A note on this blog's organization

Since I first started this blog, I've read over 600 books. I decided to organize them by sections, so to navigate to specific blog entries, review the sections below. To look for a specific book, you can check the list below, then use it to find the right page of the blog. Alternatively, you can try typing the book title or author's name in the search bar at the top left of this blog, but that seems to only pull from 'Conquering the Classics' and '101 and Beyond'.

Book Bingo #11 - Summer 2023

Book Bingo #11 - Seattle Arts & Lectures & Seattle Public Library - Adult Summer Reading 2023 (29 books in total, 5 crossovers with '101 and Beyond' list, 1 crossover with 'Conquering the Classics', indicated with an asterisk; stars on the bingo board indicate I really enjoyed that book)


If you like this concept, and/or if you want this specific board, you can download it via the Seattle Arts & Lectures website here (just navigate to Summer 2023 for this card specifically, or explore their various past summer cards).

In case you can't read my handwriting, here's the list of books and titles (top down, left to right). The blurbs are from the author's websites or bookstores. When possible, I've linked to the author's page to purchase a copy from them directly or an independent seller. Or use the library! Or buy local! As you wish. ;)

Category: Joyful

    • Mother of two Liv Green barely scrapes by as a maid to make ends meet, often finding escape in a good book while daydreaming of becoming a writer herself. So she can't believe her luck when she lands a job housekeeping for her personal hero, megabestselling author Essie Starling, a mysterious and intimidating recluse. The last thing Liv expected was to be the only person Essie talks to, which leads to a tenuous friendship. When Essie passes away suddenly, Liv is astonished to learn that her dying wish was for Liv to complete her final novel. But to do so Liv will have to step into Essie’s shoes. As Liv begins to write, she uncovers secrets from the past that reveal a surprising connection between the two women—one that will change Liv’s own story forever…

Category: Seattle reads (past or present)

    • Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, Lowell, Rosemary and her unusual sister Fern. Rosemary begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “Until Fern’s expulsion...,” Rosemary says, “she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her.” As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence. In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler weaves her most accomplished work to date—a tale of loving but fallible people whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences.

Category: Local author (I went with local to me, obviously, not to Seattle, so SE PA)

    • Greece in the age of Heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the kingdom of Phthia. Here he is nobody, just another unwanted boy living in the shadow of King Peleus and his golden son, Achilles. Achilles, “best of all the Greeks,” is everything Patroclus is not—strong, beautiful, the child of a goddess—and by all rights their paths should never cross. Yet one day, Achilles takes the shamed prince under his wing and soon their tentative connection gives way to a steadfast friendship. As they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something far deeper—despite the displeasure of Achilles’ mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess with a hatred of mortals. Fate is never far from the heels of Achilles. When word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, the men of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows Achilles into war, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they have learned, everything they hold dear. And that, before he is ready, he will be forced to surrender his friend to the hands of Fate.

Category: Hip hop

    • Hip hop is one of the most dominant and influential cultures in America, giving new voice to the younger generation. It defines a generation's worldview. Exploring hip hop's beginnings up to the present day, Jeff Chang and Dave "Davey D" Cook provide a provocative look into the new world that the hip hop generation has created. Based on original interviews with DJs, b-boys, rappers, activists, and gang members, with unforgettable portraits of many of hip hop's forebears, founders, mavericks, and present day icons, this book chronicles the epic events, ideas and the music that marked the hip hop generation's rise.

Category: Includes a recipe

    • Dana Potowski is a restaurant critic and food writer and a longtime member of a progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California. Under pressure to find her next book idea, she’s asked to join the church search committee for a new minister and agrees, resolving to secretly pen a memoir, with recipes, about the experience. That memoir, Search, follows the travails of the committee and their candidates—and becomes its own media sensation. Dana had good material to work with: the committee is a wide-ranging mix of Unitarian Universalist congregants, and their candidates range from a baker and microbrew master/pastor to a reverend who identifies as both a witch and an environmental warrior. Although she may have been ambivalent about joining the committee, Dana finds that she cares deeply about the fate of this institution and she will fight the entire committee, if necessary, to win the day for her side. This wry and wise tale will speak to anyone who has ever gone searching.

