A note on this blog's organization

Since I first started this blog, I've read well 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, try typing the book title or author's name in the search bar at the top left of this blog.

Book Bingo #2 - 2019

Book Bingo #2 - 2019 - My own creation (31 books in total, 12 overlaps with '101 and Beyond' - overlaps indicated with an asterisk)

I don't have exact dates for this one, but it definitely overlaps with some books I blogged on in 2019, so I'm putting it in that general range. I got excited about the concept of book bingos and made my own board for the first time. As you can see, even on a board of my own creation I was tempted to add write-ins. ;) Again, I'll list them left to right, top to bottom below, in case you can't read my chicken scratch.


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! 

Category: By a local author
    • A coming-of- age crime caper that explores the timeless and ever-confusing realities of male adolescence. Jason Rekulak’s hilarious debut novel offers a nostalgic celebration of old-school computer programming, 1980s pop culture, and the last great days of life before the internet.
Category: By a woman
    • This is the story of Rahel and Estha, twins growing up among the banana vats and peppercorns of their blind grandmother’s factory, and amid scenes of political turbulence in Kerala. Armed only with the innocence of youth, they fashion a childhood in the shade of the wreck that is their family: their lonely, lovely mother, their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher) and their sworn enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun, incumbent grand-aunt).Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning novel was the literary sensation of the 1990s: a story anchored to anguish but fuelled by wit and magic. [Click here to see my blog on this book.]
Category: Chose a book by its cover
    • In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other--from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space...the internet.
Category: By an Indigenous author
    • Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden - but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.
Category: Book by a Latinx (I now know the term Latine) author
    • Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents’ house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga’s role.Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. But it’s not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. Was Olga really what she seemed? Or was there more to her sister’s story? And either way, how can Julia even attempt to live up to a seemingly impossible ideal?
Category: Poetry
    • Nature Poem follows Teebs―a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet―who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. While he’s adamant―bratty, even―about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.
Category: Banned book
    • Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking, controversial, and powerful work -- exposing the attitudes of white nineteenth-century society toward "the peculiar institution" and documenting, in heartrending detail, the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families "sold down the river." An immediate international sensation, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the first year, was translated into thirty-seven languages, and has never gone out of print: its political impact was immense, its emotional influence immeasurable. [To read my blog on it, click here.]
Category: Adapted into a movie
    • First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara, the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times. Pevear and Volokhonsky masterfully restore the spirit of Pasternak's original—his style, rhythms, voicings, and tone—in this beautiful translation of a classic of world literature. [To read my blog on this, click here.]
Category: Book you've been meaning to read
    • Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy — from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans — has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair — and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend? In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to “model minorities” in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.
Category: By a woman of color
    • In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. [To read my blog on this, click here.]
Category: Set in another country
    • Banished from England for seeking to marry against his father’s wishes, Ivanhoe joins Richard the Lion Heart on a crusade in the Holy Land. On his return, his passionate desire is to be reunited with the beautiful but forbidden lady Rowena, but he soon finds himself playing a more dangerous game as he is drawn into a bitter power struggle between the noble King Richard and his evil and scheming brother John. The first of Scott’s novels to address a purely English subject, Ivanhoe is set in a highly romanticized medieval world of tournaments and sieges, chivalry and adventure where dispossessed Saxons are pitted against their Norman overlords, and where the historical and fictional seamlessly merge. [To read my blog on this, click here.]
Category: Memoir
    • New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health.
Category: Gothic novel
    • Scientist Dr. Henry Jekyll believes every human has two minds: one good and one evil. He develops a potion to separate them from each other. Soon, his evil mind takes over, and Dr. Jekyll becomes a hideous fiend known as Mr. Hyde. [To read my blog on this, click here.]
Category: Coming of age novel
    • A Separate Peace is a timeless coming-of-age novel about friendship, rivalry, and adolescence. Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world. [To read my blog on this, click here.]
Category: Author's first published book
    • Twelve-year-old Fee is a shy Korean-American boy growing up in Maine whose powerful soprano voice wins him a place as section leader of the first sopranos in his local boys choir. But when, on a retreat, Fee discovers how the director treats the boys he makes section leader, he is so ashamed, he says nothing of the abuse, not even when Peter, Fee’s best friend, is in line to be next. The director is eventually arrested, and Fee tries to forgive himself for his silence. But when Peter takes his own life, Fee blames only himself. Years later, after he has carefully pieced a new life together, Fee takes a job at a private school near his hometown. There he meets a young student, Arden, who, to his shock, is the picture of Peter—and the son of his old choir director.     
Category: Autobiography
    • Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and must live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love towards herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free rather than imprisoned. Maya Angelou’s memoir is a modern American classic, capturing the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. [For my blog on this, click here.]
