My best of Summer Book Bingo

As the United States today continues its depressing descent into political violence and fascism, perhaps it's time to review some of the best books I read this summer.

Each year, I play Seattle Public Library's Summer Book Bingo, trying to fill in spaces in all sorts of cool categories, which this year included Intergenerational Friendship, Monsters, and Gender Bender. This year, for the first time I got a full blackout, reading 24 books between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Yay! 📚

There were a fair number of books by Cascadia writers.

So Far Gone, is the latest novel from Spokane-based writer Jess Walter. Walter is such a great storyteller – there's nothing flashy about this well-crafted tale of a cynical former journalist who goes off grid after becoming frustrated with the clown show the US has become. He returns to city life to help out his estranged daughter and her kids deal with a son-in-law who's become involved in a radical right-wing church.

Homewaters, by Seattle-based writer David Williams, is a great natural and human history of Puget Sound. It's chock full of fascinating stories about the southern end of the Salish Sea. I did not know, for instance that geoducks, those ginormous phallic clams, make up the largest biomass in Puget Sound: it's estimated there are over 400 million of them sipping away on the seafloor.

Love and Saffron is a delightful novella by Kim Fay, who once worked for Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company and now lives in Los Angeles. Told in letters between two friends, it's the tale of two strong women who love writing, books, and food and make their way through the events of the 50s and 60s and build a lasting friendship at a distance.

Dean Spade is an activist and professor at Seattle University, and his book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) is a fantastic playbook for people wanting to make change in their communities. In addition to offering advice on how to help vulnerable people through non-hierarchical groups, Spade offers guidance on how to maintain a healthy personal balance between activism and self-care. Highly recommended – and you can read it for free at the Anarchist Library!

Other books I really loved that weren't from Cascadia included Edmund White's classic autobiographical novel about a gay coming of age in the 1950s, A Boy's Own Story; Angela Carter's demented, erudite, supremely kinky fairy tales found in The Bloody Chamber; Helen McDonald's H is for Hawk, a brilliant memoir about grief and training a stubborn goshawk; and Always Coming Home (which, I'll admit I'm still finishing) Ursula K. LeGuin's stunning account of the imagined culture, history, and art of a wisdom-based, post-apocalyptic society in Napa Valley centuries into the future.

What did you enjoy reading this summer? If you're a paid subscriber, you can comment below...