A note on this blog's organization

Since I first started this blog, I've read 594 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 #7 - Summer 2021

Book Bingo #7 - Seattle Arts & Lectures & Seattle Public Library - Adult Summer Reading 2021 (24 books in total, 0 crossovers with '101 and Beyond' list; 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 2021 for this card specifically, or explore their various past summer cards).

I LOVE that they started having folks illustrate the bingos as well. This is one of my favorites! Shout out to Tessa Hulls (@tessahulls). 

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: Romance
    • Ceony Twill arrives at the cottage of Magician Emery Thane with a broken heart. Having graduated at the top of her class from the Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined, Ceony is assigned an apprenticeship in paper magic despite her dreams of bespelling metal. And once she’s bonded to paper, that will be her only magic … forever. Yet the spells Ceony learns under the strange yet kind Thane turn out to be more marvelous than she could have ever imagined—animating paper creatures, bringing stories to life via ghostly images, even reading fortunes. But as she discovers these wonders, Ceony also learns of the extraordinary dangers of forbidden magic. An Excisioner—a practitioner of dark, flesh magic—invades the cottage and rips Thane’s heart from his chest. To save her teacher’s life, Ceony must face the evil magician and embark on an unbelievable adventure that will take her into the chambers of Thane’s still-beating heart—and reveal the very soul of the man.
Category: On your shelf
    • Pepper Street is a really nice, safe California neighborhood. The houses are tidy and the lawns are neatly mowed. Of course, the country club is close by, and lots of pleasant folks live there. The only problem is they knocked down the wall at the end of the street to make way for a road to a new housing development. Now, that’s not good—it’s just not good at all. Satirically exploring what happens when a smug suburban neighborhood is breached by awful, unavoidable truths, The Road Through the Wall is the tale that launched Shirley Jackson’s heralded career.
Category: Small press
    • Haunted by the loss of her parents and twin sister at sea, Henna cloisters herself in a Northeastern village where the snow never stops. When she discovers the body of a young woman at the edge of the forest, she’s plunged into the mystery of a centuries-old letter regarding one of the most famous stories of Arctic exploration—the Franklin expedition, which disappeared into the ice in 1845. At the center of the mystery is Franklin’s wife, the indomitable Lady Jane. Henna’s investigation draws her into a gothic landscape of locked towers, dream-like nights of snow and ice, and a crumbling mansion rife with hidden passageways and carrion birds. But it soon becomes clear that someone is watching her—someone who is determined to prevent the truth from coming out. Suspenseful and atmospheric, The Snow Collectors sketches the ghosts of Victorian exploration against the eerie beauty of a world on the edge of environmental collapse.
Category: Beach read
    • A wedding celebration turns dark and deadly in this deliciously wicked and atmospheric psychological thriller reminiscent of Agatha Christie. The bride – The plus one – The best man – The wedding planner – The bridesmaid – The body. On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather for a remote wedding to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It's a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed in this gripping whodunit.But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. 
Category: Black joy
  • Love in Color (Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold) - Bolu Babalola
    • A vibrant debut short story collection of love stories from the bestselling author of Honey and Spice, retelling myths, folktales, and histories from around the world. A high-born Nigerian goddess, who has been beaten down and unappreciated by her gregarious lover, longs to be truly seen. A young businesswoman attempts a great leap in her company, and an even greater one in her love life. A powerful Ghanaian spokeswoman is forced to decide whether she should uphold her family’s politics or be true to her heart. In her debut collection, internationally acclaimed writer Bolu Babalola retells the most beautiful love stories from history and mythology with incredible new detail and vivacity. Focusing on the magical folktales of West Africa, Babalola also reimagines Greek myths, ancient legends from the Middle East, and stories from long-erased places. With an eye towards decolonizing tropes inherent in our favorite tales of love, Babalola has created a captivating multicultural romance anthology that traverses across perspectives, continents, and genres. Love in Color is a celebration of romance in all its many splendid forms.
