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The Personal Sustainability Handbook: 60+ Practices to Sustainabilize Your Health, Finances, Relationships and Beyond

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Thomas Lu

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“Back when the Europeans came to convert people, they saw our traditional cures, the ginseng and qi charts, and they couldn't understand it, thought it was just superstition and old wives' tales - and yes, a lot of it was that, but look at them now! Studying the antioxidant properties of cinnamon and putting goji berries in every other thing they eat .... Curiosity can lead in fascinating directions, and it is occasionally useful to walk off the path of standard procedure.”

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Book:After the Dragons
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“It isn’t always a matter, we should note, of identifying with the protagonist. No one I know, regardless of how much they love his novel, wants to be Humbert Humbert or Victor Frankenstein, although perhaps for different reasons. Or Heathcliff. Ever want to be Heathcliff? I didn’t think so. They are not the stuff of our fantasy lives, yet we may revel in their world, even while reviling their personalities. Consider Humbert. The narrative strategy Nabokov employs is very daring, since it demands that we identify with someone who is breaking what nearly everyone will consider the most absolute taboo. …Sympathy is out of the question. What the novel requires, however, is that we continue reading, something it audaciously gives us reason to do. The word games and intellectual brilliance helps, certainly; he’s detestable but charming and brilliant. The other element is that we watch him with a sort of appalled fascination: can he really intend that; does he really do this; would he really attempt even that; has he lost all sense of proportion? The answers are, in order, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Pretty clearly, then, there are pleasures in the text that are not inherent in the personality of the main character.”

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Book:How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
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