Bingo Questions Answered! Plus, Reading Update From the Empty Nest

 

 

Hello, February!

 

I wanted to update you all on my progress through my midlife crisis. Both of my children departed the nest last month and journeyed to their sub-optimal Covid-era college situations. That’s right – my nest has no tiny birds in it anymore! Most of the time, I am happy to celebrate my lack of responsibility by having potato chips and bourbon for dinner while watching movies from the 80s. Also, Midlife Crisis Bingo has helped. 

 

 

Speaking of which, I appreciate that so many of you are Bingo-curious! Many of you have contacted me in an effort to clarify the rules. Here are a few examples:

 

1)    Can I read cookbooks?

2)    Can I read children’s literature?

3)    Can I read comic books?

4)    Can I read art books?

5)    Can I read sports books?

6)    Can I read really short books?

 

My answer to all of these things is YES! Read whatever the heck you want. Everything goes. There is no such thing as the Bingo Police. 

 

But hold up, my life partner just told me that I am a liar. When he asked me if he could read one book this year and put it in every single square, I said no. “Isn’t that a rule?” he asked, smugly. I have since made a set of punitive rules specifically for him. Moreover, I am making him fill out a nightly reading log and do a plot summary of each book he reads if he wants to get an A in Bingo. 

 

For the rest of you, I want to show you how most things that I read will naturally find their way to a square, especially in these early months. Here are the books I read in January. I will show you which squares (descriptions of squares are here) they could possibly inhabit. 

 

You can print this card here

 

Eat a Peach by David Chang: This is a memoir by the creator of the Momofuku restaurant in NYC. He discusses a variety of things, including what it’s like to be an Asian American restaurant chef in a historically white arena; the role of creativity in the restaurant business; and his own struggles with mental illness. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Hero and Sidekick; Free to Be You and Me; Life Unlike Your Own; Delicious; Truth Be Told.

One Grave Too Many by Beverly Connor: I have been kvetching a bit about reading too many books with too little plot, so I decided to have a plot sundae with all the toppings. I have a soft spot for police procedurals with female forensic detectives at the helm, and I found an old series that is new to me! This is the first book in the series. The main character is a specialist in mass graves who decides to exchange that depressing career for a gentler one in a natural history museum. Murdered bodies turn up anyway. Good times! Squares where this book could work for me: Free to Be You and Me; Most Comfortable Sweatpants; Get a Clue.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu: This book won the 2020 National Book Award. Most of the narrative is in the form of a screenplay. The main character, Willis Wu, is an actor of Taiwanese descent. He is limited by the very few roles available to Asian and Asian American actors, roles that blur ethnicities into stereotypes. Underneath the story about film roles is the story about the actual roles that immigrants from Asian countries and Asian Americans fill in American society and the ways that structural racism constrains those roles. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Made It Big; Free to Be You and Me; Life Unlike Your Own; Hot Topic. 

 

The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months of Unearthing the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country by Helen Russell: This British author and her husband move for a year to a seaside house in rural Denmark and contemplate why the people they meet claim to be so happy. They encounter all sorts of unfamiliar and kooky Danish traditions. She also finds herself confronting the deep and vast state reach into its citizens' lives -- which is so supportive (education; health care; work/life balance promotion) and also constraining (taxes; rules). Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; The Great Escape; Long Trip; Free to Be You and Me; Life Unlike Your Own; I Wonder; Side Splitter.

 

Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore: This is a light, breezy version of a time travel novel. In it, the main character lives her life jumping between years, all out of order. You could go deep and ask questions about whether you’d want to change events if you already knew the outcome, or you could just let easy books stay easy. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Out of Time; Free to Be You and Me. 

 

Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie: This novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, and I first read it in 1993. So this was a second go-round for me. The story focuses on two American professors as they embark on a sabbatical in London. It’s about roles and faking and hiding and acting and obscuring and crafting an image of yourself based on expectations. Squares where this book could work for me: Long Trip; Made It Big; Free to Be You and Me; Always Meant To.

 

The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh: This was an intensely powerful memoir of a Korean American young woman whose parents left her to fend for herself at age 14. She connects her personal experience of this trauma with the long history of trauma of her female relatives in Korea. This history alternates with actual letters her mother sent her during their separation. The letters are in multiple languages, and she explains how translation became part of her sense-making of her place in her own story. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Might Sting a Little; Free to Be You and Me; Truth Be Told.

See how easy Bingo is? Don’t overthink it. Just play! Please tell us about what you’re reading and which square(s) the book might fulfill. 

 

I will end by sharing one final question from a reader: What do I get if I do this? 

 

First of all, I appreciate your mercenary approach to Bingo. I’m guessing you want a pony. Unfortunately, I can’t afford postage on a pony. But if you play along, you might get some good conversation. You might make a new friend. You’ll get some camaraderie during a time of isolation. And one lucky whole-card-finishing participant will win a book at the end of the year. It might even be a book about ponies.

It's Monday! No, Wait! It's Wednesday!

It's not really Monday.

This is a combination post. I thought I’d be writing an It’s Monday! post, but it somehow turned into Wednesday before I noticed. I also thought I’d write a review of The Forgotten Girls by Sarah Blaedel, but I’m still too furious to deal with it. So this is going to be a bookish stir-fry – a little protein, a little vegetable, and a splash of sauce.

Last week I read Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, and that slim book aroused all of my political sensibilities. Over the weekend, I thought I’d turn down the volume and read a light mystery/thriller. I chose The Forgotten Girls because it had been well-reviewed elsewhere, and I love a good missing persons storyline.

As it turns out, once my political fire is ignited, there’s no way back. I finished The Forgotten Girls on Sunday, and I’m still gnashing my teeth.

If I had written this review at the half-way point of the book, I would have said the following: this is a fun, somewhat predictable Danish police procedural. Louise is the independent, sassy detective recently assigned to lead a Missing Persons Unit. She is joined by Eik, a handsome but unreliable detective side kick. They tackle a case that involves an unidentified woman in the woods -- and of course, nothing good happens in the woods. The story grows to include a sinister old mental institution, creepy woods-dwelling people, and some connections to other murders.

So far, so good. But then! THEN! It turns out that there’s a plot line in this book that steers pretty close to asserting the idea that men are biologically wired to be violent toward women. And as much as I never turn to thrillers for feminism, I found this development so distasteful and irresponsible that I almost threw it across the room.

I thought I would go on and on about my outrage over this issue, but now that I’m in front of the computer, I don’t have anything more to say about it. We are better than that, even if we live deep in the backwoods of Denmark.

In other news, there is a teachers’ strike in Seattle, so summer continues for the youths in my house. Their presence is interfering with my back-to-school read: Purity by Jonathan Franzen! I was so excited when this arrived for me at the library last weekend. The bad news is that it is nearly 600 pages, with tiny font and few chapter breaks.

Of course, you might be ready to point out that Franzen is no stranger to sexism (though, presumably, he doesn’t live in the woods). The author of a recent Bustle magazine article writes, “Misogyny seems to follow him like a cloud; even if you don't know about his exploits, you catch a whiff of them when he passes by.”

There is an ongoing conversation about whether a reader needs to like/approve of an author in order to enjoy/purchase a book. I’ll let you know what I think as I progress through the novel.

Hope you’re having a great week, internetters! Oh, and if you’re a Danish sleuth, I have a small piece of advice: if you know that a madman is on the loose in the woods, don’t go out into the woods! Go have a delicious pastry instead.