Monday (March 15, 2021) I finally finished the 2019 LitHub Bingo. A little late, sure, but becoming a foster parent and adopting six kids 5 and under kind of put a damper on my reading and this giant bingo involves reading one-hundred books. So here’s what I picked for each category (including explanations of my thought process on why I picked some of them).
L1 A book from the Guardian 100 List – The Wind in the Willows
L2 Non-human Narrator – Good Night
L3 South of the Border – Esperanza Rising
L4 A book that takes place in a single day/24-hour period (or less) – Heroes of 9/11
L5 Grifters – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L6 A pun in the title or chapter headings – Four Ladies Only
L7 The Smithsonian or The Hermitage – General Houston’s Little Spy (Andrew Jackson mentored Sam Houston)
L8 Grumps, frumps, or curmudgeons – Where’s You Go, Bernadette?
L9 Banned – The Jungle
L10 K, Q, or J – Juniper
I1 Iris Murdoch or Naguib Mahfouz – Bruno’s Dream
I2 Saw the movie first – To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
I3 Incan, Mayan, or Aztec – Aztec Curse
I4 An officer, a gentleman, or a dead guy – Black Potatoes (there are lots of dead guys since it’s about the Irish potato famine… probably at least one officer and one gentleman in there, too, honestly)
I5 Book with a map – Giggleswick: The Amadan Map
I6 Knitting, Quilting, or Weaving – Ahimsa (the narrator’s mother follows Gandhi and learns to weave)
I7 North of the Border – Journey (set in Alaska, but includes a man traveling to Alaska through Canada)
I8 Biracial Main Character – Born a Crime (Trevor Noah)
I9 Queen or Goddess – The Reflections of Queen Snow White
I10 Legumes or Skyscrapers – Texas (there are a lot of Skyscrapers in Texas)
T1 Music, Musician, or Composer – Good Man, Dalton
T2 Landlocked – Sacajawea
T3 Book that will make you angry – A Stone in My Hand (Palestine vs. Israel causes so much frustration and a lot depicted in this book is very unfair and anger-inducing)
T4 Featuring a Religion Other Than Your Own – David Livingstone: Africa’s Trailblazer (I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and David Livingstone went to Africa as a Congregationalist missionary)
T5 Author with a cat – The Darkdeep (it’s harder than you might think to determine if an author has a cat)
T6 Non-fiction history book – Women Under the Knife
T7 Vampires, ghosts, werewolves, or mummies, or (sign) penguins – Trapped in Transylvania: Dracula
T8 Translated from Catalan or Portuguese – The Diary of “Helena Morley” (Helena was from Brazil)
T9 Noir Crime – Gangsterland
T10 Sub-Saharan Africa – King Leopold’s Ghost
H1 Fifteen or more different letters in the title – Auschwitz Belongs to Us All
H2 A graphic novel – Real Friends
H3 One-word title – Artemis
H4 No quotation marks allowed… or other punctuation anomalies – Drown (oh how I hate lack of quotation marks in books)
H5 Book you can read in a day – Mother Teresa
H6 Herta Miller or Roberto Bolano – The Appointment
H7 By an author who writes both children’s and adult books – Kind is the New Classy (Candace Cameron Bure)
H8 Exercise (not diet or health) – I Pledge Allegiance (war exercises; it’s about the Vietnam War)
H9 Pelagic – Refugee (two of the story lines follow children attempting to escape to new countries over the ocean)
H10 Angels or Aliens – Angel on the Square
U1 Southern Gothic – The Color Purple
U2 Involving an escape – A River in Darkness (the author escaped from North Korea)
U3 Collaboration of two or more female authors – Identical Strangers (Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein, identical twins separated a birth and adopted by two different families)
U4 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni or Orhan Pamuk – The Forest of Enchantments
U5 Ballerinas or Cacti – No Ballet Shoes in Syria
U6 From NPRs 2014 list or 2015 list – The Witch of Lime Street