Category: Indigenous author

    • Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”? Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life. Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

Category: Recommended by an independent bookseller

    • Two estranged half-sisters tasked with guarding their family's library of magical books must work together to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection—a tale of familial loyalty and betrayal, and the pursuit of magic and power. In the tradition of Ninth House, The Magicians and Practical Magic, this is a suspenseful and richly atmospheric novel that draws readers into a vast world filled with mystery and magic, romance, and intrigue.

Category: Translated

    • The story of three women who say no: Norah, a French-born lawyer who finds herself in Senegal, summoned by her estranged father to save another victim of his paternity; Fanta, who leaves a contented life as a teacher in Dakar to follow her boyfriend back to France, where his depression and dislocation poison everything; and Khady, a penniless widow put out by her husband’s family with nothing but the name of a distant cousin in France. As these three lives intertwine, each woman manages an astonishing feat of self-preservation against those who have made themselves the fastest-growing and most-reviled people in Europe. In Marie NDiaye’s stunning narration we see the progress by which ordinary women discover unimagined reserves of strength.

Category: Sea creatures

    • The Island of Sea Women offers up an evocative tale of two best friends whose bonds are both strengthened and tested over decades by forces beyond their control. Set largely on the remote Korean island of Jeju, The Island of Sea Women follows Young-sook and Mi-ja, girls from strikingly different backgrounds who bond over their shared love of the sea. Working in their village’s all-female diving collective, the two friends come of age in a community where gender roles are anything but typical. Here, women are the primary breadwinners, the heads of household in all but name, and yet, as Mi-ja and Young-sook come to realize, there are limits to their control that can prove devastating.

Category: Trans or non-binary author

    • The city of Ora is watching. Anima is an extrasensory human tasked with surveilling and protecting Ora’s citizens via a complex living network called the Gleaming. Although ær world is restricted to what æ can see and experience through the Gleaming, Anima takes pride and comfort in keeping Ora safe from harm. When a mysterious outsider enters the city carrying a cabinet of curiosities from around with the world with a story attached to each item, Anima’s world expands beyond the borders of Ora to places―and possibilities―æ never before imagined to exist. But such knowledge leaves Anima with a question that throws into doubt ær entire purpose: What good is a city if it can’t protect its people?

Category: Library book list or display

  • Dune - Frank Herbert*
    • Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides—who would become known as Muad'Dib—and of a great family's ambition to bring to fruition mankind's most ancient and unattainable dream. A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction. [Click here to read my blog on this book.]

Category: True crime or crime fiction

    • Librarian Molly Kimball and her mother, Nina, need a change. So when a letter arrives from Nina’s Aunt Violet in Cambridge, England requesting their help running the 400-year-oldfamily bookshop, they jump at the chance. Soon they’re enjoying new adventures in this fabled city—and solving bookish murder mysteries.
Category: FREE
    • An instant bestseller when it was released in 1938, this beloved tale has been read and loved by school-age children across the nation for more than fifty years. In this classic story of the Baxter family and their wild, hard, and satisfying life in remote central Florida, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings has written one of the great novels of our times. A rich and varied tale—tender in its understanding of boyhood, crowded with the excitement of the backwoods hunt, with vivid descriptions of the primitive, beautiful hammock country, written with humor and earthy philosophy—The Yearling is a novel for readers of all ages. Its glowing picture of a life refreshingly removed from modern patterns of living is universal in its revelation of simple courageous people and the beliefs they must live by. [Click here to read my blog on this book.]
    • In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and troubled mother, and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family. [Click here to read my blog on this book.]
    • With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the crosscurrents of the Bengali immigrant experience set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide. A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. An Indian American girl recognizes her cultural identity during a Halloween celebration while the Pakastani civil war rages on television in the background. A latchkey kid with a single working mother finds affinity with a woman from Calcutta. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, these Pulitzer Prize-winning stories speak with passion and wisdom to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story, Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and a baffling new world. [Click here to read my blog on this book.]

