Summer Book Bingo: On Your Shelf
April 28, 2020
2020 Summer Book Bingo, our free summer reading program with The Seattle Public Library, is coming very soon! A few sneak peak previews of Book Bingo squares have got us reading and ready (past reveals: Uplifting and Nature). To hear about the release of the Summer Book Bingo card as soon as it comes out, follow along with our reveals on social media using the hashtag #BookBingoNW2020.
With the need for those of us not deemed ‘essential workers’ to stay at home, we’re learning to make do with what we have around the house—and that includes books. The Summer Book Bingo “On Your Shelf” square fits perfectly into the theme of making do with what you have. We asked the SAL staff what books are on their shelves . . .
Woogee Bae, Donor Relations Associate
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
Upend by Claire Meuschke.
How long has it been on your shelf?
It’s been on my shelf for a week and a few days now.
What drew you to it?
In Meuschke’s book, everything is residue, and that residue reveals violent histories, geographies, and unnamed names. She follows her grandfather Hong On’s immigration trial in 1912 during the Chinese Exclusion Act, paying careful attention to how long-ago traumas seep into our present, even in the form of paint colors and plastic products. I’m interested in writing that carries our ghosts along with us, to learn from so that we may reimagine our world. And this book seems appropriate now—but of course, always—in how the stories that are often buried can be dug-up and re-planted; re-watered and cared for differently, perhaps more tenderly.
Sarah Burns, Event & Corporate Giving Manager
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
Travels With Myself and Another: A Memoir by Martha Gellhorn.
How long has it been on your shelf?
Gellhorn was a brilliant writer, savvy traveler, and glamorous adventurer—someone I immediately idolized when I discovered her in college, when everyone else seemed to be reading her more famous and briefly-married-to husband, Hemingway.
What drew you to it?
I like having her nearby on my bookshelf as a kind of mentor and friend. Highly recommended to be immediately transported back in time to Cuba, East Africa, Russia, and China.
Letitia Cain, Marketing Coordinator
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits.
How long has it been on your shelf?
This book was originally recommended to me by Rebecca Hoogs more than a few years ago, and it’s been sitting on my shelf. I’d been meaning to read it for too long but just hadn’t gotten around to it.
What drew you to it?
What attracted me to this book is that it is in the form of a diary. Each chapter opens with the usual diary entry, “Today I …,” but what unfolds is an anecdote about a decision not to respond to an email that turns into a philosophical exploration of the nature of friendship, or a mediation on time, or a musing on ghosts, rendered in a way where the mundane becomes transformed and compelling. And the dates? July 14 rubs up next to October 30, then June 27—the order seems random, even though the book opens with, “This book is an accounting of my two years of my life.” The writing is funny and honest, a real pleasure to read, especially now when time and dates feel so irrelevant.
Amanda Carrubba, Finance & Operations Director
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
How long has it been on your shelf?
It has been on my shelf so long that the cover is very tattered, and the pages are definitely not their original color anymore.
What drew you to it?
My personal favorite of her books. I recommend it all the time anyway!
Alicia Craven, Director of Education
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories by Yukiko Motoya, translated by Asa Yoneda.
How long has it been on your shelf?
A couple of weeks—I ordered it from Powells, and have been trying to read slowly, waiting for my friend in Chicago to get her copy so we can do a book club together!
What drew you to it?
I have read some, but not all of the stories, and I can’t wait to read the rest. They are so tonally strange and beautiful—there are hints of surrealism, dark humor, and deep interiority that make all your neurons buzz with excitement of both surprise and recognition.
Piper Daugharty, WITS Program Associate
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
Subduction by Kristen Millares Young.
How long has it been on your shelf?
Three days before I started reading it! 🙂 It came out April 14th, and I anxiously awaited its arrival for about a week. Normally my books sit on my shelf for months (or even years!) before I finally crack them open, but this one was so highly anticipated. I’m already halfway through it, now.
What drew you to it?
Kristen is a debut author and also the Hugo House Prose Writer-in-Residence, so she’s been mentoring me as a Hugo House fellow this past year. She’s an amazing human: both brilliant and endlessly generous, and so dedicated to the literary community in a range of ways. I’ve heard her talk about her process of writing this, which has been immensely helpful for my own novel and writing process, and she always talks about how much she cut from her early drafts. I can feel the haunted-ness of the book as I read it—there’s so much underneath that feels palpable, tense, and embedded in the past.
