2019 Resolution: Book Bingo Blackout

I'm never sure whether this challenge is called Book Blackout Bingo or Book Bingo Blackout. Both sound fine to me. I've got another year to get it straight, since I liked this challenge so much I'll be returning for 2020 Book...well, you know.

Although I enjoyed this challenge, I was not completely successful. No blackout for me!  I attribute this to my own poor planning.

Let's unpack this board and see what happened in Bybee Book Bingo:

EDGAR AWARD FIRST NOVEL: Did not complete this category. All year, it skulked up there in the top left corner, accusing me. I'm sorry, Edgar Award!

HEROINE: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. Both sisters were heroines.

PALATE CLEANSER: Best American Food Writing, 2018. I'd just read a self-help book and a weird Jim Thompson novel, so this was a palate cleanser in all senses of the phrase. Favorite essay was about a food writer who visits Pawhuska, Oklahoma to see Ree Drummond's (The Pioneer Woman) empire....or tourist trap, depending on your viewpoint.

GENRE BENDING: The Government Lake by James Tate. This is a book of poetry, but it reads like surreal flash-fiction.

GEN X AUTHOR: Gail Honeyman, author of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine gets the nod here. She was born in 1970.

ODD COUPLE: Buttermilk Graffiti by Edward Lee. The blurb on the back of this delectable trip across the USA says it best: "American food is a story of mash-ups. Immigrants arrive, cultures collide, and out of the push and pull come exciting new dishes and flavors." Lee tells their stories with delicacy and gusto, as only a chef could.

CLASSIC I'VE NEVER READ: Did not complete. Late in the year, I grabbed a copy of Black Beauty, but didn't care for it enough to finish. I also bailed on Frankenstein and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I took several swings at this category but whiffed. No joy in Mudville.

PUSHING BOUNDARIES: Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie & Clyde.

EXPLORE: The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag. The titular character is always out looking for treasures around Pompeii.

PLACE NAME: If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin.

LIFE HACK: Nomadland by Jessica Bruder. Finances got you down? Give up paying rent and take to the road in a camper.

UNBELIEVABLE: Maurice in A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne. This guy, like Tom Ripley, gets away with the most heinous acts. My jaw was dropped on practically every page.

GREEN: What Is... The Story of Frankenstein? A nonfiction book for young readers that explains the history behind Mary Shelley's creation, The picture on the cover shows the Boris Karloff incarnation, And yeah. He's green.

FIRE: The Library Book by Susan Orlean. The 1986 fire features prominently in Orlean's look at the history of the Los Angeles Public Library.

BIRTH: Celia has a baby in Middlemarch.

ROMANTIC: Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin.

LANGUAGE: The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See. Many Korean words and phrases.

LGBTQ: Elevation by Stephen King. A lesbian couple are featured in the storyline.

SOUTH PACIFIC: Did not complete this category. Poor planning on my part.

NOVELTY BOOK: Spam: A Biography.

FOLKTALE: Did not complete this category. Starting to feel sad.

MAP: The Pioneers by David McCullough. The endpapers are a map of Ohio Territory.

DEEP DIVE: I read six books by or about Susan Sontag.

UNRULY WOMAN: Love and Ruin by Paula McLain. Ernest Hemingway's third wife, Martha Gellhorn, was also a writer and a war correspondent. Of course, after she was Papa's woman, she was supposed to stay home and let him have the adventures. She basically told him to stick it in his ear!

LOST AND FOUND: My Kitchen Year by Ruth Reichl. Reichl was editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, which folded. Through cooking and time with friends and family, she seeks to find the next phase in her career.

Book Blackout Bingo: Deep Diving With Susan Sontag

July's reading found me taking a deep dive into Susan Sontag's work. It's not a bad way to spend time. This all began when I read an article saying that a new in-depth biography of Sontag would be coming out in September.

It really began 30 years ago, the first time I saw Bull Durham. In the movie, Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) goes on a long rant to Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) about things he believes in (high fiber, good scotch, Oswald acted alone, Astroturf and the designated hitter should be outlawed, long slow wet kisses that last three days) and in this lengthy list, he spewed out that he thought the novels of Susan Sontag were self-indulgent overrated crap.  The next time Crash and Annie meet up, she retorts that she likes Sontag's novels. Well, of course the screenwriter threw Sontag into that long list for comedic effect and to show the depth and breadth of Crash's erudition.

 Did Sontag ever see Bull Durham? Of course she did. In her diaries, she talks about seeing 3-4 films a day. This was before the advent of the VCR. Of course, she lived in NYC, but racing from movie house to movie house indicates a real devotion to cinema. Also: I'm no Sontag, but if some character says my name is some movie, disparagingly or not, I'm there. Plopped right down in the center of the front row.

So yeah, Bull Durham left me wondering about Susan Sontag. A tiny bit of research into her bibliography was enough to scare me off.  But I continued to hear her siren song. I bought a paperback copy of In America, Sontag's last novel, and it sat unread on my bookshelf for years. I was too intimidated.

In the meantime, I read an anecdote about Susan Sontag in Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Sontag came to Archer City to visit McMurtry. Upon seeing his massive but haphazardly organized home library, she vowed that she couldn't go to sleep until she'd gotten it into some kind of order. My intimidation started to melt away. How could you be afraid of someone like that? Perfectly understandable impulse. Susan was me and I was Susan and it wasn't just the first name, either.

Flash-forward to last year, which I guess would technically be a flashback: I was in Dollar Tree (never underestimate their book section; they've got some quirky treasures there) and I saw Reborn, which is volume one of Sontag's diaries and journals which were posthumously edited (lovingly, meticulously) by her son, David Rieff. After paying my dollar, Reborn sat on my shelf until last month, then I just fell into it, utterly entranced. After that, I had to have the second volume, When Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh. (That title doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?)

When I had polished off Vol. 2, I discovered that Vol. 3 is still...in the works???  I was ready to move on to the novels. A search of my local libraries turned up one: The Volcano Lover. It's a historical novel about Sir William Hamilton, Lady Emma Hamilton and Admiral Horatio Nelson, one of the most famous love triangles in history. But it's more than that. Told primarily from Sir William's point of view, it's a meditation on collecting, possession, theft and loss. Cerebral and compelling. It's good in the way Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall novels are satisfying.

I paused in reading to watch a YouTube video of Sontag being interviewed at about the time In America came out. I didn't get very far. Sontag was breathtaking, but the guy interviewing her (Charlie Rose, I think) was a complete and utter horse's ass. Apologies to the horse. It is to Sontag's credit that she treated him with the utmost courtesy instead of decimating him with first her gaze and then her intellect, which is what he richly deserved.

My deep dive is spilling over into August as I'm happily reading In America. Next up is a memoir of Sontag by David Rieff,  Swimming in a Death Sea, and after that is an audiobook of her essays, On Photography.