Category: Activism or social justice
    • When Julia finds a slur about her best friend scrawled across the back of the Kingston School for the Deaf, she covers it up with a beautiful (albeit illegal) graffiti mural. Her supposed best friend snitches, the principal expels her, and her two mothers set Julia up with a one-way ticket to a “mainstream” school in the suburbs, where she’s treated like an outcast as the only deaf student. The last thing she has left is her art, and not even Banksy himself could convince her to give that up. Out in the ’burbs, Julia paints anywhere she can, eager to claim some turf of her own. But Julia soon learns that she might not be the only vandal in town. Someone is adding to her tags, making them better, showing off—and showing Julia up in the process. She expected her art might get painted over by cops. But she never imagined getting dragged into a full-blown graffiti war. Told with wit and grit by debut author Whitney Gardner, who also provides gorgeous interior illustrations of Julia’s graffiti tags, You’re Welcome, Universe introduces audiences to a one-of-a-kind protagonist who is unabashedly herself no matter what life throws in her way.
Category: Make you laugh
    • Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy. A little hapless, somewhat neurotic, sort of a hypochondriac. He’s what’s known as a Beta Male: the kind of fellow who makes his way through life by being careful and constant — you know, the one who’s always there to pick up the pieces when the girl gets dumped by the bigger/taller/stronger Alpha Male. But Charlie’s been lucky. He owns a building in the heart of San Francisco, and runs a secondhand store with the help of a couple of loyal, if marginally insane, employees. He’s married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. And she, Rachel, is about to have their first child. Yes, Charlie’s doing okay for a Beta. That is, until the day his daughter, Sophie, is born. Just as Charlie — exhausted from the birth — turns to go home, he sees a strange man in mint-green golf wear at Rachel’s hospital bedside, a man who claims that no one should be able to see him. But see him Charlie does, and from here on out, things get really weird. . . . People start dropping dead around him, giant ravens perch on his building, and it seems that everywhere he goes, a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Strange names start appearing on his nightstand notepad, and before he knows it, those people end up dead, too. Yup, it seems that Charlie Asher has been recruited for a new job, an unpleasant but utterly necessary one: Death. It’s a dirty job. But hey, somebody’s gotta do it.
Category: Coming of age
    • With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon is a bigamist,” Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and the teenage girls caught in the middle. Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s families– the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich and flawed characters, she also reveals the joy, and the destruction, they brought to each other’s lives.At the heart of it all are the two girls whose lives are at stake, and like the best writers, Jones portrays the fragility of her characers with raw authenticity as they seek love, demand attention, and try to imagine themselves as women.
Category: Recommended by library staff/peak picks
    • A charming and evocative story about a picturesque Southern town, two fiercely independent women, and a magical friendship that will change their lives forever. The residents of Dove Pond, North Carolina, know three things: they have the finest bar-b-que this side of Atlanta, their Apple Festival is the best that ever was, and the town has phenomenal good luck whenever the Dove family has seven daughters. Fortunately, that time is now, because Dove Pond desperately needs a miracle. The seventh daughter, Sarah Dove, believes in all things magical. Books have whispered their secrets to her since she was a child. Now the town librarian, she makes sure every book finds the reader who most needs it. But recently the books have been whispering something different—that change is about to come to Dove Pond. 
Category: Graphic novel or comic
    • Journey through the woods in this sinister, compellingly spooky collection that features four brand-new stories and one phenomenally popular tale in print for the first time. These are fairy tales gone seriously wrong, where you can travel to “Our Neighbor’s House”—though coming back might be a problem. Or find yourself a young bride in a house that holds a terrible secret in “A Lady’s Hands Are Cold.” You might try to figure out what is haunting “My Friend Janna,” or discover that your brother’s fiancée may not be what she seems in “The Nesting Place.” And of course you must revisit the horror of “His Face All Red,” the breakout webcomic hit that has been gorgeously translated to the printed page. Already revered for her work online, award-winning comic creator Emily Carroll’s stunning visual style and impeccable pacing is on grand display in this entrancing anthology.
