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 #6 - Winter Book Bingo (2020)

Book Bingo #6 - Winter Book Bingo - Winter 2020 - Another one of my own creation, meant to look like a snowflake (art isn't my strong suit ;)) (27 books in total, 14 overlaps with '101 and Beyond' and 1 with 'Conquering the Classics', indicated with an asterisk below; NOTE: stars on the bingo board indicate I really enjoyed a work)


Okay, so we know I'm not winning prizes for my artwork ;) This was very fun to read timed to the season of the year. (Even if it Did Not Snow). As with the other bingos, I'm listing the titles below left to right, top to bottom. This one has a lot of crossovers with '101 and Beyond', I think because I wanted to stay motivated to move through the blog list, but also had other books calling to me, and wanted to mix in some new books as well!

Note: Blurbs below are either from the authors' websites or from booksellers. When possible, I've linked directly to the author's site to purchase a copy. Alternatively, feel free to use your local library, or buy local! If a title is one I blobbed on, I provide the link after the description. 

Category: Read while drinking hot cocoa
    • As the daughter of a time traveler, Nix has spent sixteen years sweeping across the globe and through the centuries aboard her father’s ship. Modern-day New York City, nineteenth-century Hawaii, other lands seen only in myth and legend—Nix has been to them all. But when her father gambles with her very existence, it all may be about to end. If there is a map, Nix’s father can sail his ship, The Temptation, to any place and any time. But now that he’s uncovered the one map he’s always sought—1868 Honolulu, the year before Nix’s mother died in childbirth—Nix’s life, her entire existence, is at stake. No one knows what will happen if her father changes the past. It could erase Nix’s future, her dreams, her adventures . . . her connection with the charming Persian thief, Kash, who’s been part of their crew for two years.
Category: Borrowed book
    • A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery. Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.
Category: Written within a year of my birth
    • Travel writer Macon Leary hates travel, adventure, surprises, and anything outside of his routine. Immobilized by grief, Macon is becoming increasingly prickly and alone, anchored by his solitude and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer too optimistic to let Macon disappear into himself. Despite Macon’s best efforts to remain insulated, Muriel up-ends his solitary, systemized life, catapulting him into the center of a messy, beautiful love story he never imagined. A fresh and timeless tale of unexpected bliss, The Accidental Tourist showcases Tyler’s talents for making characters—and their relationships—feel both real and magical. [Click here to see my blog on this book.] 
Category: Also radio broadcast
    • The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H.G.Wells, first serialised in 1897 by Pearson’s Magazine in the UK and by Cosmopolitan magazine in the US. The novel is one of the earliest science-fiction that explores the possibilities of intelligent life from other planets and details a conflict between humankind and an extraterrestrial race. It vividly describes the mass hysteria such an invasion would stimulate and shows how unprepared our civilization is for the onslaught of forces from another world. [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Read in your jammies
  • Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand* (This was on my original 100 Classics list, and is one of my favorite books of all time. PLEASE READ THE BOOK AND MY BLOG BEFORE YOU MAKE ANY ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT WHAT THAT MEANS.)
    • Who is John Galt? When he says that he will stop the motor of the world, is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battles not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves? You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in this book. You will discover why a productive genius becomes a worthless playboy...why a great steel industrialist is working for his own destruction...why a composer gives up his career on the night of his triumph...why a beautiful woman who runs a transcontinental railroad falls in love with the man she has sworn to kill. Atlas Shrugged, a modern classic and Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism—her groundbreaking philosophy—offers the reader the spectacle of human greatness, depicted with all the poetry and power of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists.[Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Book of Poetry
    • Originally published in 1923, The Prophet continues to inspire millions worldwide with its timeless words of love and mystical longing. Writing with insight, hope, and a remarkable compassion for the human condition, Kahlil Gibran explores ideas of joy and sorrow, friendship, good and evil, pleasure, reason and passion, expressing humanity’s yearning for a Unity of Being, only achieved through love. [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Takes place around Christmas
    • It’s a week before Christmas and Louisa Graham is working twelve hour shifts at a bakery on Manhattan's Lower East Side. When a young cooking show assistant comes in from the rain and begs to buy all the cinnamon rolls on her tray, she doesn’t know what to do. Louisa is just the baker, and they aren't hers to sell. But the show burned the rolls they were supposed to film that day; so she agrees. The next morning, Louisa finds out that her cinnamon rolls were a hit, but the star of the show was allergic, and the whole crew is supposed to leave for London that afternoon. They want Louisa to step in for their annual Christmas Eve Dinner TV special at Claridge's. It’s a great opportunity, and Digby Bunting, Louisa’s famous baking idol, will be there. Even if he does seem more interested in her than her food...
