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 #9 - Summer 2022

Book Bingo #9 - Seattle Arts & Lectures & Seattle Public Library - Adult Summer Reading 2022 (24 books in total, 4 crossovers with '101 and Beyond' list, indicated with an asterisk)


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 2022 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: A SAL (Seattle Arts & Lectures Series) speaker (past or upcoming)
    • In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger. When she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty.
Category: Sci-fi or fantasy by a BIPOC author
    • Jevick, the pepper merchant’s son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick’s life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. But just as he revels in Olondria’s Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.
Category: Recommended by a local bookseller
    • Chef and writer Samin Nosrat has taught everyone from professional chefs to middle school kids to author Michael Pollan to cook using her revolutionary, yet simple, philosophy. Master the use of just four elements—Salt, which enhances flavor; Fat, which delivers flavor and generates texture; Acid, which balances flavor; and Heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food—and anything you cook will be delicious. By explaining the hows and whys of good cooking, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will teach and inspire a new generation of cooks how to confidently make better decisions in the kitchen and cook delicious meals with any ingredients, anywhere, at any time.
Category: Debut author
  • 19 - J.S. Pierce
    • 19 is a gripping dual-POV narrative that follows Jessica, a mixed-race girl recruited into a secret intelligence organization called The Agency at just eleven years old. Through Jessica's forbidden journals, her husband Chris embarks on a quest for truth, uncovering startling revelations about her death and the dangers within The Agency. Author J.S. Pierce captivates readers with her vivid and detailed storytelling, making every moment of Jessica's journey intensely immersive and emotionally resonant.
Category: Blue cover
    • London, 1863. Bridie Devine, the finest female detective of her age, is taking on her toughest case yet. Reeling from her last job and a damaged reputation, a remarkable puzzle has come her way. Christabel Berwick has been kidnapped. But Christabel is no ordinary child. She is not supposed to exist. As Bridie fights to recover the stolen child she enters a world of fanatical anatomists, crooked surgeons and mercenary showmen. Anomalies are in fashion, curiosities are the thing, and fortunes are won and lost in the name of entertainment. The public love a spectacle and Christabel may well prove the most remarkable spectacle London has ever seen. Things in Jars is an enchanting Victorian detective novel that explores what it is to be human in inhumane times.
Category: Banned or challenged book
    • Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway–a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the death of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance–infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life–Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s first complete rendering of what she described as the “luminous envelope” of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind’s inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality. [Click here to read my blog on this book.]
Category: Set south of the equator
    • Set in an isolated, rundown community in the Peruvian Andes, Vargas Llosa's novel tells the story of a series of mysterious disappearances involving the Shining Path guerrillas and a local couple performing cannibalistic sacrifices with strange similiarities to the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece. Part detective novel and part political allegory, it offers a panoramic view of Peruvian society; not only of the current political violence and social upheaval, but also of the country's past and its connection to Indian culture and pre-Hispanic mysticism.
Category: Unreliable narrator
    • In Agatha Christie's masterful whodunit, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the boundaries of detective fiction are expertly blurred, as it employs an innovative narrative technique that challenges conventional tropes. Set in the quaint English village of King's Abbot, the novel delves into the murder of wealthy industrialist Roger Ackroyd, unraveling a web of deceit through the astute observations of Hercule Poirot. Christie's concise prose and shrewd characterizations foster a palpable tension, while the novel's striking twist redefined the genre and questioned the reliability of narrators in literary mystery, making it a quintessential study in reader engagement and surprise.
Category: A book about books
    • It is 1939, Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. By her brother’s graveside, Liesel’s life is changed when she picks up an object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger’s Handbook, and it’s her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor’s wife’s library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel’s foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel’s world is both opened up and closed down. The Book Thief is a story about the power of words to make worlds. Award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring books of our time.
Category: Recommended by library staff or peak pick
    • Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930’s Denver on her own, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion.