Category: Recommended by a friend
    • Far beneath the surface of the earth, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories. The entryways that lead to this sanctuary are often hidden, sometimes on forest floors, sometimes in private homes, sometimes in plain sight. But those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them. Zachary Ezra Rawlins is searching for his door, though he does not know it. He follows a silent siren song, an inexplicable knowledge that he is meant for another place. When he discovers a mysterious book in the stacks of his campus library he begins to read, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, lost cities, and nameless acolytes. Suddenly a turn of the page brings Zachary to a story from his own childhood impossibly written in this book that is older than he is.
Category: QTBIPOC (queer, trans, Black, indigenous, person of color)
  • PET - Akwaeke Emezi
    • There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with this lesson all their life. But when Jam meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colors and claws, who emerges from one of her mother’s paintings and a drop of Jam’s blood, she must reconsider what she’s been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster—and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption’s house. Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also uncover the truth, and the answer to the question—How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist? In their riveting and timely young adult debut, acclaimed novelist Akwaeke Emezi asks difficult questions about what choices you can make when the society around you is in denial.
Category: Free
  • This little raccoon was so cute that I forgot to read a book for this space! Can you believe it? 
Category: Mystery or crime
    • Tonight, Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed... Again It is meant to be a celebration but it ends in tragedy. As fireworks explode overhead, Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed. But Evelyn will not die just once. Until Aiden - one of the guests summoned to Blackheath for the party - can solve her murder, the day will repeat itself, over and over again. Every time ending with the fateful pistol shot. The only way to break this cycle is to identify the killer. But each time the day begins again, Aiden wakes in the body of a different guest. And someone is determined to prevent him ever escaping Blackheath...
Category: Cli-fi or environmental non-fiction
    • When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others’ emotions. Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.
Category: Poetry or essays
    • Aleksandar Hemon's lives begin in Sarajevo, where boyhood is consumed by street soccer and sibling rivalry, and a young man's life is about American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism. At the age of twenty-seven, Hemon journeyed to Chicago—a trip that would mark the beginning of another life, this time in the United States. There, he watched from afar as war broke out in Bosnia, his parents and sister fleeing, and Hemon himself unable to return. Yet this, his first book of nonfiction, is much more than a memoir of these experiences. At once a love song to two cities and a paean to the bonds of family, The Book of My Lives is a singular work of passion, built on fierce intelligence, unspeakable tragedies, and sharp insight. Like the best narratives, it is a book that will leave you a different reader when you finish—and a different person, with a new way of looking at the world.
Category: Asian American or Pacific Islander Author
    • Yangsze Choo’s stunning debut is a startlingly original novel infused with Chinese folklore, romantic intrigue, and unexpected supernatural twists. Li Lan, the daughter of a respectable Chinese family in colonial Malaysia, hopes for a favorable marriage, but her father has lost his fortune, and she has few suitors. Instead, the wealthy Lim family urges her to become a “ghost bride” for their son, who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Rarely practiced, a traditional ghost marriage is used to placate a restless spirit. Such a union would guarantee Li Lan a home for the rest of her days, but at what price? Night after night, Li Lan is drawn into the shadowy parallel world of the Chinese afterlife, where she must uncover the Lim family’s darkest secrets—and the truth about her own family.
Category: SAL (Seattle Arts & Lectures) Speaker
    • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
Category: Speculative fiction
    • Some people ARE illegal. Lobizonas do NOT exist. Both of these statements are false. Manuela Azul has been crammed into an existence that feels too small for her. As an undocumented immigrant who's on the run from her father's Argentine crime-family, Manu is confined to a small apartment and a small life in Miami, Florida. Until Manu's protective bubble is shattered. Her surrogate grandmother is attacked, lifelong lies are exposed, and her mother is arrested by ICE. Without a home, without answers, and finally without shackles, Manu investigates the only clue she has about her past—a mysterious "Z" emblem—which leads her to a secret world buried within our own. A world connected to her dead father and his criminal past. A world straight out of Argentine folklore, where the seventh consecutive daughter is born a bruja and the seventh consecutive son is a lobizón, a werewolf. A world where her unusual eyes allow her to belong. As Manu uncovers her own story and traces her real heritage all the way back to a cursed city in Argentina, she learns it's not just her U.S. residency that's illegal. . . .it’s her entire existence.
