This year marks the Seattle Public Library’s 10th year of the Summer Book Bingo program, in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures. Book Bingo celebrates reading and discovery and incentivizes participation with a drawing for prizes.
This year, we have the exciting addition of Teen Book Bingo, offering teen-focused challenges and prizes! And Spanish-language readers can play Lotería de Lectura, for the second year.
It’s up to participants to decide what books they want to read (or listen to — audiobooks count!) to fit a certain category and reach their Book Bingo goals, but library staff members are eager to help readers find the right fit of titles.
To get you started, here are four books that could count toward three of the squares on the Adult Book Bingo card. Find more information on how to play and download cards at spl.org/bookbingo. Submissions are due by Tuesday, Sept. 3.
Friendship
A recent Peak Picks title, “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center” by Rhaina Cohen, asks why our society values romantic partnerships more than platonic partnerships as both can be vital and sustaining.
Through interviews and personal accounts, Cohen explores how the public and societal perception of friendship has changed over time, and how such bonds are centered in some people’s lives. Friendship emerges as a space where more investment and intimacy can flourish, and where more legal rights may be in order. In a loneliness epidemic, stories about the value of friendships and how people can open themselves to new models of connectedness seem particularly apt.
Many novels center on friendship as well, including Leanne Toshiko Simpson’s debut “Never Been Better,” which introduces Dee, Matt and Misa, who meet in a psychiatric hospital and forge an intimate bond as a result. But when Matt and Misa get engaged, Dee’s secret pining for Matt sends her in a tailspin.
At Matt and Misa’s destination wedding at a resort with an open bar, Dee weighs the contradictory costs of her feelings while navigating awkward encounters with her meddlesome sister as her emotional wingman. Humor abounds in this story that also sensitively explores issues of mental health and recovery.
Something That Scares You
This category provides the perfect opportunity to explore one of the biggest genres of the moment: horror. Horror is undergoing a sea change rich with diverse representation and thematic relevance that plumbs the depths of real-world adversity.
Try Indigenous writer Stephen Graham Jones, who just wrapped up his acclaimed Indian Lake trilogy. In the first book, “My Heart Is a Chainsaw,” we meet the snarky, slasher film-obsessed Indigenous teenager Jade Daniels. The setting is Proofrock, Idaho, the site of a mass murder years before at the summer camp nearby. Jade has the sneaking suspicion — maybe a death wish — that history is poised for a repeat. The final girl couldn’t possibly be Jade, could it?
Environmental
As the most requested category by last year’s Book Bingo players, Environmental offers many opportunities to read locally.
Seattle author Madeline Ostrander’s 2022 book “At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth,” tells the stories of four communities on the front lines of the climate crisis, including Pateros, Okanogan County, which experienced devastating fires in 2014 and 2015.
Through these stories, she posits that reexamining how we live and learning to see the Earth as our home might create ripple effects of community resilience. If we enter into the right relationship with our homes and grapple collectively with how climate alters our shared landscape, might we undo or fend off some of the damage?
Find more reading suggestions at www.spl.org, or submit a question at www.spl.org/Ask.
This column was republished with permission from the Seattle Times.
The Seattle Public Library’s Reader Services team writes a monthly column for the Seattle Times that promotes reading and book trends from a librarian’s perspective. Read the May 2024 article by Reader Services librarian Misha Stone on the Seattle Times website.
You can find these titles at the library by visiting spl.org and searching the catalog.
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