It’s mid-July, which means we’re halfway through Book Bingo season and you have six solid weeks to read books in fun categories and fill up that bingo card.
For the uninitiated, all summer long, The Seattle Public Library, Seattle Arts & Lectures and new partner, King County Library System, celebrate Book Bingo, a program that encourages everyone to read widely and discuss books with friends and neighbors.
If you’re trying for a blackout or just need some ideas, here are six suggestions for three categories.
SAL Speaker (Past or Present)
Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib’s “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” is, yes, about the hallowed sport but also an homage to “the emotional politics of place.”
A love letter to Columbus, Ohio, this memoir captures the thrill and the sorrows that accompany loving a sport and supporting your hometown team. As a Black boy growing up in a city that others denigrated, Abdurraqib recounts witnessing Black men rising in the basketball firmament, including LeBron James’ start in the Cleveland Cavaliers and his meteoric rise within and beyond their shared community.
The book is structured like a basketball game, which reveals the author’s memories wrapped in sport and time itself. As the countdown clock ticks down, Abdurraqib reminds us that “one way sports works is because of the fact that many of us do, in fact, survive on the miracles and mercies of others.”
“Chain-Gang All-Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a propulsive and heartbreaking read with a structure that blends story with interspersed facts about our criminal justice system. These facts remind the reader that for many people, the dystopia of the story is a lived reality.
While the plot about a group of gladiators attempting to earn their freedom is enthralling, it’s the characters that really shine. From sitting with them during quiet moments on the road, to feeling their skin break open during fights both on and off the gladiator stage, to embodying an audience who both love and hate the games, their emotions and trials are your emotions and trials. Readers fuse with the characters, making this an unforgettable saga.
BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color) Historical Fiction and Nonfiction
History is an excavation, and all the more so when some lives are deemed fringe or dissident. In Saidiya Hartman’s “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals,” the lives of 20th-century Black and queer people are recovered through trial transcripts, surveys, rent collection journals and prison case files.
While history tried to police, punish and bury the lives of “black women as sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists,” their stories reveal the heady intoxication of lives lived to their fullest against the odds. Vivid prose brings the tenements, bars and performance halls to life where pleasures and dangers intermingle, and freedoms are sought and found.
Hartman’s unearthed history reveals “the afterlife of slavery” and how people navigated state surveillance and police power that “acted to shape and regulate intimate life.”
One of the beauties of this category is its ability to blend genres. “Daughter of the Merciful Deep” by Lesley Penelope is a historical fantasy set during the Jim Crow era, based on real events.
The Black southern town of Awenasa is threatened by the creation of a nearby dam that will wash it away. The government is trying to force the town to leave, and the surrounding white community is all too happy to violently make this happen so they can have lakefront property. Two sisters, Grace and Jane, follow an old friend to a magical underwater land, seeking their last chance at survival.
Jane’s evolution is particularly moving — we watch her come to terms with her grief and guilt and learn how to recenter love and trust in her life.
Monsters
“It is early fall, the cold is beginning to descend, and in three months everyone in this house will be dead.” “Victorian Psycho” by Virginia Feito starts with a dark declaration and delivers on that and more.
Winifred “Fred” Notty arrives at Ensor House as a governess for the Pounds family and narrates her arrival and surveyance of her new post with wry, wicked glee. Monsters abound in this drafty house, but Fred also has a demon inside of her. Unbeknown to her semi-wealthy and blinkered employers, Winifred has entered her post with many plans indeed.
This gut-wrenching yet somehow charming book is filled with despicable premeditation and body horror relayed in prose that sparkles with wit and fire.
In “That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon,” Kimberly Lemming delivers a master class on humor and erotic romantasy, demonstrating that sometimes, monsters can be too sexy to deny!
Cinnamon is a simple spice trader living in a cozy town with absolutely no interest in adventure when she gets drunk one night, accidentally saves a demon and is cajoled into a quest. After the fright of her life, she soon comes to realize that maybe demons aren’t so bad after all.
The laugh-out-loud, contemporary dialogue and steamy scenes will have you guffawing and blushing as you race through this series opener.
Download your Book Bingo card and find all kinds of other reading suggestions at www.spl.org/BookBingo.
– Misha and Genesee