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This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

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Showing results by Jonathan Franzen only

[...] depending on the regulatory weather (not climate but weather, for it changed seasonally and sometimes seemingly hourly) [...]

—p.28 Purity in Oakland (1) by Jonathan Franzen 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] Their theory was that the technology-driven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realised that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products. Unemployed consumers would acquire an economic value equivalent to their lost value as actual laborers, and could join forces with the people still working in the service industry, thereby creating a new coalition of labor and the permanently unemployed, whose overwhelming size would compel social change.

part of a labor utopia discussion among some nerds, humorously juxtaposed with Purity doing all the actual cooking labour

—p.45 Purity in Oakland (1) by Jonathan Franzen 7 years, 6 months ago

Hoping this would make him LOL again

the tragedy of this girl trying to act like she doesn't care what men think of her but, in this passage, is desperately trying to get this older man to like her (it gets even worse when you later find out that he has deliberately targeted her for his own twisted scheme)

—p.60 Purity in Oakland (1) by Jonathan Franzen 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] he didn't want this to be just another seduction. He wanted her to be the way out of the wasteland of seduction he'd been living in.

sad

—p.99 The Republic of Bad Taste (75) by Jonathan Franzen 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly clasutrophobic; a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.

—p.100 The Republic of Bad Taste (75) by Jonathan Franzen 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] Being an exceptionally bright and receptive little boy, you also already believed in the historical inevitability of the socialist workers' state. [...]

just thought this passage was funny

—p.103 The Republic of Bad Taste (75) by Jonathan Franzen 7 years, 6 months ago

The Nazis had persecuted the Communists and nearly destroyed the Soviet Union, which had then been fully justified in exacting reparations, and America had diverted scarce resources from its own oppressed working class and sent them to West Germany to create an illusion of prosperity, luring weak and misguided East Germans across the border.

acc to Andreas' father

—p.103 The Republic of Bad Taste (75) by Jonathan Franzen 7 years, 6 months ago

In theory, psychologists were unnecessary in the Republic of Bad Taste, because neurosis was a bourgeois malady, a morbid expression of contradictions that by definition could not exist in a perfect worker's state.

kinda funny

—p.108 The Republic of Bad Taste (75) by Jonathan Franzen 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in that infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it.

Andreas contemplating the murder

—p.143 The Republic of Bad Taste (75) by Jonathan Franzen 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. [...]

—p.173 Too Much Information (169) by Jonathan Franzen 7 years, 6 months ago

Showing results by Jonathan Franzen only