Spencer Ruchti, Author Events Manager for Third Place Books, offers suggestions to fill your "Suggested by an Independent Bookseller" square – and more – for Book Bingo NW 2024.
Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry
Of Cattle and Men lays bare the brutal labor of the slaughterhouse trade—a bit like Cormac McCarthy with the labor consciousness of George Orwell. Zoë Perry's translation from the Portuguese is steadfast in its interpretation of agricultural life in rural Brazil, and remarkable in its ability to render the subtle surrealism of Ana Paula Maia's new breed of western. Also, this book won the inaugural Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation last year, an entirely bookseller-helmed prize for literary translation. Take this recommendation from not one bookseller, but five!
Recommended bingo squares: Suggested by an Independent Bookseller, Something That Scares You, In Translation
Septology by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls
Jon Fosse's Septology cycle is undoubtedly the most meaningful book I've read in the last five years, to such an extent that, as President of the imaginary Fosse fan club, I have a framed illustration of the recent Nobel recipient hanging above me in my office. Damion Searls is the perfect translator for Fosse's unending sentences, that repeat and circle back on themselves with mathematical beauty, creating some of the most significant literature I've read on alcoholism, faith, and artmaking. Septology could fill a hundred volumes, and I would read forever.
Recommended bingo squares: Suggested by an Independent Bookseller, One Big Book (if reading multiple installments), In Translation
The Peregrine by J.A. Baker
Make this the summer you finally read The Peregrine. A bookseller once said he stopped on page 190 of this book, so he could claim he was always reading it. I totally get the impulse to want to live in J.A. Baker's fenlands of England, completely void of people—only birds, who 'know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us.' There are books that change the way you read, and then there are books that alter the way you want to live, walk, pay attention. The Peregrine is both.
Recommended bingo squares: Suggested by an Independent Bookseller, Environmental, Sky Creatures
The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time by Hugh Raffles
You'll never read anything like this book about grief and deep time, with threads of geology, anthropology, and literature. Raffles crosses the Earth several times, and writes with encyclopaedic knowledge of this planet and its cultural and scientific mysteries in a way that's unique and full of rigorous awe. It's an uncategorizable masterpiece. But I categorize it under 'geology' because I think it should share a spot on the shelf with Marcia Bjornerud's Timefulness.
Recommended bingo squares: Suggested by an Independent Bookseller, Environmental
Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park
Holy cow. A novel clear in its ambitions, absorbed in the moment of its plot(s) in a way that is uniquely entertaining. You'll want to tell everyone about this book. An alternate history of the Korean Provision Government, a covert organization that, in Park's vision, has embedded its membership into popular culture, role-playing games, popular science fiction, slasher films. At the center of it all is a mysterious novel-within-a-novel called, yes, Same Bed, Different Dreams by a Nobel-rumored Korean author who goes by the mononym Echo. A novel that is so varied, comical, deliciously clever, and mad fun that it's hard to believe it was written by a single author.
Recommended bingo squares: Suggested by an Independent Bookseller, Fantastical, One Big Book
For more ideas for books to meet your Summer Book Bingo challenge, follow our Shelf Talk4 on social media. Book bingo is presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures.
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