November BingoDOG Reads

Not sure how many of us are still working on our BingoDOGs!

Link to the wiki:
https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/2019_BingoDog

I have gone a few months without anything to add to my Bingo card. This is my last one!

Eastern European setting

Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey / Isabel Fonseca
3 stars

The author is a journalist (she is not an anthropologist, though I had to check that). She spent time in various Eastern European countries in the early ‘90s (this was published in 1995), to talk to and get to know the Romani (aka Gypsies) to learn about their lives and culture. She also talks to other local people to find out their views of the local Roma (usually negative).

Overall, the book was ok. I didn’t learn as much as I thought I might. I have read a book by Ian Hancock, who is Romani himself, and I liked it better. Fonseca was a bit all over the place – the chapters didn’t really tie together. I guess each chapter was in a different country. I think I didn’t like her writing style. She included some photos of some of the various people she talked to. I suppose the most interesting to me was the chapter on the Holocaust. I’m not sure any stereotypes were quenched by reading this – she said it early in the book: they lie, they steal… I found it odd. If she was trying to fight stereotypes (as other reviews are saying), I definitely missed that. Oh, one stereotype broken: they don’t travel, nor necessarily want to always be travelling; they are just so unwelcome in so many places, they don’t have a lot of options. I’m still rating it ok. It held my interest, so that’s a good thing. It just wasn’t what I expected, and I didn’t learn as much as I’d hoped.

>1 LibraryCin: Me! I still have seven squares to go. I have four of the books ready to go, so hopefully that will just leave three in the home stretch of December.

>3 JayneCM: Good luck!

I still have some squares. Some I had planned books from these last two months Cats so I may get a couple more filled in. But I know I won't fill it this year.

I finished The Sandman Volume 2: Doll's House for the graphic novel square and have just one more! I'm reading The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (which I'm really enjoying so far) for the fiary tale square.

And this will be the first time I've managed to cover the BingoDOG card!

>6 LisaMorr: Congrats! It's a great feeling, isn't it?

>3 JayneCM: Good luck! Hope you can manage it!

>6 LisaMorr: Good for you!

I have some squares left on my second card. This is, I think, my major reading goal for the rest of 2019--fill in those last seven squares.

>7 MissWatson:, >8 LibraryCin:, >9 LibraryCin: Yes! and thanks! Should be able to report back before the end of the month that it's done!

>10 NinieB: Congrats on working to complete a second card!!!

>11 LisaMorr: Thanks! I *loved* doing the card the first time around so I set up a second one. Assuming that I read at a similar pace next year, I'm thinking of coming up with a second card of my own devising. The downside of doing the same card twice is that the squares that are irksome the first time around are really irksome the second time around.

Just finished Down Among The Sticks And Bones for the book about siblings square. Loved it!

>12 NinieB: - I think there are a lot of reading challenges that you could make up a different card and not make it too easy or too hard. I don't mind stretching my reading, but I'm never going to read a graphic novel. I know DeltaQueen50 does the Pop Sugar Challenge that had like 52 (?) prompts.

>14 dudes22: Exactly, I can adapt a challenge like Pop Sugar!

>14 dudes22: I do PopSugar too - only because I always add too many challenges to my reading!

For book mentioned in another book--Re-Enter Sir John, mentioned in Howard Haycraft's Murder for Pleasure.

I've finished The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection by Alexander McCall Smith for the "book with 6 or more words in the title" block