Episode 909: A book with the name of a board game in the title

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Welcome to Reading With Libraries!

Thank you for joining us again on our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

Our organization is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we work with all types of libraries. Schools, public, academic, history centers, and more! We are here to support you and to bring you new knowledge to inform your library work. 

This season we continue to explore a wide variety of book genres and topics so you can expand your reading horizons, and share more information with your library community. We are looking at the prompt from the 2022 PopSugar reading challenge this season. You can read along with their challenge, linked in our show notes, or just enjoy some different books. 

This week we are looking at books with the name of a board game in the title. If this leads you to play some extra games this week – fantastic! We support you being able to enjoy yourself with books and with some games. So spend this week having a little extra bit of fun for yourself.

Check out our show notes page for links to our beverages, our resources, and the books we share today.

Beverages:

This is, of course, a book group. And every book group needs to have beverages, so you really get the feel for your reading.

This week’s beverages are from the article Famous Drinks Based on Video Games. Try them all!

The Warp Pipe from Super Mario Bros

Ingredients:

3/4 shot Blue Curacao

1/2 bottle Mike’s Hard Limeade

1/2 shot Bols Melon

1/2 Lime (cut into wedges)

Directions: 

  1. Cut your half a lime into four wedges.  
  2. Squeeze the lime juice into a highball glass and then drop them in the bottom.  
  3. Add some ice over top the limes, then pour in the Blue Curacao.  
  4. Add the Mike’s Hard Limeade until the glass is almost full, then top with your Bols Melon.  
  5. Stir a bit with a straw and enjoy.
  6. Tip: make sure you don’t add too much Bols Melon, or the melon flavor will overpower the lime.

The Tonberry from Final Fantasy

Ingredients:

.5 oz Midori (or other melon liqueur)

.5 oz Sour Apple Pucker

.5 oz Absinthe

Directions:

Mix all three ingredients in a shot glass and drink.

Genre Discussion:

Books and games are two pass times that go together. Many people who like one of these entertainments also like the other. If you are on vacation, or passing a rainy afternoon, or even stuck inside during a global pandemic – reading books and playing tabletop games can be the best activities. 

Wikipedia talks about tabletop games. “There are many varieties of board games. Their representation of real-life situations can range from having no inherent theme, such as checkers, to having a specific theme and narrative, such as Cluedo. Rules can range from the very simple, such as in Snakes and Ladders; to deeply complex, as in Advanced Squad Leader. Play components now often include custom figures or shaped counters, and distinctively shaped player pieces commonly known as meeples as well as traditional cards and dice.”

The Bucks County Public Library talks about the value of playing games:

  • Playing board games brings people closer, strengthens relationships, and can help you meet new people.
  • Playing board games increases brain function.
  • Playing board games teaches you how to set goals and be patient.
  • Playing board games is great for reducing stress and makes for laughter.
  • Playing board games creates more happiness.
  • Playing board games enhances creativity and self-confidence.
  • You can play board games anywhere at any time.

While the books we discuss this week do not necessarily have games as part of their storylines, knowing you can add them in to your own activities can give you some additional fun this week!

Suggested Reading Resources:

This week we have books that go back and forth across the line between books and games. Enjoy them both!

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. You can click on any of these links to go to Amazon.com for more information. If you buy anything while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits from your purchase. Thanks in advance for helping to support the mission of CMLE – we appreciate it! 

Sorry Not Sorry, by Sophie Ranald

Game: Sorry

She’s not just stuck in a rut — she’s buried in it up to her chin. The only company she has in bed is the back catalog of Netflix, and falling in love feels like the stuff of fairy tales. So when she stumbles across the popular podcast Sorry Not Sorry, which challenges women to embrace their inner bad girl, she jumps at the chance to shake things up.

Old Charlotte would never ask for a stranger’s number, go on a blind date or buy lacy lingerie . . . but New Charlotte is waving goodbye to her comfort zone (with a side order of margaritas). And it turns out that good things do happen to bad girls . . .

If you’re a fan of romantic comedies by Sophie Kinsella, Helena Hunting, or Christina Lauren, and love TV shows like Girls, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Jane the Virgin, you won’t be able to put down this hilarious read.

Sorry Not Sorry, by Alyssa Milano

Game: Sorry

Alyssa Milano, actress and activist, delivers here a collection of powerful personal essays that get to the heart of her life, career, and all-out humanitarianism. These essays are unvarnished and elegant, funny and heartbreaking, and utterly real. A timely book that shows in almost real time the importance of taking care of others, it also gives a gut-punch-level wake-up call in an era where the noise is a distraction from what really needs to happen, if we want to live in a better world.

These are stories of growing up in celebrity, of family and of friends, of connections and breaking apart. They have teeth on the page and come from the heart. And they are stories that offer a direct line into the thoughts and life of one of the most visible, hard-working humanitarians we have. A bestselling children’s book author, Alyssa’s finally giving her fans worldwide what they really want to hear directly from her about: the life she has lived, the things she’s seen and experienced, and the way she lives in and with the world.

Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft, by Tess Sharpe and Jessica Spotswood
Game: Trouble

Women accused of witchcraft. Fearsome girls with arcane knowledge. Toil & Trouble features fifteen stories of girls embracing their power, reclaiming their destinies, and using their magic to create, to curse, to cure, to kill…and to live. 

A young witch uses social media to connect with her astrology clients—and with a NASA-loving girl as cute as she is skeptical. A priestess of death investigates a ritualized murder. A bruja who cures lovesickness might need the remedy herself when she falls for an altar boy. A theater production is turned upside down by a visiting churel. A water witch uses her magic to survive the soldiers who have invaded her desert oasis. And in the near future, a group of girls accused of witchcraft must find their collective power…and destroy their captors.

Apples Never Fall, by Liane Moriarty

Game: Apples to Apples

The Delaney family love one another dearly – it’s just that sometimes they want to murder each other….

If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father?

This is the dilemma facing the four grown Delaney siblings.

The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They’re killers on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after 50 years of marriage, they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. So why are Stan and Joy so miserable?

The four Delaney children – Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke – were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that’s okay, now that they’re all successful grown-ups and there is the wonderful possibility of grandchildren on the horizon.

One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door, bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend. The Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted.

Later, when Joy goes missing, and Savannah is nowhere to be found, the police question the one person who remains: Stan. But for someone who claims to be innocent, he, like many spouses, seems to have a lot to hide. Two of the Delaney children think their father is innocent, two are not so sure – but as the two sides square off against each other in perhaps their biggest match ever, all of the Delaneys will start to reexamine their shared family history in a very new light.

The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd
Game: Life

Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily’s fierce-hearted Black “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother’s past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come. 

Sythe, by Neal Shusterman

Game: Stonemaier Games Scythe Board Game – An Engine-Building, Area Control

A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery: humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now Scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control.

Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.

Scythe is the first novel of a thrilling new series by National Book Award–winning author Neal Shusterman in which Citra and Rowan learn that a perfect world comes only with a heavy price.

Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig
Game: Chess

Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig’s final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.

Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig’s story.

This new translation of Chess Story brings out the work’s unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.

The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness

Game: Go

Todd Hewitt is the only boy in a town of men. Ever since the settlers were infected with the Noise germ, Todd can hear everything the men think, and they hear everything he thinks. Todd is just a month away from becoming a man, but in the midst of the cacophony, he knows that the town is hiding something from him — something so awful Todd is forced to flee with only his dog, whose simple, loyal voice he hears too. With hostile men from the town in pursuit, the two stumble upon a strange and eerily silent creature: a girl. Who is she? Why wasn’t she killed by the germ like all the females on New World? Propelled by Todd’s gritty narration, readers are in for a white-knuckle journey in which a boy on the cusp of manhood must unlearn everything he knows in order to figure out who he truly is. 

Labyrinth Lost (Brooklyn Brujas Book 1), by Zoraida Córdova

Game: Ravensburger Ocean Labyrinth

Nothing says Happy Birthday like summoning the spirits of your dead relatives. Alex is a bruja, the most powerful witch in a generation and she hates magic. At her Deathday celebration, Alex performs a spell to rid herself of her power. But it backfires. Her whole family vanishes into thin air, leaving her alone with Nova, a brujo boy she can’t trust. A boy whose intentions are as dark as the strange marks on his skin. The only way to get her family back is to travel with Nova to Los Lagos, a land in-between, as dark as Limbo and as strange as Wonderland.

Subpar Parks: America’s Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors, by Amber Share 

Game: Trekking The National Parks

Subpar Parks, both on the popular Instagram page and in this humorous, informative, and collectible book, combines two things that seem like they might not work together yet somehow harmonize perfectly: beautiful illustrations and informative, amusing text celebrating each national park paired with the one-star reviews disappointed tourists have left online. Millions of visitors each year enjoy Glacier National Park, but for one visitor, it was simply “Too cold for me!” Another saw the mind-boggling vistas of Bryce Canyon as “Too spiky!” Never mind the person who visited the thermal pools at Yellowstone National Park and left thinking, “Save yourself some money, boil some water at home.”

Featuring more than 50 percent new material, the book will include more depth and insight into the most popular parks, such as Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and Acadia National Parks; anecdotes and tips from rangers; and much more about author Amber Share’s personal love and connection to the outdoors. Equal parts humor and love for the national parks and the great outdoors, it’s the perfect gift for anyone who loves to spend time outside as well as have a good read (and laugh) once they come indoors.

The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy, by Michael Lewis
Game: Risk the Game of Strategic Conquest

What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works?

“The election happened,” remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. “And then there was radio silence.” Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them.

Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.

Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.

If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system―those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! 

Join us next Thursday with another topic or genre and many more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries or expand your library skills, check out our podcast Linking Our Libraries!  

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!