Category: A SAL speaker (past or upcoming)

    • When Charley unexpectedly inherits eight hundred acres of sugarcane land, she and her eleven-year-old daughter say goodbye to smoggy Los Angeles and head to Louisiana. She soon learns, however, that cane farming is always going to be a white man’s business. As the sweltering summer unfolds, Charley struggles to balance the overwhelming challenges of a farm in decline with the demands of family and the startling desires of her own heart. 

Category: Workers' rights

    • A groundbreaking, breathtaking history of the Chinese workers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, helping to forge modern America only to disappear into the shadows of history until now. From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in America. Converging on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad, the migrants spent years dynamiting tunnels through the snow-packed cliffs of the Sierra Nevada and laying tracks across the burning Utah desert. Their sweat and blood fueled the ascent of an interlinked, industrial United States. But those of them who survived this perilous effort would suffer a different kind of death: a historical one, as they were pushed first to the margins of American life and then to the fringes of public memory. In this groundbreaking account, award-winning scholar Gordon H. Chang draws on unprecedented research to recover the Chinese railroad workers’ stories and celebrate their role in remaking America. An invaluable correction of a great historical injustice, The Ghosts of Gold Mountain returns these “silent spikes” to their rightful place in our national saga.

Category: Debut essays or short stories

    • Before Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Ford, there was Sherwood Anderson, who, with Winesburg, Ohio, charted a new direction in American fiction–evoking with lyrical simplicity quiet moments of epiphany in the lives of ordinary men and women. In a bed, elevated so that he can peer out the window, an old writer contemplates the fluttering of his heart and considers, as if viewing a pageant, the inhabitants of a small midwestern town. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy, carelessness and abandon. [Click here to read my blog on this book.]

Category: Older protagonist

    • Once a celebrated author of short stories now in his twilight years, Anthony Peardew has spent half his life collecting lost objects, trying to atone for a promise broken many years before. Realising he is running out of time, he leaves his house and all its lost treasures to his assistant Laura, the one person he can trust to fulfil his legacy and reunite the thousands of objects with their rightful owners. But the final wishes of the 'Keeper of Lost Things' have unforeseen repercussions which trigger a most serendipitous series of encounters . . .

Category: Chosen by the cover

    • Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

Category: BIPOC poetry collection

    • The driving forces behind Rhodes’s work include a decolonizing ethos; a queer sensibility that extends beyond sexual and gender identities to include a politics of deviance; errantry; ramshackled bodies; and forms of loving and living that persist in their wild difference. Invoking individual and collective ghosts inherited across diverse geographies, this collection queers the space between past, present, and future. In these poems, haunting is a kind of memory weaving that can bestow a freedom from the attenuations of the so-called American dream, which, according to Rhodes, is a nightmare of assimilation, conquest, and genocide. How love unfolds is also a Big Bang emergence into life—a way to, again and again, cut the future open, open up the opening, undertake it, begin. These poems are written for immigrants, queer and transgender people of color, women, Latin Americans, diasporic communities, and the many impacted by war.

Category: Manga or graphic novel

  • Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers - Written by Lee Francis III, Roy Boney, Jr., Arigon Starr, Jonathan Nelson, Lee Francis IV | Illustrated by Arigon Starr, Roy Boney, Jr., Jonathan Nelson, Renee Nejo
    • Written and illustrated by Native Americans from various tribal nations, these comics detail the deep emotions of leaving one’s homeland to fight in a war far away, the comfort and benefit in finding those who speak your native language, and the pride in knowing you served your country while honoring your people. A high percentage of Native Americans serve in the U.S. military and bring special talents that have aided their fighting units during wartime, including the famed code talkers of World War I.

Category: Read with a friend

    • In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances.These three sections comprise an ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.

Category: BIPOC or LGBTQIA horror

    • Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book’s content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries. Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories. But real life doesn’t always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

Category: Audiobook or e-book

    • In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.

