalom writes here about how breasts became eroticized in eroticized in Western culture, which…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 381.45 MIL Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption
The 380s: Commerce, Communications & Transportation. I was tempted to read something about trains when I got here, but then I spotted this, a book about bookselling (with an implicit critique of capitalism in its title!). As my dream in life has been to retire into bookselling, I thought there could be no better option for…
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Beautiful Sentences: Christine Sneed
Rejection is the relentless, powerful hazing that disables ninety-seven out of a hundred talented people. Christine Sneed, “The First Wife.”