Category: Response to another book
    • With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, Rhys ingeniously brings into light one of fiction's most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind. [To read my blog on this, click here.]
Category: Based on true events
    • On November 15th, 1959, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith brutally murdered the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. This superb work, an exhaustively researched narrative of the lives of the family and the men who killed them, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events. [To read my blog on this, click here.]
Category: Short story collection
    • This gorgeously wrought anthology represents a wide range of styles, themes, and perspectives on a variety of topics. The carefully selected stories depict moments that linger—moments of doubt, crossroads to be chosen, relationships, epiphanies, moments of loss and moments of discovery. A celebration of writing and expression, Everyday People brings to light the rich tapestry that binds us all. An eclectic mix of award-winning and critically lauded writers, the contributors include: Mia Alvar, Carleigh Baker, Nana Brew-Hammond, Glendaliz Camacho, Alexander Chee, Mitchell S. Jackson, Yiyun Li, Allison Mills, Courttia Newland, Denne Michelle Norris, Jason Reynolds, Nelly Rosario, Hasanthika Sirisena, and Brandon Taylor.
Category: Read in one day
    • Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is perhaps the crowning achievement of Shirley Jackson’s brilliant career: a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the dramatic struggle that ensues when an unexpected visitor interrupts their unusual way of life.
Category: By a queer author
    • In Inside/Out, Osmundson manages to create an epic in less than fifty pages. Somehow, while welcoming readers into so many folds of his life, he manages to obliterate spectacle and really demands we ask ourselves who and what we are, and who and what we want to hide, from the inside out. Inside/Out is more than an intervention, more than a literary awakening; it is the terrifying and utterly gorgeous exploration of what love, loss, and fear do to us from the inside out.
Category: Translated from another language
    • In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels. [To read my blog on this, click here.]
Category: By a trans author
    • Amanda Hardy is the new girl in school. Like anyone else, all she wants is to make friends and fit in. But Amanda is keeping a secret, and she’s determined not to get too close to anyone. But when she meets sweet, easygoing Grant, Amanda can’t help but start to let him into her life. As they spend more time together, she realizes just how much she is losing by guarding her heart. She finds herself yearning to share with Grant everything about herself, including her past. But Amanda’s terrified that once she tells him the truth, he won't be able to see past it. Because the secret that Amanda’s been keeping? It's that at her old school, she used to be Andrew. Will the truth cost Amanda her new life, and her new love?
Category: Science fiction
    • A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters. [To read my blog on this, click here.]
Category: Published in the year you were born
    • Masuji Ono saw misery in his homeland and became unwilling to spend his skills solely in the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he envisioned a strong and powerful nation of the future, and he put his painting to work in the service of the movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Masuji Ono struggles through the spiritual wreckage of that war, his memories of the “floating world” of his youth, full of pleasure and promise, serve as an escape from, a punishment for—and a justification of—his entire life. Drifting without honor in Japan’s postwar society, which indicts him for its defeat and reviles him for his aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being. 
Write-Ins
    • The year is 1995, and Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings. At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside. Selin’s summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.
    • Jamie Watson has always been intrigued by Charlotte Holmes; after all, their great-great-great-grandfathers are one of the most infamous pairs in history. But the Holmes family has always been odd, and Charlotte is no exception. She’s inherited Sherlock’s volatility and some of his vices—and when Jamie and Charlotte end up at the same Connecticut boarding school, Charlotte makes it clear she’s not looking for friends. But when a student they both have a history with dies under suspicious circumstances, ripped straight from the most terrifying of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Jamie can no longer afford to keep his distance. Danger is mounting and nowhere is safe—and the only people they can trust are each other.
    • An uncompromising and self-destructive deserts his wife, family, business, and civilization for his art. Shedding harsh light on an artist's ego, Maugham reveals the lengths to which one man will go to focus on his art. 
    • The Great Gatsby brilliantly recast in the contemporary South: a powerful first novel about an extended African-American family and their colliding visions of the American Dream. No One Is Coming to Save Us is a revelatory debut from an insightful voice that combines a universally resonant story with an intimate glimpse into the hearts of one family.
    • Seventeen-year-old Maya Aziz is torn between worlds. There’s the proper one her parents expect for their good Indian daughter: attending a college close to their suburban Chicago home and being paired off with an older Muslim boy her mom deems “suitable.” And then there is the world of her dreams: going to film school and living in New York City—and pursuing a boy she’s known from afar since grade school. But in the aftermath of a horrific crime perpetrated hundreds of miles away, her life is turned upside down. The community she’s known since birth becomes unrecognizable; neighbors and classmates are consumed with fear, bigotry, and hatred. Ultimately, Maya must find the strength within to determine where she truly belongs.
    • Mrs. McGinty died from a brutal blow to the back of her head. Suspicion falls immediately on her shifty lodger, James Bentley, whose clothes reveal traces of the victim’s blood and hair. Yet something is amiss: Bentley just doesn’t seem like a murderer. Could the answer lie in an article clipped from a newspaper two days before the death? With a desperate killer still free, Hercule Poirot will have to stay alive long enough to find out.
My Reflections on this Book Bingo