U7 A book club book (for your own or someone else’s…) – Educated (we had talked about reading that for our church book club but then ended up never having book club again; I decided that counts)
U8 Post-disaster recovery story – Tainted
U9 Travelogue – Seriously Mum, What’s an Alpaca
U10 Child Narrator – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
B1 Something fun – The Phantom Tollbooth
B2 Skis or Snowmobiles – Snow Treasure
B3 Book by an autistic author – Failure to Communicate
B4 A book listed on the “A Year of Reading the World” blog – A Modern Family
B5 Set in a city within 100 miles of your own – The Devil Went Down to Austin (it’s about 80 miles from the center of San Antonio to the center of Austin depending on which way you go)
B6 Fantasy – Dragon Slippers
B7 Morocco or Greece – The Lioness of Morocco
B8 Pulp Fiction – The Da Vinci Code
B9 Scream or Creepy Things – Some Gave it All (the author came home from Vietnam with PTSD and many years later ended up in a months long flashback; there is a lot of screaming)
B10 Broken or Lost – Kings of Broken Things
21 In the Earth of In the Atmosphere – The Boys of Earth-180
22 It Smells – Bread and Roses, Too (it was 1912 in the city, a time and place not known for smelling nice)
23 Southern Hemisphere – Pink Boots & a Machete
24 For the love of animals: James Herriot or Jean Craighead George – All Creatures Great and Small
25 A “Stacia” book – Waiting for Snow in Havana (Stacia is member of the Lithub and she mentioned this book to me as one she had enjoyed after I read another book involving a child who escaped from Castro’s Cuba)
26 Arctic or Antarctic – The North Pole Challenge
27 Post-Modern – Slaughterhouse-Five
28 Involves a holiday – Murder in Christmas River
29 A character in the novel is an author – Clouds Tumble Down (the book is being written by the main character)
210 Wreck! – Wrecked
01 Bordering the Arabian Sea – Gandhi: The Man
02 Wodehouse romp – My Man Jeeves
03 Recluse – Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (the main character is a recluse until her therapist tells her she needs to meet her neighbors)
04 By or about a female Nobel prize winner – We Are Displaced (Malala Yousafzai)
05 Mythological – Odd and the Frost Giants
06 Illegitimate – Don Quixote
07 Photography – Kids at Work (some incredible pictures in that book)
08 Book that has been adapted into a “young reader” version (ex. The Martian or Three Cups of Tea) – Orphan Train
09 New book (less than three months old from your start date for the book) The Bullet Journal Method (released October 23, 2018; started reading it December 25, 2018; finished reading it January 29, 2019)
010 Manual labor or the Roaring 20s – Surviving Hitler
11 By the offspring of a famous author – Bone Music (Christopher Rice, Ann Rice’s son)
12 Epistolary novel – The Recipe Club
13 A “Kareni book” – The Goblin Emperor (Kareni is another member of the LitHub; she talks about how much she loves this book a lot)
14 Detroit, Liverpool, Beijing, or Lagos – China’s Son
15 A dusty from your stacks – The Heart of Memory (purchased April 24, 2011)
16 Dead narrator – All Quiet on the Western Front
17 A book you got from the library – Becoming
18 Word from a billboard: FREE – Breaking Free
19 A Polish or Kenyan author – Invisible Jews
110 Blimps, Balloons, or Birds – Culinary Reactions (balloons as in the way dough grows as it rises)
91 Translated from Korean, Japanese, or Vietnamese – Go
92 In the Antilles – Tropical Secrets (Cuba)
93 Your mom or dad’s favorite – Scarlett
94 Main character has something in common with you – Remembrance (nursing education)
95 Written in the 1950s – Night
96 An alternate history book – Bring the Jubilee
97 A humor book – Only Dead on the Inside
98 A cozy mystery – Pasta, Pinot & Murder
99 A book of nonviolent true crime – The Shrigley Abduction
910 A self-published book – Demon of Darkness
Mama Reader 