|
|
Under 200 Pages Reading Challenge 2025 Winter Bingo |
|
|
|
|
|
The invisible man
by H. G. Wells
A scientist who has discovered a way to make himself invisible unleashes his growing madness and frustrations by terrorizing a small town
|
|
|
|
|
Dept. of speculation
by Jenny Offill
An unflinching portrait of marriage features a heroine simply referred to as "the Wife," who transitions from an idealistic woman who once exchanged love letters with her husband and who confronts an array of universal difficulties
|
|
|
|
The vegetarian
by Kang Han
Deciding to go vegetarian in the wake of violent thoughts, Yeong-hye, a woman from an Asian culture of strict societal mores, is denounced as a subversive as she spirals into extreme rebelliousness that causes her to splinter from her true nature and risk her life.
|
|
|
|
Train dreams
by Denis Johnson
The National Book Award-winning author of Tree of Smoke presents the story of early 20th-century day laborer Robert Grainer, who endures the harrowing loss of his family while struggling for survival against a backdrop of radical historical changes. 40,000 first printing.
|
|
|
|
In the cut
by Susanna Moore
Frannie, an attractive, sexually adventurous woman from New York, begins a harrowing journey when she encounters a mysterious man having sex with a woman in the basement of a bar, a meeting that draws her into a dangerous sexual liaison and into the middle of a series of brutal murders. Reprint.
|
|
|
|
What belongs to you
by Garth Greenwell
Drawn by hunger, loneliness, and risk, an American teacher embarks on a sexual relationship with a young hustler and discovers that desire has far-reaching consequences when he is forced to grapple with his own fraught history and that of the lover with whom he is obsessed
|
|
|
|
Fever dream
by Samanta Schweblin
A first English translation by an award-winning Spanish author follows the nightmarish experiences of a dying woman and a boy beside her hospital bed, who explore the dynamics of broken souls, toxic relationships and the power and desperation of family.
|
|
|
|
Margaret the first
by Danielle Dutton
Dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted and wildly unconventional 17th-century Duchess whose husband encouraged her writing and desire for a career, which earned her fame and infamy in England. Original. 10,000 first printing.
|
|
|
|
Point Omega
by Don DeLillo
Jim Finley, a young filmmaker, attempts to convince Richard Elster, a former secret war advisor, to tell his story on film, an endeavor complicated by the arrival of Richard's daughter, Jessie, from New York and a devastating event that throws everything into question. By the National Book Award-winning author of White Noise. Reprint.
|
|
|
|
The sense of an ending
by Julian Barnes
Follows a middle-aged man as he reflects on a past he thought was behind him, until he is presented with a legacy that forces him to reconsider different decisions, and to revise his place in the world
|
|
|
|
The lover
by Marguerite Duras
The story of an affair between a fifteen-year-old French girl and her Chinese lover, set in prewar Indochina
|
|
|
|
Signs preceding the end of the world
by Yuri Herrera
"Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially whenthere's no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the US carrying a pair of secret messages--one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld"--Publisher's description
|
|
|
|
Mrs. Caliban
by Rachel Ingalls
A bored, lonely married woman, Dorothy Caliban, encounters Larry, a gigantic frog-like creature recently escaped from a sadistic laboratory, and they become intimate friends, in a tale of sex, horror, fantasy, and violence
|
|
|
|
On earth we're briefly gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong
A first novel by the award-winning author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds is written in the form of a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read about the impact of the Vietnam war on their family.
|
|
|
|
Convenience store woman
by Sayaka Murata
"Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech patterns so that she can play the part of a normal person. However, eighteen years later, at age 36, she is still in the same job, has never had a boyfriend, and has only few friends. She feels comfortable in her life, but is aware that she is not living up to society's expectations and causing her family to worry about her"
|
|
|
|
The days of abandonment
by Elena Ferrante
Once an aspiring writer, Olga traded literary ambition for marriage and motherhood; when Mario dumps her after 15 years, she is utterly unprepared. Though she tells herself that she is a competent woman, nothing like the poverella (poor abandoned wife) that mothers whispered about in her childhood, Olga falls completely apart. Routine chores overwhelm her; she neglects her appearance and forgets her manners; she throws herself at the older musician downstairs; she sees the poverella's ghost. After monthsof self-pity, anger, doubt, fury, desperation and near madness, her acknowledgments of weaknesses in the marriage feel as earned as they are unsurprising
|
|
|
|
Sula
by Toni Morrison
The intense friendship shared by Nel Wright and Sula Peace, two African-American women raised in an Ohio town, changes forever when one of them leaves home to roam the countryside and returns ten years later. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.
|
|
|
|
The Buddha in the attic
by Julie Otsuka
Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment
|
|
|
|
Faces in the crowd
by Valeria Luiselli
Multiple narrators' voices overlap as they tell their stories, including a young mother in contemporary Mexico City, a translator wandering Harlem, and a man dreaming of New York in 1950s Philadelphia
|
|
|
|
Mapping the interior
by Stephen Graham Jones
Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew. The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you'd rather not have. Over the course of a few nights,the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them ... at terrible cost
|
|
|
|
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital
by Lorrie Moore
Realizing during a trip to Paris that she no longer loves her husband, Berie Carr remembers her childhood in upstate New York, where she shared a deep friendship with a captivating older girl named Sils. Reprint.
|
|
|
|
Old school
by Tobias Wolff
During his senior year at an elite New England prep school, a young man who had struggled to find it with his contemporaries finds his life unraveling thanks to the school's obsession with literary figures and their work during a visit from an author for whose blessing a young writer would do almost anything. By the author of This Boy's Life. A first novel. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.
|
|
|
|
The bookshop
by Penelope Fitzgerald
Follows a kindhearted English widow's struggle to open a bookshop in a seaside town against the polite, but uncompromising opposition of the town's arbiters of culture
|
|
|
|
|
|
|