Category: BIPOC Food Writing
    • Diana Abu-Jaber’s vibrant, humorous memoir weaves together delicious food memories that illuminate the two cultures of her childhood—American and Jordanian. Here are stories of being raised by a food-obsessed Jordanian father and tales of Lake Ontario shish kabob cookouts and goat stew feasts under Bedouin tents in the desert. These sensuously evoked repasts, complete with recipes, paint a loving and complex portrait of Diana’s impractical, displaced immigrant father who, like many an immigrant before him, cooked to remember the place he came from and to pass that connection on to his children. The Language of Baklava irresistibly invites us to sit down at the table with Diana’s family, sharing unforgettable meals that turn out to be as much about “grace, difference, faith, love” as they are about food.
Category: Sports
    • Inspired by the author’s experience as a collegiate champion, the novel follows Quenton Cassidy, a competitive runner at fictional Southeastern University whose lifelong dream is to run a four-minute mile. He is less than a second away when the turmoil of the Vietnam War era intrudes into the staid recesses of his school’s athletic department. After he becomes involved in an athletes’ protest, Cassidy is suspended from his track team. Under the tutelage of his friend and mentor, Bruce Denton, a graduate student and former Olympic gold medalist, Cassidy gives up his scholarship, his girlfriend, and possibly his future to withdraw to a monastic retreat in the countryside and begin training for the race of his life against the greatest miler in history. A rare insider’s account of the incredibly intense lives of elite distance runners, Once a Runner is an inspiring, funny, and spot-on tale of one individual’s quest to become a champion.
Category: Olympics host city
    • A hypnotic novel inspired by the strange and fascinating life of sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti, brother of the fabled automaker. With World War One closing in and the Belle Époque teetering to a close, Bugatti leaves his native Milan for Paris, where he encounters Rodin and casts his bronzes at the same foundry used by the French master. In Paris and then Antwerp, Bugatti obsessively observes and sculpts the baboons, giraffes and panthers in the municipal zoos, finding empathy with their plight, identifying with their life in captivity. As the Germans drop bombs over the Belgian city, the zoo authorities are forced to make a heart-wrenching decision about the fate of the caged animals, and Bugatti is stricken with grief from which he’ll never recover. Rembrandt Bugatti’s work, now being rediscovered, is displayed in major art museums around the world and routinely fetches large sums at auction. Edgardo Franzosini recreates the young artist’s life with intense lyricism, passion and sensitivity.
Category: A book from a series
    • There’s no such thing as safe in a city at war, a city overrun with monsters.  Kate Harker and August Flynn are the heirs to a divided city—a city where the violence has begun to breed actual monsters. All Kate wants is to be as ruthless as her father, who lets the monsters roam free and makes the humans pay for his protection. All August wants is to be human, as good-hearted as his own father, to play a bigger role in protecting the innocent—but he’s one of the monsters. One who can steal a soul with a simple strain of music. When the chance arises to keep an eye on Kate, who’s just been kicked out of her sixth boarding school and returned home, August jumps at it. But Kate discovers August’s secret, and after a failed assassination attempt the pair must flee for their lives.
Category: A book from a series
    • Kate Harker is a girl who isn’t afraid of the dark. She’s a girl who hunts monsters. And she’s good at it. August Flynn is a monster who can never be human. No matter how much he once yearned for it. He has a part to play. And he will play it, no matter the cost. Nearly six months after Kate and August were first thrown together, the war between the monsters and the humans is a terrifying reality. In Verity, August has become the leader he never wished to be, and in Prosperity, Kate has become the ruthless hunter she knew she could be. When a new monster emerges from the shadows—one who feeds on chaos and brings out its victim’s inner demons—it lures Kate home, where she finds more than she bargained for. She’ll face a monster she thought she killed, a boy she thought she knew, and a demon all her own.
