Book Bingo is still underway, and some of those squares may be giving you trouble. Here are some suggestions for the mentioned in another book square.
The beauty of this category is that there are so many books about books to choose from. Additionally, so many books mention other books in them, naturally and surreptitiously, that the possibilities are endless. I just finished a novel, Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis, which is about five queer women’s lives under a dictatorship in Uruguay and this cropped up towards the end:
She was happy. Even under the regime, she managed to be happy. Her favorite book, now, was a used paperback she’d found at the street market at Tristán Narvaja: a translation of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, who was British, and dead now, La Venus said, we were never alive at the same time and yet she saw right into me, this book is my Bible and Lily Briscoe is the only Jesus I need.”
Hopefully, you find inspiration in such serendipitous ways!
If you need help, here are some suggestions:
One of my favorite books about books is, of course, Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust series.
In Book Lust, Nancy Pearl wrote: “Ben Okri, one of the best of a new generation of African writers, won the Booker Prize for his novel The Famished Road, the story of the child Azaro, who endures the impoverishments and political upheavals in Nigeria while experiencing the wonders and terrors of the spirit world that only he can see.”
Also from Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust: “When you read Haven Kimmell’s A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana, her memoir of growing up in a very small Midwest town in the 1970s, it’s as though you are immediately thrust inside a kid’s mind, looking at the world through unjaded eyes, unmediated by an adult’s interpretations and perceptions.”
Will Schwalbe’s two memoirs, The End of Your Life Book Club, and Books for Living (about which I wrote a previous blog post), are both testaments to how reading can help us understand and cope with the challenges that life throws our way; he also details all of the ways that reading has brought him joy.
In The End of Your Life Book Club, Will Schwalbe wrote about The Reluctant Fundamentalist: “(Mohsin) Hamid’s novel immediately made me reevaluate whom I could believe and what I could trust, my own prejudices and those others had about me–on a personal level, but also globally.”
Well-Read Black Girl started as a Brooklyn-based book club, but has flourished into an online community and book festival centering books by Black women. Glory Edim’s book shares favorite reads from an impressive array of Black women writers.
In the introduction to Well-Read Black Girl, editor Glory Edim, wrote: “It’s been forty-eight years since Toni Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye. Her words have set the unyielding precedent in American literature. So many generations of Black women felt seen after reading her work.”
In Well-Read Black Girl, Jesmyn Ward wrote of Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry : “Cassie was as powerless as I was, living in a world of adults and bewildering circumstances, a world rotten with Jim Crow and sharecropping and ‘night men’ and racism.
Need more suggestions? Here is the full list with more ideas. But don’t be surprised if you run into a book mentioned in another book you are reading for Book Bingo!
For more ideas for books to meet your Summer Book Bingo challenge, follow our Shelf Talk #BookBingoNW2020 series or check the hashtag #BookBingoNW2020 on social media. Book bingo is presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures.
~posted by Misha S.
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