Bingo Bango Books

In celebration of completing 5 cycles of book picking, by the 5 members of the Bingo Bango Book Club, I wanted to just do a speed run of reviewing, rating and reminiscing about what we've read, what we've liked and where we've met.
This is more of a post of posterity than a post for useful content updates about my life, but such is the nature of just trying to write ONCE per month. Sometimes you simply don't have anything to report.
I was so hard up for ideas to write about recently that I almost went to Claude and told it to give me a writing prompt.
Am I trying to write the great American novel?
No, that book exists, it's called Crota, (JK more on that later) and literary fiction doesn't seem like it's going to be my thing, in as much as I'd have a thing. I simply can't imagine sticking with something for 250+ pages.
And as I routinely find, a novel novel concept often falls apart at the end.
Alas, that's my take on reading.

Let's look at the books.

Rotation One (21/22)

The Vanishing Half — Brit Bennett (Literary Fiction) Twin sisters, same starting point, completely different lives — one passes as white and never looks back. Will their life stories ever overlap after they split? Yes. Yes they will.

The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka (Absurdism) Gregor Samsa wakes up as a bug and the family that depended on him slowly stops pretending to care.

Use of Weapons — Iain M. Banks (Sci-Fi) Two timelines, one moving forward, one backward, closing in on a secret that reframes everything you just read. Sort of discombobulating if you don't have any idea what's happening in the Culture.

Kindred — Octavia Butler (Afrofuturism) Butler sends a Black woman from 1970s California back to a slave plantation, repeatedly, against her will to grapple with lineage, trauma, and consequences.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union — Michael Chabon (Alt-History Noir) Hardboiled detective fiction set in a Jewish Alaska that never actually existed. Great use of the word MAVEN.

At the end of the first cycle, my favorite of the reads was The Vanishing Half. I arguably liked Yiddish Policemen's Union more, but it was my pick, so it seems gauche to just immediately default to my book. I did not like Use of Weapons. If you like Bone Chairs, then you may like Use of Weapons. Kindred was engrossing in the way watching torture might be interesting. It was just page after page of trauma. We were in the middle of George Floyd and Covid, so the escapism I like in my literature was not felt in reading a book about pain and really bad shit.

Rotation Two (22/23)

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin (Literary Fiction) Two friends build a video game empire together and spend about 300 pages not saying what they actually mean to each other. And then there's one more person in this triange but they really give that one short shrift and that bothers me.

Crota — Owl Goingback (Horror) Something old and hungry gets woken up in the Missouri woods and a small town pays for it. — Golf outing

The Memory Police — Yoko Ogawa (Dystopian Literary Fiction) Things disappear from the island — roses, birds, photographs — and most people simply forget they ever existed. It's an extended metaphor and something to ponder on our march towards authoritarianism. — Modist Brewing

The Last Unicorn — Peter S. Beagle (Fantasy) Ostensibly a quest to find other unicorns. Actually a book about loss and what you give up when you become something you're not. Very sad.

Five Decembers — James Kestrel (Historical Crime Noir) A murder case pulls a Honolulu detective into the opening days of World War II and doesn't let him go for years. Continent hopping epic as we try to find out what happened. — Psycho Suzi's

This was when we started adding in the idea of "what if we met somewhere that is tangentially associated with the book." I don't recall everywhere we've met (very Memory Police of me) but I'll do my best to note it if i can. I hated T3. I found it twee. And I think cribbing the title from Shakespeare gave it a gravitas that the book did not earn. The only character that wasn't a piece of shit gets killed in a one off POV chapter and I mostly hate read it. Crota also features one great POV chapter from the creature which the whole book should have been. Again, I think author's have great ideas that are watered down by editors. Crota coulda been great. Instead it was very funny. It's horror, but it's mostly comedy. Read it for the lols. Memory Police and Last Unicorn were both sad. 5D rips. I picked 5D. More people should read 5 Decembers. Way better than Across Five Aprils but similarly titled, re war. Vanishing Half is probably still my favorite book we've read so far.

Rotation Three (23/24)

Interior Chinatown — Charles Yu (Satire) Written as a screenplay, which sounds like a gimmick until you realize the form is the whole argument. Yu's background actor knows exactly what role the world has cast him in and can't figure out how to audition for anything else.