Category: Latina/Latino/Latine author
    • They’re called the Beautiful Ones. Loisail’s most notable socialites: the wealthy, powerful, beloved. This spring is Nina’s last chance to join their ranks, but the Grand Season has just begun and Nina’s debut has already gone disastrously awry. Neighbors call her the Witch of Oldhouse—the haphazard manifestations of her powers making her the subject of malicious gossip. So when entertainer and fellow telekinetic Hector Auvray arrives to town, Nina is dazzled. He’s traveled the world performing his talents for admiring audiences. And he sees Nina not as a witch, but as something more. With Hector’s help, Nina’s talent blossoms, as does her love for him. But great romances are just for fairytales. In the glittering, gossip-laden world of Loisail, where everyone conceals secrets, can their courtship survive?  
Category: Been meaning to read
    • Rose has always felt out of place in her family, a wanderer in a bunch of homebodies. So when an enormous white bear mysteriously shows up and asks her to come away with him — in exchange for health and prosperity for her ailing family — she readily agrees. The bear takes Rose to a distant castle, where each night she is confronted with a mystery. In solving that mystery, she loses her heart, discovers her purpose, and realizes her travels have only just begun. As familiar and moving as Beauty and the Beast and yet as fresh and original as only the best fantasy can be, East is a novel retelling of the classic tale "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," a sweeping romantic epic in the tradition of Robin McKinley and Gail Carson Levine.
Category: Health or healthcare workers
    • Joan is a thirtysomething ICU doctor at a busy New York City hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the United States to secure the American dream for their children, Joan is intensely devoted to her work, happily solitary, successful. She does look up sometimes and wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own cultural and social expectations. Once Joan and her brother, Fang, were established in their careers, her parents moved back to China, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in their homeland. But when Joan’s father suddenly dies and her mother returns to America to reconnect with her children, a series of events sends Joan spiraling out of her comfort zone just as her hospital, her city, and the world are forced to reckon with a health crisis more devastating than anyone could have imagined. 
Category: Set somewhere you'd like to visit
    • Iceland, AD 1000. Freya knows that her people are doomed. Warned by the Fates of an impending disaster, she must embark on a journey to find a magnificent gold necklace, one said to possess the power to alter the course of history. But even as Freya travels deep into the mountains of Iceland, the country is on the brink of war. The new world order of Christianity is threatening the old ways of Iceland?s people, and tangled amidst it all are two star-crossed lovers who destiny draws them together?even as their families are determined to tear them apart. Infused with the rich history and mythology of Iceland, Betsy Tobin's sweeping novel is an epic adventure of forbidden love, lust, jealousy, faith and magical wonder set under the shadow of a smoldering volcano.
Category: Read outside
    • In this haunting masterpiece of postcolonial literature, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979, Naipaul gives us a convincing and disturbing vision of a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past. Salim is doubly an outsider in his new home—an unnamed country that resembles the Congo—by virtue of his origins in a community of Indian merchants on the coast of East Africa. Uncertain of his future, he has come to take possession of a local trading post he has naively purchased sight unseen. But what Salim discovers on his arrival is a ghost town, reduced to ruins in the wake of the recently departed European colonizers and in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Salim struggles to build his business against a backdrop of growing chaos, conflict, ignorance, and poverty. His is a journey into the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier—but witnessed this time from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that the nation’s violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who calls himself the people’s savior but whose regime is built on fear and lies. [Click here to read my blog on this book.]
Category: Hobby or skill
    • I’m 30 years old and work as a postman. A bit of a movie geek. I live with my cat. One day, I am suddenly diagnosed with a brain tumor and told that I have very little time left to live. When I returned home in a hopeless mood, I found a man waiting for me who looked exactly like me. He claims to be the devil and offers me a strange deal. He offers you a strange deal: “I will erase one thing from this world. In exchange, you get one day of life. I decided to erase it in order to live. A phone, a movie, a watch ……​, and a cat. In exchange for my life, things disappear from the world. Seven days of me, a cat, and a cheerful devil have begun.