Category: Read by the fire
    • Widely regarded as Dickens’s masterpiece, Bleak House centers on the generations-long lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce, through which “whole families have inherited legendary hatreds.” Focusing on Esther Summerson, a ward of John Jarndyce, the novel traces Esther’s romantic coming-of-age and, in classic Dickensian style, the gradual revelation of long-buried secrets, all set against the foggy backdrop of the Court of Chancery. Mixing romance, mystery, comedy, and satire, Bleak House limns the suffering caused by the intricate inefficiency of the law.
Category: Made into a movie
    • First published in 1922, The Beautiful and the Damned followed Fitzgerald's impeccable debut, This Side of Paradise, thus securing his place in the tradition of great American novelists. Embellished with the author's lyrical prose, here is the story of Harvard-educated, aspiring aesthete Anthony Patch and his beautiful wife, Gloria. As they await the inheritance of his grandfather's fortune, their reckless marriage sways under the influence of alcohol and avarice. A devastating look at the nouveau riche, and the New York nightlife, as well as the ruinous effects of wild ambition, The Beautiful and the Damned achieved stature as one of Fitzgerald's most accomplished novels.[Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Book in stories
    • Wise Blood is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction. [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: About winter
    • Blankets is the story of a young man coming of age and finding the confidence to express his creative voice. Craig Thompson’s poignant graphic memoir plays out against the backdrop of a Midwestern winterscape: finely-hewn linework draws together a portrait of small town life, a rigorously fundamentalist Christian childhood, and a lonely, emotionally mixed-up adolescence. Under an engulfing blanket of snow, Craig and Raina fall in love at winter church camp, revealing to one another their struggles with faith and their dreams of escape. Over time though, their personal demons resurface and their relationship falls apart. It’s a universal story, and Thompson’s vibrant brushstrokes and unique page designs make the familiar heartbreaking all over again.
Category: Read under a blanket
    • When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life—the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family’s future resting on her shoulders, her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition—Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself, back and forth, between the worlds she straddles. Through Kimberly’s story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world we rarely hear about. Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and a world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant—a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.
Category: Incorporates time travel
    • Butler’s most celebrated, critically acclaimed work tells the story of Dana, a young black woman who is suddenly and inexplicably transported from her home in 1970s California to the pre–Civil War South. As she time-travels between worlds, one in which she is a free woman and one where she is part of her own complicated familial history on a southern plantation, she becomes frighteningly entangled in the lives of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder and one of Dana’s own ancestors, and the many people who are enslaved by him. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she’s been given: to protect this young slaveholder until he can father her own great-grandmother. Author Octavia E. Butler skillfully juxtaposes the serious issues of slavery, human rights, and racial prejudice with an exciting science-fiction, romance, and historical adventure.[Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: First in a series
    • Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940, as Parisians flee the city, human folly surfaces in every imaginable way: a wealthy mother searches for sweets in a town without food; a couple is terrified at the thought of losing their jobs, even as their world begins to fall apart. Moving on to a provincial village now occupied by German soldiers, the locals must learn to coexist with the enemy—in their town, their homes, even in their hearts. When Irène Némirovsky began working on Suite Française, she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she died. For sixty-four years, this novel remained hidden and unknown. [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Hat/scarf on the cover
    • Saints and Misfits—a William C. Morris Award finalist and an Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of the Year—is a “timely and authentic” (School Library Journal, starred review) debut novel that feels like a modern day My So-Called Life…starring a Muslim teen. There are three kinds of people in my world: 1. Saints, those special people moving the world forward. Sometimes you glaze over them. Or, at least, I do. They’re in your face so much, you can’t see them, like how you can’t see your nose. 2. Misfits, people who don’t belong. Like me—the way I don’t fit into Dad’s brand-new family or in the leftover one composed of Mom and my older brother, Mama’s-Boy-Muhammad. Also, there’s Jeremy and me. Misfits. Because although, alliteratively speaking, Janna and Jeremy sound good together, we don’t go together. Same planet, different worlds. But sometimes worlds collide and beautiful things happen, right? 3. Monsters. Well, monsters wearing saint masks, like in Flannery O’Connor’s stories. Like the monster at my mosque. People think he’s holy, untouchable, but nobody has seen under the mask. Except me.