Category: Recommended by a local bookseller
    • In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
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 five years!
  • The Paper Magician
    • I definitely borrowed this from the library, and I think I read it on my sister Lexie's recommendation. It is very fun, and an excellent adventure. It's part of a series, though I think I just read the first one. Lex read more, I believe, and enjoyed them! One fun thing about these bingos was that they also gave me space (lol, or I gave myself space, ahem) to read books not on the blog lists, books people had recommended to me, books I saw at stores, etc. Which was great fun :)
    • The Road Through the Wall
      • I think that I prefer several of Jackson's other works over this one (We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Sundial, etc.) but I had this one on my shelf and wanted to try it.
        • She and Mr. Roberts both spoke to him gently, when they remembered, because secretly they were both a little afraid that a boy who read books instead of playing baseball might someday turn on them with a dreadful sure knowledge that would cut away their confidence and their muscles and leave them insecure and frightened, their stronger son as weak as they.
        • Harriet was wondering if there would be any girls moving into the house-for-rent, and if so, if one of them might not be a good kind of friend for her... Perhaps one of the new girls who would live in the house - they would be like in Little Women, and Harriet's friend would be jo (or just possibly Beth, and they could die together, patiently) - would love and esteem Harriet, and some day their friendship would be a literary legend...
        • On possible past lives - 'You mean,' Harriet said slowly, considering, 'you mean, I could be anything?' The sound of the wind moving through the trees, a distant shout from the golf course, seemed to bring her an echo of barbaric rites, clashing temple bells, perhaps from the distant, only-just-remembered past; 'I bet I was Egyptian', she said, carried away, 'I always wanted to go to Egypt.'
        • 'It's people from outside took her,' Mrs. Mack said, nodding her great old head. 'People from the other side of the wall.' 'We think she's just gotten lost,' Mr. Desmond said. 'She's just lost herself.' 'No one from here,' Mrs. Mack said. 'This is a nice neighborhood, not like places where little girls get taken away.
        • Pleasure was in the feeling that the terrors of the night, the jungle, had come close to their safe lighted homes, touched them nearly, and departed, leaving every family safe but one. I do love Shirley Jackson's prose. 
      • The Snow Collectors
        • I'm telling you, there was liberation in misanthropy.
        • When things became unbearable, I'd go to the library.
        • The snow fell in handfuls, powdery - the husks of dead stars, water that traveled by sky.
        • Love in Color
          • The alternative was that I had lost control of my own narrative, that our story was spilling beyond my set limits, that it may not have a limit. It would be out of my hands; I would not be able to protect myself. That was something I refused to allow.
          • I hope every time you try to un-fall in love with me you fail. And I know you'll probably try it a lot.
          • I felt like there was an infinity within our affinity, that our connection was so deep and so fathomless that there was no way we could be bound by something as mundane as dawn. We were our own suns.
          • They were each other's natural wonders.
        • You're Welcome, Universe
          • I've never really wanted to be hearing. If I had the choice, I would choose to be Deaf. There's this sense of community. 
          • My old art teacher told me I draw like a man. I've never forgiven him. I don't draw like anything, I draw like everything. I draw like me.
        • A Dirty Job
          • 'Take my word for it, I am Death.' He tried to sound really ominous. 'Death is always tall in the pictures.' She was standing on tiptoe, he could tell the way she kept bouncing up by the little window to get a look at him. 'You don't seem tall enough.' 'There's no height requirement'. 
        • Silver Sparrow
          • 'Am I a secret?' I asked my mother. 'No,' she said. 'You are an unknown.'
          • Love can be incremental.
          • I lived in a world where you could never want what you wanted out in the open.
          • 'You can't read my mind.' 'Baby, I made your mind.'
        • The Book Charmer
          • Sometimes you just have to scrub out all the silliness and let the sun in.
