Jayde Holmes’s Book Bingo

Every year, I give myself a new Book Bingo challenge. I have a bingo card generator with over 200 book prompts, mostly related to science fiction, fantasy and horror tropes, and each year I encourage everyone to join me in seeing how many bingos you can get. Here is my current card, that I will be trying to fill throughout the year 2025:

Rules and Reasoning:

All challenges on the card can be interpreted in whichever way makes the challenge most fun for the person doing it. In order to make these cards accessible, I have tried to avoid challenges that specify a format. There will be no ‘read a comic book’, or ‘listen to an audiobook’ squares.

Some challenges may imply a format, such as in this 2025 card, where one square wants a book that has been sitting on the shelf for a year. This implies you should read a physical book, but if ebooks or audiobooks are more your thing, feel free to to interpret ‘on the shelf’ as referring to a Goodreads shelf, or as a metaphor for a ‘to be read’ pile. Always interpret the challenge in a way that best gives you the most options to read works in the way you are comfortable with, whilst also encouraging you to explore new genres and ideas.

I’ve also changed how I approach diversity-inspired challenges as the years have gone on. I’ve moved away from challenges that explicitly ask for specific identities for the most part, and moved to more vague challenges that encourage reading about a variety of identities (eg. ‘Own Voices’, ‘Any Queer Romance’, ‘Diversity in a Form you Missed Last Year’) or genre and language challenges that encourage reading books from a range of cultural perspectives (eg. ‘Translated from X Language’, ‘Afrofuturism’, ‘Silk Punk’) I found these types of challenges more comfortable than prompts that required investigating the protagonist or author’s identity under a microscope. I also found that this creates less ‘free’ squares for people who already follow a diverse range of authors or who are fans of publishing companies that promote own voice stories.

Finally, rules regarding book length or time limit are completely up to the player. For me, I give myself a year to complete the card, with December 31st being the deadline. For length, I make novellas the shortest length for books, and collections with 1-5 chapters as opposed to single issues the minimum for comic books. I also make a rule for myself that each book can only fill one square.

For your own challenges, feel free to add whatever rules and restriction you think will make the challenge most fun.

If the 2025 card doesn’t appeal to you, feel free to have a go at this special themed challenge card:

Tour the Sol System Challenge

The aim of this card is to read science fiction books that take place entirely in our own solar system. Explore all the planets from Mercury to Pluto, go on adventures with robots and aliens, and read science fiction written across an almost hundred year time period. The only rule is don’t leave our own solar system. Well, one challenge offers you a chance to leave the Sol System, but that should be towards the end of the story, or at least feature a lot of scenes on Earth.

The free square has been replaced by a ‘Set on Earth’ square. Have fun putting a book there that really seems out of place.

Playing Along in 2025?

If you are playing along with any of my cards, feel free to post them wherever you like, as long as you keep the link back to my site on them. Feel free to reach out to me on my socials (Mastodon and Bluesky preferred) and we can compare progress if you like.

Most important, whether you use these cards publicly or privately, just remember to have fun and keep on reading.