Category: Multi-generational
    • Set in the rural midlands of England, The Rainbow revolves around three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than sixty years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow and adopts her daughter as his own, he is unprepared for the conflict and passion that erupt. Suffused with biblical imagery, The Rainbow addresses searching human issues in a setting of precise and vivid detail. [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Takes place in London
    • At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Snow on cover
    • Bryn Aven is determined to gain status amongst the Kanin, the most powerful of the hidden tribes. But as a half-blood, winning respect is a huge challenge. Bryn's almost-human community distrusts people, and those from other tribes are almost as suspect. She has just one goal to get ahead: to join the elite guard protecting the Kanin royal family. And Bryn's vowed that nothing will stand in her way, not even a forbidden romance with her boss, Ridley Dresden. But her plans are put on hold when fallen hero Konstantin starts acting dangerously. Bryn loved him once, but now he's kidnapping Kanin children - stealing them from hidden placements within human families. She's sent to help stop him, but will she lose her heart in the process?
Category: Takes place in a cold climate
    • Kidnapped form his safe California home. Thrown into a life-and-death struggle on the frozen Artic wilderness. Half St. Bernard, half shepard, Buck learns many hard lessons as a sled dog: the lesson of the leash, of the cold, of near-starvation and cruelty. And the greatest lesson he learns from his last owner, John Thornton: the power of love and loyalty. Yet always, even at the side of the human he loves, Buck feels the pull in his bones, an urge to answer his wolf ancestors as they howl to him. [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Gothic novel
    • Before the huge crowd that packed the cathedral square, La Esmeralda stood between two executioners. Suddenly Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, rushed at the executioners and felled them with his enormous fists. He snatched the gypsy girl in one arm and ran with her into the church. A moment later he appeared at the top of the bell tower. Holding the girl above his head, he showed her triumphantly to all of Paris while his thunderous voice roared savagely to the sky: “Sanctuary! Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” Set amid the riot, intrigue, and pageantry of medieval Paris, Victor Hugo’s masterful tale of heroism and adventure has been a perennial favorite since its first publication in 1831 and remains one of the most thrilling stories of all time. [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Snowman on the cover
    • Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it also portrays a large cast of other characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein.  [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Book about a quest
    • Two Chinese-American sisters—Miranda, the older, responsible one, always her younger sister’s protector; Lucia, the headstrong, unpredictable one, whose impulses are huge and, often, life changing. When Lucia starts hearing voices, it is Miranda who must find a way to reach her sister. Lucia impetuously plows ahead, but the bitter constant is that she is, in fact, mentally ill. Lucia lives life on a grand scale, until, inevitably, she crashes to earth. Miranda leaves her own self-contained life in Switzerland to rescue her sister again—but only Lucia can decide whether she wants to be saved. The bonds of sisterly devotion stretch across oceans—but what does it take to break them? Everything Here Is Beautiful is, at its heart, an immigrant story, and a young woman’s quest to find fulfillment and a life unconstrained by her illness. But it’s also an unforgettable, gut-wrenching story of the sacrifices we make to truly love someone—and when loyalty to one’s self must prevail over all.
Category: Recommended by a librarian
    • Betrothed since childhood to the prince of Mynaria, Princess Dennaleia has always known what her future holds. Her marriage will seal the alliance between Mynaria and her homeland, protecting her people from other hostile lands. But Denna has a secret. She possesses an Affinity for fire—a dangerous gift for the future queen of a kingdom where magic is forbidden. Now, Denna must learn the ways of her new home while trying to hide her growing magic. To make matters worse, she must learn to ride Mynaria’s formidable warhorses before her coronation—and her teacher is the person who intimidates her most, the prickly and unconventional Princess Amaranthine (called Mare), sister of her betrothed. When a shocking assassination leaves the kingdom reeling, Mare and Denna reluctantly join forces to search for the culprit. As the two work together, each discovers there’s more to the other than she thought. Mare is surprised by Denna’s intelligence and bravery, while Denna is drawn to Mare’s independent streak. Soon their friendship is threatening to blossom into something more. But with dangerous conflict brewing that makes the alliance more important than ever, acting on their feelings could be deadly. Forced to choose between their duty and their hearts, Mare and Denna must find a way to save their kingdoms—and each other.
