The fall chill is creeping in but summer is technically not over YET, which means it is within my rights to continue playing the Queens Public Library summer book bingo. It’s my first time taking part in a reading club/game/etc. since aging out of the Nesconset Library summer reading program! Very exciting! Reading challenges usually elicit in me a knee-jerk negative response, probably because I lump them in with not only BuzzFeed but also the broad TikTok– or Goodreads–ification of books: the transforming of reading into a checklist. This association isn’t totally fair. Why not take advantage of a chance to get out of your literary comfort zone?
When I was little, I would choose my next read by sitting in front of my bookshelf and “inka binka”-ing (iykyk) across the spines until I had five selections, and then repeating the same among those five. I won’t lie: I’ve considered returning to it! It was exciting! This is of the same flavor. I don’t do well with freedom, and now that I’m no longer limited to new releases and books about suicide I’m overwhelmed by choice. I found the sheet while getting the kids’ packet for Theo and I thought, huh, fun—though I did forget the bingo of it all and lived with a self-imposed pressure to check off every box for the entire summer. I failed on that goal, but after much maneuvering: bingo.
Here's the breakdown.
Already Recommended
- One-word title: Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa
- Set in a different country: Loved One by Aisha Muharrar
- Set in the summer: The Castaways by Elin Hilderbrand
- Nonfiction: A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst
- Mystery: The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward
Read but not quite recommending (sorry to this man)
- Sci-fi: Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel. Yes I read it in two sittings; yes I immediately borrowed the next two books; yes I finished the entire trilogy in less than a week, but it was more suspenseful than good. You know? Or, well, the first was good, but the fact that the following books got increasingly worse—and less subtle in its utopian message—kind of retroactively weakened the first. YMMV. I’d watch the hell out of a limited series adaptation though! Buy it in print/digital or audio.
Recommending big time
- Award-winning: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
I’ve had this on my list since playing the indie game Pentiment last year, which I learned after finishing was based on this 580-page, 45-year-old novel about warring brotherhoods during 14th century politically unstable Italy. More specifically, it follows Brother William, an inquisitor-turned-pragmatist who’s arrived at a Franciscan abbey to mediate negotiations between the state and church but ends up being asked to solve a series of brutal murders within the abbey. It’s presented as a found manuscript [fave trope] from William’s young and wide-eyed apprentice, Adso, and—give or take a few sections of exhaustive abbey descriptions which I just.. skipped—it’s compelling, thrilling, dark, and relevant in its focus on religious extremism infiltrating politics, science, and social mores. There are many books I’ve read after watching the film/TV adaptation, but reading after playing a game adaptation added an entirely new interactive element: I’d follow the duo trying to figure out how to get into a secret passage and remember doing the same. Super cool experience.
There’s so much to say in praise of this book, but I’ll drop a short excerpt instead, in which the naive Adso is trying to make moral sense of one monk’s murder, desperate to preserve his entire belief system. William begins:“Don’t ask too many questions. The abbot told me at the beginning that the library was not to be touched. […] It could be that he is involved in some matter he thought unrelated to Adelmo’s death, and now he realizes the scandal is spreading and could also touch him. And he doesn’t want the truth to be discovered, or at least he doesn’t want me to be the one who discovers it…”
Whew! If you’re more into ideas than plot, and have a lot of patience for loooong sections of debate, this is for you. Buy it in print/digital or audio.
“Then we are living in a place abandoned by God,” I said, disheartened.
“Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?” - Blue cover: Information Age by Cora Lewis. One thing I’m going to do every single time is buy a fellow former BuzzFeeder’s book the second I see it. Cora and I didn’t really interact much, but I’ve always admired her work, even more so after reading her debut novel. It’s told in vignettes and short bits of dialogue, each in service of not only progressing the story—which follows a late-2010s internet journalist grappling with the job’s shifting ideals alongside her peers in the NYC media social sphere— but also deepening it. Very less is more, and a perfect snapshot of a brief, now sort of surreal, moment in history: that between the emerging disillusionment within an industry once full of contagious hope, and that industry’s fall. Buy it in print.