Category: Same author, different genre

    • Hailed as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century and transformed into an Academy Award–winning film, A Passage to India hauntingly evokes India at the peak of the British colonial era, complete with the racial tension that underscores every aspect of daily life. Into this setting, Forster introduces Adela Quested and Mrs. Moor, British visitors to Chandrapore who, despite their strong ties to the elusive colonial community there, are eager for a more authentic taste of India. But when their fates tangle with those of Cecil Fielding and his local friend, Dr. Aziz, at the nearby Marabar Caves, the community of Chandrapore is split wide open and everyone’s life—British and Indian alike—is inexorably altered. [Click here to read my blog on this book.]

Category: Same author, different genre

    • A chance acquaintance brings together the preposterous bourgeois Wilcox family and the clever, cultured and idealistic Schlegel sisters. As clear-eyed Margaret develops a friendship with Mrs Wilcox, the impetuous Helen brings into their midst a young bank clerk named Leonard Bast, who lives at the edge of poverty and ruin. When Mrs Wilcox dies, her family discovers that she wants to leave her country home, Howards End, to Margaret. Thus as Forster sets in motion a chain of events that will entangle three different families, he brilliantly portrays their aspirations to personal and social harmony. David Lodge's introduction provides an absorbing and eloquent overture to the 1910 novel that established Forster's reputation as an important writer, and that he himself later referred to as "my best novel." This edition also contains a note on the text, suggestions for further reading, and explanatory notes.

Category: Bonus

    • When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer—Helen had been captivated by hawks since childhood—she’d never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk’s fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White’s chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself “in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her” tested the limits of Macdonald’s humanity and changed her life. Heart-wrenching and humorous, this book is an unflinching account of bereavement and a unique look at the magnetism of an extraordinary beast, with a parallel examination of a legendary writer’s eccentric falconry. Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.

Category: Bonus

    • But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries. What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They’re also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own–deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also, ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play. Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of–well–birdness: A mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own. Young birds that devote themselves to feeding their siblings and others so competitive they’ll stab their nestmates to death. Birds that give gifts and birds that steal, birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves, birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call–and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter. Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It’s what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.

My Reflections on this Book Bingo

As with the other book bingos, I won't blog separately on each of these books, as it has been a long time since I read many of these, and I wouldn't want to give them short shrift. What I will do instead is share passages I liked and/or general reflections from this bingo board. 

I'll preface this by saying that I believe I borrowed many of these books from the library, and at least one I listened to on audiobook, so I don't have notes on every book. Please don't take this as a sign of me not liking these books, it's just been a few years.