As with the first book bingo, 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 Marrow Thieves - I really enjoyed reading this, and remember thinking that I want to read more works by Indigenous authors, particularly Canadian Indigenous authors, as I haven't read much work by these folks. 
    • I'd felt kind of special then, before I knew how dangerous special could be. 
    • And he opened a hand, palm down to indicate the ground, this ground, as he began Story. 
    • Terror is an odd bedfellow. I love this line.
    • Could they hear my fear? Did I give us away?
    • Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you're not the one that'll be alive to live it. 
  • So You Want to Talk About Race
    • It is very hard to survive as a woman of color in this world, and I remember saying once that if I stopped to feel, really feel, the pain of the racism I encountered, I would start screaming and I would never ever stop. 
    • I had started to see myself, and once you start to see yourselve, you cannot pretend anymore. 
    • If we continue to treat racism like a giant monster that is chasing us, we will be forever running. 
    • Often, being a person of color in a white-dominated society is like being in an abusive relationship with the world. ooph. This really hit me.
    • The world will try to tell you that what you are seeing, hearing, thinking, and feeling is wrong. 
    • Systemic racism is a machine that runs wehter we pull the levers or not, and by just letting it be, we are responsible for what it produces. We actually have to dismantle the machine if we want to make change.
  • If I Was Your Girl
    • I thought about how every person could hold two truths inside of them, how impossible it felt sometimes to have your insides and outsides aligned. love this.
    • I promise, whatever you're hiding, in this place, what we see is what you know you are inside. 
    • I felt like a part of the people around me, like another cell in a healthy body instead of a hidden disease.
  • An Artist of the Floating World
    • We are the emerging generation. Together, it is within our capability to achieve something of real value. 
    • My conscience, Sensei, tells me I cannot remain forever an artist of the floating world. 
  • No One is Coming to Save Us
    • Nobody has to know the hollow spaces you shock yourself by living through.
    • Everybody was keeping the wrong secrets. 
    • You need to mourn your pain or it will rot you. I love this line.
    • If you can't get what you want, want something else. See that the something else is good, too.
  • The Moon and Sixpence
    • I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change and the excitement of the unforeseen. 
    • An appeal to the emotions is little likely to be effectual before luncheon.
    • Who makes fame? Who indeed?
    • I too have made beauty. 
    • Who can tell what anguished fancy made these fruits?
Additional notes on the books in this bingo:

Several of these were added because I had a connection to the author. My dear friend, Denne Michele Norris, now a many times over published author and CEO extraordinaire of Electric Literature, had a story published in the excellent short story collection Everyday People, and one of her mentors and friends Alexander Chee also had a story in the collection, which inspired me to go back and read his first novel, Edinburgh. I loved it, and unfortunately only seem to have one section I saved: 
  • The survivor gets to tell the story. That said, I remember loving this book. Everyday People, in addition to being a marvelous collection of stories, also contains a wonderful book list with a variety of different collections of books, poems, etc. written by writers of color. I've been delving deep in that list to continue to add to my future book bingo choices and inform my TBR. Thank you for the incredible list, Jenn Baker, and the marvelously edited collection of stories!
My dear friend Denne Michele Norris also had a podcast with several friends, Food4Thot, and as I was listening to episodes, I was inspired to read works by some of the other podcasters, including Nature Poem by Tommy Pico and Inside/Out, by Joseph Osmundson, both of which I really enjoyed.

Another incredible work that I sadly don't have many notes on is Hunger, Roxane Gay's memoir, which I loved. Here's one of my favorite lines:
  • This is not a story of triumph, but this is a story that demands to be told and deserves to be heard.
Fun fact! Denne Michele Norris, my incredibly talented friend and published author, was interviewed by Roxane Gay on Denne's debut novel, When the Harvest Comes (it's definitely on a future bingo, so stay tuned!) and I got to see it live! It was a peak "pinch-me" moment, and an incredible conversation. You can watch the conversation here. In case you're wondering, I was SO chill and definitely not at all incredibly awkward in trying to fangirl to Roxane Gay. ;)
  • I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Love, Hate, & Other Filters, A Study in Charlotte
    • These are all quite different but fall into the YA category. I enjoyed each of them, though I don't seem to have more notes about them. I think I found them using the book list from Everyday People.
  • We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Idiot
    • I love Shirley Jackson, and this one is excellent. I also remember liking The Idiot, though again, I don't seem to have notes.

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