Category: Non-binary/genderqueer author or character
    • Mokoya and Akeha, the twin children of the Protector, were sold to the Grand Monastery as infants. While Mokoya developed her strange prophetic gift, Akeha was always the one who could see the strings that moved adults to action. While Mokoya received visions of what would be, Akeha realized what could be. What's more, they saw the sickness at the heart of their mother's Protectorate. A rebellion is growing. The Machinists discover new levers to move the world every day, while the Tensors fight to put them down and preserve the power of the state. Unwilling to continue as a pawn in their mother's twisted schemes, Akeha leaves the Tensorate behind and falls in with the rebels. But every step Akeha takes towards the Machinists is a step away from Mokoya. Can Akeha find peace without shattering the bond they share with their twin?
Category: Reread a childhood favorite
    • Mandy, a ten-year-old orphan, dreams of a place to call her own. Escaping over the orphanage wall to explore the outside world, Mandy discovers a tiny deserted cottage in the woods. All through the spring, summer, and fall, Mandy works to make it truly hers. Sometimes she "borrows" things she needs from the orphanage. Sometimes, to guard her secret, she even lies. Then, one stormy night at the cottage, Mandy gets sick, and no one knows how to find her—except a special friend she didn't know she had. This is the perfect book for ten-year-old girls who love tiny houses and stories filled with hope.
Category: Recommended by a neighbor or friend
    • Charlie Hall has never found a lock she couldn’t pick, a book she couldn’t steal, or a bad decision she wouldn’t make. She’s spent half her life working for gloamists, magicians who manipulate shadows to peer into locked rooms, strangle people in their beds, or worse. Gloamists guard their secrets greedily, creating an underground economy of grimoires. And to rob their fellow magicians, they need Charlie. Now, she’s trying to distance herself from past mistakes, but going straight isn’t easy. Bartending at a dive, she’s still entirely too close to the corrupt underbelly of the Berkshires. Not to mention that her sister Posey is desperate for magic, and that her shadowless and possibly soulless boyfriend has been keeping secrets from her. When a terrible figure from her past returns, Charlie descends back into a maelstrom of murder and lies. Determined to survive, she’s up against a cast of doppelgängers, mercurial billionaires, gloamists, and the people she loves best in the world — all trying to steal a secret that will allow them control of the shadow world and more.
Category: Outside your comfort zone
    • How to Transform Feeling Overwhelmed and Frazzled to Empowered and Fulfilled. Are you often told to stop taking things to heart or to toughen up? Do you have a lot of empathy for others? Do you tend to overanalyse things and 'get stuck in your own head'? Or become easily overwhelmed and often need to withdraw? If the answer is yes, you are likely to be a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), and this book will be your guide to embracing your innate sensitivity.
Category: Book to screen
    • With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps–a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an “ordinary young man” who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas. [Click here to read my blog on this book.]
Category: #1 First book by an author
    • At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people. [Click here to read my blog on this book.]
Category: #2 Most recent book by same author
    • From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Breath, Eyes, Memory, Everything Inside is a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love. Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean, and beyond, this is the indelible work of a keen observer of the human heart–a master at her best.
Category: LGBTQ+ love story
    • Claudia Lin is used to disregarding her fractious family’s model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy. She’s also used to keeping secrets from them, such as that she prefers girls—and that she’s just been stealth-recruited by Veracity, a referrals-only online-dating detective agency. A lifelong mystery reader who wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, Claudia believes she’s landed her ideal job. But when a client goes missing, Claudia breaks protocol to investigate—and uncovers a maelstrom of personal and corporate deceit, with far-reaching societal implications.
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 my notes are a bit more sparse than for some of the other bingos. Please don't take this as a sign of me not liking these books, it's just been a few years.
  • Pachinko
    • 'Sunja-ya, a woman's life is endless work and suffering. It's better to expect it, you know. Youre becoming a woman now, so you should be told this. For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life - but no matter what, always expect suffering, and just keep working hard. No one will take care of a poor woman - just ourselves.'
    • 'People are rotten everywhere you go. They're no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let's see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.'
    • 'Umma, no one can know.' 'Is it so terrible to be Korean?' 'It is terrible to be me.'
  • A Stranger in Olondria
    • As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses.
    • Here the earth is full of little bones.
    • 'A book', says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, 'is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.'
    • Our two worlds scrape together like the two halves of a broken bone.
  • Things in Jars
    • The sea rocked asleep, now wakes and answers, a refrain of waves and shale song.