Because it is also a book of encounter and of indigenous-settler conflict, the taut memories of the characters’ pasts will always be trying to fight their way into the present, but of course, they also affect the future. I’m stunned at this lyrical debut, at the subtlety that weaves so many complex issues of land ownership, histories, settler-colonialism, gender dynamics, and questions of research ethics into one riveting, deeply felt, submerged story. So far, Subduction feels like a conjuring, not just a novel, and I haven’t been able to put it down!
Ruth Dickey, Executive Director
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder by Brian Doyle.
How long has it been on your shelf?
A few months I think, given to me by a kind friend and then recommended by another just this morning, which reminded me to pull it off my pile.
What drew you to it?
I am deeply attracted to the idea of wonder, especially in challenging moments.
Bre’Anna Girdy, WITS Program Coordinator
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
Neuromancer by William Gibson.
How long has it been on your shelf?
This book has been on my shelf, I want to say, a little over two months.
What drew you to it?
This book helped legitimize one of my favorite genres: cyberpunk. The fact that I haven’t read it yet is just tragic, and definitely a disservice to my own creativity, I’m sure. Granted, I’ve always known of the book, I just wasn’t urged into action until I read a piece in The New Yorker in which William Gibson was interviewed. I’m really inspired by cordial and humble creators, and Gibson is the epitome of that. He’s so funny and quirky and strange (strange in the best possible way, of course). I knew I had to at least have this book in my presence.
Christina Gould, Patron Services Manager
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers.
How long has it been on your shelf?
It’s on my shelf—unread. An added perk of working at SAL is that publishers send us books. After Rebecca, our Associate-Director-slash-Season-Curator, combs through them, it’s the staff’s turn. I greedily snatched up The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers about two years ago.
What drew you to it?
I am familiar with the author’s work. This is his third nonfiction work about an immigrant in America that finds himself in the jaws of history. The first paragraph on the back of the book hooked me: “The Monk of Mokha is the true story of a young Yemeni American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in San’a by civil war.” It has all the elements that I love: learning about another culture’s history and customs, their struggles and upheavals, and the draw of the homeland to the those that are born elsewhere. When I saw this square on the Summer Book Bingo card, I knew actually which book I would finally read. Can’t wait!
Rebecca Hoogs, Associate Director
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life by David Foster Wallace.
How long has it been on your shelf?
A year or two?
What drew you to it?
This is a very short book—really a lecture, an essay—that my colleague, Alicia Craven, recommended to me and which I recently picked up off the shelf and read in a single sitting. Reading in the pandemic era has been challenging for me, but this was just right—almost poem-like in both its brevity and significance. For example, this quote resonates in a way it would not have pre-pandemic: “It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.”
Leanne Skooglund, Development Director
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.
How long has it been on your shelf?
I’ve had this book on my shelf for about twelve years. I love this novel and have recommended it to many people. It’s disappeared a few times and shown up again, either because someone remembered to return it, or I found another used copy.
What drew you to it?
Krauss weaves an irresistible, complex tale of lives bound together over time by a book called the History of Love and the unlikely connection between 15-year-old Alma, who is grieving the loss of her father, and 80-year-old Leo, who is waiting to die. I’ve never forgotten this book.
Alison Stagner, Communications Manager
What’s your “On Your Shelf” read?
The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
How long has it been on your shelf?
This book has been on my shelf for a year-and-a-half.
What drew you to it?
When Doris Kearns Goodwin came to SAL in October 2018, everyone lost their minds. Tickets sold out, and we had fans who were desperate to meet her calling to ask us if they could be her chauffeur for the evening. (The answer, if you’re wondering, is no.) It was the kind of celebrity and admiration you might expect from an Oscar-winner, or one of the cuter members of the royal family—not a presidential biographer. I knew I had to read her then. I devoured her Leadership in Turbulent Times, which was excellent, and considered myself extremely lucky when I happened upon a copy of The Bully Pulpit in a Little Free Library down the street. The book is supposed to be an incredible study of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft’s “intense friendship.” But, at 867 pages, only 117 of which are footnotes, I’ll admit: I’m still a little scared.