- Audiobook: These Memories Do Not Belong to Us by Yiming Ma. Yiming Ma’s astounding debut is a dreamworld. It’s the aftermath of a devastating global war and an authoritarian Chinese party runs the world. “Memory capitalism” reigns: Citizens carry intracranial chips that record every memory, allow brain-to-brain communication, and make privacy obsolete; entire lives and experiences can be bought and sold. An unnamed narrator offers a sort of prologue about his recently deceased mother—an impassioned and fearless insurgent—and his inheritance of a collection memories that were deemed enough of a risk to the ruling party to be banned. What follows are these captivating, diverse accounts of the trail to widespread loss of power and freedom, spanning centuries and geography. It’s horrifying in that the premise is uncomfortably plausible, but also hopeful in its steadfast belief in the perseverance of the human spirit. I started listening (can’t emphasize enough how much this book was made for audio) while at the gym and I ended up on the stairs much longer than I intended. An unprecedented feat! Buy it in print/digital or audio.
- Graphic Novel: The Lie and How We Told It by Tommi Parrish. When I grabbed The Lie at Seattle’s Phoenix Books & Comics and walked it over to the counter, an off-shift employee (testament to the shop’s vibe that they were there!) stopped to tell me how happy they were that I was buying it, that it was one of the best books they’d ever read and were sad any time someone passed over it. Very understandable take now that I’ve read it! The Lie begins with two old friends running into each other and deciding to grab dinner and drinks. They were each others’ “whole world” in high school but it’s been years since they last hung out, and though they are ostensibly reminiscing and catching up on relationships, work, even entire identity shifts, the evening mostly evokes disappointment—in each other, in themselves, and in the fact that whatever they had expected of the night was never going to happen. So much has changed and so much has stayed the same. It’s impossible to pin down the titular lie; depending on your reading of both the dialogue and art, you could deduce dozens. Maybe all of it, what’s said and unsaid, can be distilled into one basic lie, but good luck defining it. A found comic breaks up the main story [a different take on my fave trope!] and works as a foil in its thorough excavation of its narrators emotions. You can read The Lie in less than an hour, but going through it once isn’t enough—gotta go back to see what you missed. Buy it in print.
- Translated into English: Vengeance Is Mine by Marie NDiaye. I’ve been a Marie NDiaye stan since the absurd That Time of Year came out in 2020. Her latest English release follows Susane, a single middle-aged lawyer in Bordeaux whose anxiety and complicated moral code often makes her feel like an outsider. She’s tortured by shame over having hired a housekeeper—which she did to help the Mauritian mother and wife stay in the country—and when a wealthy man at the center of a high-profile case against his wife arrives at her office, she can’t fathom why he’s chosen her for representation. She’s also unnerved by the needling sense that she and the man have a shared past she can only vaguely recall. As often happens with NDiaye protagonists, Susane’s narration becomes increasingly unhinged and unreliable. Reality is hard to parse. When she begins to suspect her housekeeper of keeping a secret, the tempting possibility of conspiracy rears its head. Is any of this connected? Can Susane trust her memories—her mind? Outstanding psychological thriller but if you want a neat conclusion you will be disappointed. Buy it in print/digital or audio.
Short and sweet miscellaneous recs, since this already feels like it’s a thousand years long:
Watching: Pokemon Concierge on Netflix. Very soothing, very cozy, surprisingly moving. Stunning stop motion. (AI COULD NEVER!!) Psyduck brought me real lols. I wish I could stay at the Pokemon Resort :(
Playing: Silksong. This got me out of my platformer rut. Love to be a li’l spider wielding a sewing needle, trying to figure out what brought me to this vaguely Catholic underground world. Beautiful art!!!!! Beautiful music!!!!! Very hard!!!
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