The Troop — Nick Cutter (Horror) A stranger shows up on a remote island looking like something that forgot how to be human, and it goes very badly from there. Tough break for the camping troop who happens to be there at the same time. Like Lord of the Flies, but with worms.

The Mountain in the Sea — Ray Nayler (Sci-Fi) Octopuses might be conscious and nobody knows what to do with that. Also artificial intelligence, secretive global corporations that take people captive. — Jasmine 26

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao — Junot Díaz (Magical Realism) Oscar wants to be Tolkien and find love and escape a curse that's been following his family since the Trujillo era. It won some awards. Obama loved it. — Pryes Brewery

The Socrates Express — Eric Weiner (Non-fiction) Weiner rides trains and waxes poetic about philosophers trying to figure out if any of them actually had useful things to say about how to live, enjoy life, or approach situations. — Spitz

A contentious collection of books with our first foray into non fiction, a heated discussion about the history of the Dominican Republic, Interior Chinatown's very unique premise and writing style, and a book about Octopuses. Troop was Crota-coded, another horror. Socrates Express night ended with me getting in a fight with an uber driver and him tanking my rating after I slammed his door and walked home in the rain. Vanishing Half still favorite read.

Rotation Four (24/25)

Demon Copperhead — Barbara Kingsolver (Literary Fiction) What if David Copperfield took place in opioid-era Appalachia— a foster kid named Demon narrates his own destruction and I hated it. We apparently give credit for taking other people's ideas, adding drug addiction to it, and then setting it in a novel place. — Northbound Smokehouse

Joyland — Stephen King (Mystery) A college kid works a small-town carnival in the 70s, gets tangled in an old murder, and mostly just tries to outrun the feeling that something is ending. Spooky, supernatural. — Mall of America

Mercy of the Gods — James S. A. Corey (Sci Fi) Corporate satire meets alien occupation — a research team fighting for survival inside a bureaucracy that barely registers their existence. Are you interested in lab politics on earth? No, me neither. You'll hate lab politics in space. — Young Joni

Hard Rain Falling — Don Carpenter (Literary Fiction, Noir) Postwar America through the eyes of someone it was never going to be kind to. Pool halls, prison, bad luck, worse choices — a dreary commentary on life in the pacific northwest. — Jim's Pool Hall

Death and the Penguin — Andrey Kurkov (Dark Comedy) Kyiv, a failing writer, a clinically depressed penguin named Misha, and obituaries for people who haven't died yet. What could go wrong? — Moscow on the Hill

It cannot be understated how much I hated Demon Copperhead. Hard Rain Falling was a book I am forever going to associate with Train Dreams though they are not alike at all. Mercy of the Gods, I also hated, similar to Use of Weapons. Death and the Penguin was one of our works in translation. After four looks at this thing, I really like my own taste, and sort of trudge my way through everyone else's. Death and The Penguin supplants Vanishing Half as my favorite read. Also famous for the night that I broke my wrist.

Rotation Five (25/26)

Razor Girl — Carl Hiaasen (Crime Comedy / Satire) Only in Florida… a whole book premised on "Florida, isn't it funny?" Smack Shack

Ubik — Philip K. Dick (Science Fiction) No idea what this is about. THIS IS THE ONLY BOOK I DIDNT READ. LITT Pinball

In the Lake of the Woods — Tim O'Brien (Literary Fiction / Mystery) A politician's wife vanishes from a Minnesota lake cabin after a massacre in Vietnam derails his career. We spend the rest of the book sort of trying to figure out what happened and also, just reading theories about what could have happened. Fowling

The Kiss Quotient — Helen Hoang (Romance) An autistic econometrician hires a male escort to help her get better at dating and then predictably falls for him. Quang

The Good Lord Bird — James McBride (Historical Fiction) A young enslaved boy gets swept up with John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and narrates the whole thing from Iowa to out east. Butcher and the Boar

Five series of books. Five types of readers.
I'd say Jim is our 'into themes about identity' and 'most likely to be invited to other book clubs' award winner.
Chris is our Horror guy. Literary horror, creature horror. Something bad is usually happening.
Matt — Sci fi coded, with a hint of 'but what is really going on?'
Alex — The lover of the group? Are all these books romance novels in some sense.
Sam — Group historian but make it a hint weird.

Death and the Penguin is the ceiling.
Demon Copperhead is the floor.