  • The Messy Lives of Book People
    • Was it normal to feel so adrift in a family of four?
    • At an early age, she had mastered the art of reading and walking at the same time without tripping up.
  • We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
    • I felt polished by the wet air and maybe just a little migratory myself, just a little wild.
    • That didn't sound larkish. That had the precision and persistence of fury.
    • Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary. lololol. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one ;)
    • The spell will be broken only when the people rise up. So rise up already.
    • The Song of Achilles
      • I really enjoyed this book, but again, I'm fairly sure I loaned my copy to someone, as I can't find it to see my notes.
    • Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
      • If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work. 
      • But in their own way, the new generation - to whom so much had been given, from whom so much was being stolen, for whom so little would be promised - would not settle for the things previous generations had been willing to settle for. Concede them a demand and they would demand more. Give them an apocalypse, and they would dance.
      • Rastafarianism was an indigenous fusion of messianism and millenarianism, anticolonialism and Black nationalism, and it gave the cuase of 'Black Supremacy' spiritual, political, and social dimensions.
      • Forget busing, Adler thought. Hip-hop was offering a much more radical, much more successful voluntary desegregation plan. It was bleeding-eduge music with vast social implications. 'Rap reintegrated American culture', Adler declared. 
      • Style was a way to defy a hostile word.
      • Many compared rappers to griots - the mythmakers, genealogists, praise singers, oral historians and social critics of Senegambian society. 
    • Search
      • I listened to this as an audiobook, and I did not care for it.
    • The Night Watchman
      • I can't find my notes from this, which is odd, because I know I came across them. Maybe I'll find them later! 
    • Ink Blood Sister Scribe
      • I really enjoyed this book! I think I borrowed it from the library, so I don't have notes.
    • Three Strong Women
      • What was she supposed to think, what was she failing to understand? 
      • Should she have remembered something? Had she already, at some time past, been warned?
      • The Island of Sea Women
        • I listened to this book and found it very interesting and informative. I'd love to read more about Jeju from the Sea Women themselves, though.
      • In the Watchful City
        • Furious, Anima releases the toucan. For a moment, ae lets aerself simply plunge through the Gleaming, all gold and light, data and sortilege, physics and thaumaturgy: the place where the world simply is.
        • 'There is something that remains you no matter where you are, when you are, what you are. So, I'll ask you one question: Who are you?'
        • (people always assumed / my mother was the fortune-teller. / (but even though she broke apart bones /  (pounded them (in (the mortar (with (the pestle / (until (themeal (was fine (as flour / she was not the one) / who read the stories ) / in their marrow).
        • The night market: Paper lanters strung up over woven eaves, clouds of steam and smoke drifting like fog, scents settling on the oils of aer fur like dew. Chatter in multiple languages; sizzling; the scrape of metal on metal; the sharp clink! of glasses coming together in a toast. The air is thicker here, as if a magical quality has suffused it, turning a street that is ordinary by day into something otherworldly by night. Even the light comes in a dozen colors: the cool blue-white of the moon; the twinkling, honey-amber string lights; the rainbows diffusing through thin lanterns of blue and red and yellow paper; the fluttering of the orange flames in the gas lamps lining the sidewalk.
        • We can only rise from the ashes once we have already burned.
      • Queen Sugar
        • 'Sometimes, you go looking for adventure, all you find is disaster.
      • Ghosts of Gold Mountain
        • I chose this book both because I wanted to learn more about the topic, and because my best friend's grandfather worked on the transcontinental railroad. It was an incredible read, and a wonderful addition to my understanding of the history of this country. 
          • For five years, from 1864 to 1869, Chinese constituted by far the largest single workforce in American industry to that date, not surpassed in numbers until the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century. 
          • The Pacific Mail Steamship Company, the main American carrier in the Pacific, reported that in the single year 1876 alone, its ships carried more than 250,000 letters between China, Japan, and the United States. Yet remarkably, not a single message from or to a Railroad Chinese (book's term, not mine) in this vigorous traffic has been located despite the most strenuous research efforts. Today there is nothing extant in their own words about their experiences. 
            • How does one give voice to the voiceless? How does one recover a sense of lived experience if there is nothing from the central actors themselves? 
          • Many Chinese settled in the Deep South after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad because of its climatic and topical similarity to home. So too did they settle in the humid farm region of California's Sacramento River delta, where the waters began to merge with San Francisco Bay. The people of the Siyi were sun and water people, both in their native lands and abroad.
          • I found the sections on the worker's strike and the population shift & later vicious, violent, and genocidal expulsion by the whites in Truckee to be particularly illuminating. (records of property owners, many prominant doctors, restaurant owners, commerical records; later mass lynchings, 'vigilante' murders, arson)
          • After the end of the Civil War, the creation of a single, uninterrupted rail line that ran east to west across the continent encouraged a new directional way of thinking about the nation.
          • At issue in the controversy over the deaths of Chinese who perished during and after the construction of the Pacific Railroad is the deep anguish and anger many felt about the suffering Chinese endured in nineteenth-century America, which has yet to be fully acknowledged. The grief continues long after the moments of tragedy...For many, especially Chines Americans, the history of the Railroad Chinese requires contending with a painful, aggrieved, and unsettled past. Many today who sympathize with the Railroad Chinese say that low-end estimates of violent deaths of Chinese during and after the building of the railroads demean them and the blood contribution Chinese have made to America.
          • After the railroad work as done, the railroad people didn't take the Chinese back to San Francisco. They let them walk back. 'See how cruel they were?'
          • As the acclaimed writer Maxine Hong Kingston has written: 'After the Civil War, China Men banded the nation North and South, East and West, with criss-crossing steel. They were the binding and building ancestors of this place.'
      • The Dictionary of Lost Words
        • Words are our tools of resurrection.
        • I shall tell him a lie he shall want to believe.
        • Most people don't notice what they don't expect to see.
      • Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers
        • I got this from the library because I wanted to learn more about the code talkers, and because I've been trying to learn as much as possible about Navajo/Diné culture to inform a character in a book series I'm writing.
          • After the Navajo code was developed, the Marine Corps established a Code Talking school. As the war progressed, more than 400 Navajos were eventually recruited as Code Talkers...Many of the Code Talkers who served were under age and had to lie about their age to join. Some were just 15 years old. Through the course of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars, America's enemies never deciphered any of these coded messages. Ultimately, there were Code Talkers from at least 16 tribes who served in the Army, the Marines, and the Navy including Assiniboine, Cherokee, Choctaw, Comanche, Meskwaki, Navajo, Lakota, and Seminole. 
          • Without the contribution of these brave Americans, history may have taken a very different course. Despite the tragic history of colonization, conquest, genocide, forced relocation, reservations and assimilation, Native Americans have chosen to serve the United States in every time of conflict. Which begs the question - 'Why?' Why fight to defend a country that has failed for so long to respect and protect the lives and rights of Indigenous people? 
            • Perhaps it is best stated by the soldier who was the last surviving original member of the Navajo Code Talkers and who lived to be a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal: 'People ask me, 'Why did you go? Look at all the mistreatment that has been done to your people.' Somebody's got to go, somebody's got to defend this country. Somebody's got to defend the freedom. That's the reason why I went. My wartime experiences developing a code that utilized the Navajo language taught me how important our Navajo culture is to our country. For me that is the central lesson: that diverse cultures can make a country richer and stronger." - Corporal Chester Nez, USMC, Retired
      • To Paradise 
        • He found himself aware that he was having an adventure, and then ashamed at his pride, for, in truth, being a vistor demanded no kind of bravery at all.
        • To live a life in color, a life in love: Was that not every person's dream? 
        • I know that loneliness cannot be fully eradicated by the presence of another; but I also know that a companion is a shield, and without another person, loneliness steals in, a phantom seeping through the windows and down your throat, filling you with a sorrow nothing can answer. 
      • The Book Eaters
        • I enjoyed this, but I think I borrowed it from the library. No notes!
      • Becoming
        • I listened to this audiobook and loved it.