Category: Magic in the title
    • Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness … about marriage and children and memory … about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: About new beginnings
    • Passing is Nella Larsen's powerful Harlem Renaissance novel of race, identity, class, marriage, and social performance in early twentieth-century America. The story centres on Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two light-skinned Black women whose lives have taken sharply different paths. Irene lives within the Black middle class of Harlem, while Clare has crossed the colour line and lives as white, concealing her racial identity from her racist husband and the society around her. Their renewed acquaintance becomes increasingly charged with fascination, resentment, danger, and ambiguity, as Larsen examines the unstable boundaries between safety and desire, belonging and concealment, freedom and self-erasure. With remarkable compression and psychological precision, Passing explores the pressures created by racism, respectability, gender expectation, social status, and the need to survive inside a hostile racial order. Larsen's novel is both a major work of African American literature and one of the essential texts of the Harlem Renaissance, notable for its restrained style, moral complexity, and unresolved emotional force. [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Ice in the title
    • 'It was evident, if there were no other entrance to the ice house, that the body had at some point traversed this thorny barrier ...The big question was, how long ago? How long had that nightmare been there?' The people of Streech village had never trusted the three women living up at the Grange - not since Phoebe Maybury's husband suddenly, inexplicably, vanished. Ten years later a corpse is discovered in the grounds and Phoebe's nightmare begins. For once they have identified the body the police are determined to charge her with murder...
Category: Based on a fairy tale
    • In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife. Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, hailed by Colum McCann as “the most thrilling literary discovery in years,” has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.
Category: Read while it's snowing
  • It. Did. Not. Snow. I was SO disappointed. I think we got some tiny flurries, and maybe some ice, but it was a DISAPPOINTING WINTER for snow lovers like myself. I kept holding the category open, planning to fill it in when the time came, but it did not come. Alas. 

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. 
  • The Girl from Everywhere
    • My room was too empty to lend itself to easy dreams.
    • Was it the fear I might be unmade?
  • A Gentleman in Moscow
    • Silence can be an opinion. Silence can be a form of protest.
    • The tenure of friendships has never been governed by the passage of time. 
    • They spoke of the once and was, of the wishful and the wonderful. 
    • Fate would not have the reputation it has if it simply did what it seemed it would do. 
    • Like a lone sailor adrift for years on alien seas, he wakes one night to discover familiar constellations overhead. 
    • I view it as an incredible stroke of good fortune at this stage in my life to have found such a fine new friend.
    • Admittedly, it takes a certain amount of discipline to sit in a chair and read a novel, even a seasonal one, when a beautifully wrapped present waits within arm's reach and the only witness is a one-eyed cat. 
    • As at home in tin as it is in Limoges, coffee can energize the industrious at dawn, calm the reflective at noon, or raise the spirits of the beleaguered in the middle of the night. 
    • It was the symphony of silence. 
  • Christmas in London
    • Occasionally, I listened to some of the book bingo items on audiobook. (Never for the '101 and Beyond' or the first 100 classics, those I like to read on paper.) I remember listening to this one, and I was so annoyed that at one point, she's supposed to be a baker and she's in London and her would-be boyfriend 'whips up the dough' for her cinnamon rolls for a fancy event and she is just 'doing the icing'. I thought this was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard of. Obviously cinnamon roll dough is equally as important, if not more so, than the icing, and there's no way a non-baker would bake the dough, or that a serious baker would let a non-baker bake their dough for them. Clearly this has stuck with me for six years ;)
  • Bleak House
    • I don't seem to have notes from Bleak House, though I do believe I have a copy upstairs, so perhaps my underlinings are there. Rather than write them all in painstaking detail, I'll say that I am a big Dickens fan. I don't think this was my favorite by a longshot (see my blogs on David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, or A Tale of Two Cities, for example) but I always enjoy Dickens, particularly when read on a brisk day by the fire.
  • Blankets
    • This one I borrowed from the library, so no notes on my end. I do enjoy an occasional graphic novel, though!
  • Girl in Translation
    • I enjoyed this book, I vividly remember! That said, I believe I read a borrowed copy from the library.
  • Saints & Misfits
    • How do you wash off what cannot be seen?
    • Who I am inside this body, what I know to be true, that all stays the same. My kernel is me all the time. I let no one change that. 
    • That is the beautiful struggle of being a believer. 
    • Gandhi - Rise, traveller, the sky is light. Why do you sleep? It is not night.
    • Rumi - This is love: to fly towards a secret sky.
    • Flannery O'Connor - I write to discover what I know.
  • Everything Here is Beautiful
    • I remember enjoying this book, but again, don't seem to have a copy here, so I don't have my notes on it.
  • The Tiger's Wife
    • An unleashed secret was a terrible force.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)