    • He is a circus to the eye.
    • Prudhoe's shelves, curved of course, are packed with periodicals, pamphlets, and books, ranged in deliberate disorder, for the doctor likes juxtapositions.
  • Death in the Andes
    • What was he doing in the middle of the barrens with sullen, suspicious serruchos who killed each other over politics and, as if that wasn't enough, went missing too? Why wasn't he back home? He imagined himself at the Rfo Bar, surrounded by beers and the Invincibles, his lifelong buddies, on a hot Piuran night filled with stars, waltzes, and the smell of goats and carob trees. A wave of sadness made his teeth ache.
    • The revolution had a million eyes, a million ears.
  • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 
    • 'And now, messieurs et mesdames,' said Poirot rapidly. 'I will continue with what I was about to say. Understand this: I mean to arrive at the truth. The trught, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to the seeker after it. I am much aged, my powers may not be what they were.' Here he clearly expected a contradiction. 'In all probability this is the last case I shall ever investigate. But Hercule Poirot does not end with a failure. Messieurs et mesdames, I tell you, I mean to know. And I shall know - in spite of you all.'
  • The Book Thief
    • Needless to say, I vacation in increments. In colors.
    • To stem the flow of truth. Her heart at that point was slippery and hot, and loud, so loud so loud.
    • There was the chaos of goodbye.
    • Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.
  • Woman of Light
    • She had become a divine reflex fueled only by fury and heartache.
    • 'I think everything that's ever happened or going ot happen to us and the people we love is around,' said Luz. 'All we have to do is reach for it.
  • Joan is Okay
    • While not a mouse, I do have prosaic features. My eyes, hooded and lashless. I have very thin eyebrows. I told the man that he could try another hospital or come back at another time. But high chance that I would still be here and he would still think that I looked like  mouse.
    • Greetings between families can be so anticlimactic. My mother and I spoke often enough through phone calls and texts, but after two years physically apart, there were no big embraces or kisses. She didn't greet Fang as he was already at baggage claim, ahead of the crowd. I had forgotten about crowds in China, that being in a crowd here was like being lost at sea, and for airports, trainstations - for any transportation hub, any city really - for all the tourist sites, all the shopping centers, especially around the holidays, especially food markets, escalators, the phrase rén hǎi exists, or 'people sea'.
    • He walked me to the elevators while I pressed myself against the marble wall of the lobby, wishing to be absorbed. He told me that I shouldn't do that. I shouldn't wipe myself against stone surfaces like some cleaning cloth but instead should walk with confidence and purpose.  I love everything about this line.
    • As a child, I was at medium to high risk of not maturing - many trips to the counselor's office, a persistent lack of friends. My first counselor in Scranton asked if I had thoughts of hurting myself. You do not smile, she said, and if you do not smile, how is anyone going to know what's going on in that big head? 'The Joker smiles a lot,' I replied. 'The Joker isn't real', she said. That I often answered questions strangely was a reason I was sent to her office in the first place.
    • How immigration is often described: a death, a rebirth. Or how my mother would describe it, starting back down at zero. To pin can also mean to piece together, as you would a puzzle. So, to piece back together life.
  • If Cats Disappeared from the World
    • What did I gain by growing up, and what did I lose? 
    • In other words, I'm the person you could have been.
  • Mandy
    • I adored this book as a child, and loved it reading it again. I want nothing more than a little abandoned cottage in the woods that I can fix up and make my own.
  • Book of Night
    • It turns out that men have more authority, even when they're not real.
  • The Handbook for Highly Sensitive People
    • This book gets a little wacky when it gets into the past life regressions and such, but I did really enjoy the earlier sections where she talks about working in intense work environments in part to prove to herself that she could handle it because people accused her of 'feeling too much'. I definitely identified with her experience quite a bit.
  • Everything Inside
    • Some people just want to go home, no matter the cost. Some people would do just about anything to go home. 
    • 'Can I share some secrets?' he asked. 'Can't take any more secrets,' she said. 'A small one,' he said. Big or small, she did not want to hear any more, but it didn't stop him.
    • Doesn't she realize that the life she is living is an accident of fortune?

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