      • H is for Hawk
        • This was recommended to me by a friend and colleague who has a passion for raptors.
          • Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don't get to say when or how.
          • I love [this place] because of all the places I know in England, it feels to me the wildest. It's not an untouched wilderness like a mountaintop, but a ramshackle wildness in which people and the land have conspired to strangeness.
          • The wild can be human work.
          • I rejoiced in their aerial verve. 
          • The archaeology of grief is not ordered.
          • Other places became magic through happenstance.

      • The Bird Way
        • This book was given to me by my dear Aunt Stevie, and came highly recommended, and boy did it live up to the hype! I learned SO MUCH about my buddies, the birds! For instance, that female songbirds sing, and we wouldn't have figured this out if we didn't have female ornithologists!!
          • Whatever its purpose, duetting in birds is a marvel.
          • Why birds mimic at all is still something of a mystery.
          • Birds see a massive spectrum of color our brains are simply incapable of processing. !!!!!!!!!!
          • Look up pyric-carnivory. It's unbelievable.
          • Other animals existed in the tyranny of the present, a kind of eternal now.
          • Quoting: 'We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
          • The word auspicious, meaning 'favorable or promising success,' comes from the the Latin auspex, or 'observer of birds'. In ancient Rome, bird-seers were priests, or augurs, who founded their divinations on the flight patterns of birds. The sixteenth-century English noun auspice originally referred to the practice of observing birds to find omens. There's a deep hunch here. We would do well to watch birds more, tune in to their usual and unusual behaviors, learn while we can from their marvelous - and still often mysterious - ways of being. YESSSS, I love this so much. Especially as an avid bird watcher ;)

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