          • It was a myth. We were never safe.
        • The Starless Sea
          • Far beneath the surface of the earth, hidden from the sun and the moon, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories.
          • But if he's a story within a story who is telling it? 
          • Someone somewhere knows this story.
          • A boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.
          • PET
            • You can't sweet-talk a monster into anything else, when all it does want is monsterness. Good and innocent, they not the same thing; they don't wear the same face.
            • But an echo of a memory is not hte same as a memory, and a memory is not the same as a now.
            • Forgetting is dangerous. Forgetting is how the monsters come back.
            • Do you smell your own fears? They are so storng when they leak from you.
            • I am made of things you have no names for.
            • The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
              • I seem to recall finding this one confusing, and not liking it terribly much.
              • Parable of the Sower
                • I am Earthseed. Anyone can be. Someday, I think there will be a lot of us. And I think we'll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place.
                • All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule, who will lead, who will define, refine, confine, design, who will dominate.
              • The Book of My Lives
                • Perhaps love is a process of finding a common vision of reality.
                • We missed each other, even while we were together, because the decaying elephant in the room was the loss of our previous life - absolutely nothing was the way it used to be.
                • I can still see my grandmother, the senior borscht cook, with an enormous, stemaing pot in her hands. wobbling from the kitchen out to the yard, sweat drops sliding off her forehead and into the borscht for that special final touch.
                • The crucial ingredient of the perfect borscht is a large, hungry family.
                • What if my reality was someone else's fiction?
                • I was prone to anxiety and depression in my late twenties, which I experienced as a depletion of my interiority, as a drought of thought and language. The purpose of going to the mountain was to replenish my mind, to reboot the language apparatus, the thought machine. But my reclusion worried my parents, while my friends suspected I was in the process of losing my mind. At night, the only sounds were the lows and bells of roaming cattle, the wind and the branches scratching the roof. Excited birds would bid me good early morning, and I'd start reading as soon as I opened my eyes. I enjoyed my life ascetically simplified: reading, eating, hiking, sleeping. The self-imposed austerity remedied whatever pain I'd carried up to the mountain.
                • The Ghost Bride
                  • I think I borrowed this one from the library, but if memory serves, this was the first time I had read about an afterlife where multiple religions just had their own afterlives and weren't in competition with each other. The author is Malaysian, I believe, and as a country home to a variety of religion systems, I think it feels natural in this story, but it was wholly wild to me, in the best way. I definitely grew up in a sort of 'this faith or hell' kind of narrative, so the idea that there could simply be multiple faiths, multiple respective afterlives, harmoniously coexisting, was and is incredibly cool to me.
                • On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
                  • I am writing because they told me never to start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence - I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.
                    • Lobizona
                      • I loved this book! (spoiler alert) She's undocumented, which shines a great light on this community, well before they have horrifyingly been placed in the spotlight in recent years. She's also a lady werewolf, so she's not supposed to exist! It's an excellent read.
                        • Buenos Aires has more bookstores per person than any city in the world.
                        • Sometimes reality strays so far from what's rational that we can only explain it through fantasy.
                        • If no one knows we exist, how can the system ever hope to accommodate us?
                        • You're the spark we've been waiting for - if you ignite, we will fan your flames. Otherwise you'll be alone in the dark forever.
                        • Plant your new garden with the seeds of equality, water it with tolerance and empathy, and warm it with the temperate heat of truth.
                      • The Language of Baklava
                        • I loved this one, too! I really thought I had a physical copy, but I can't seem to find it. It weaves recipes and food stories with memoir in the most lovely way. I remember recommending it to my co-worker, Natalie, who is also Jordanian-American.
                          • This Savage Song & Our Dark Duet
                            • I definitely enjoyed this and its sequel! V.E. Schwab is a great storyteller, in my opinion, and I'd love to read more of her work.
                              • The truth was a disastrous thing.
                              • Can't, shouldn't, wouldn't, won't. No one thinks to look for someone who's always there.

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