BINGO!
Here we go. Bingo: 2024 Book Bingo!
Bingo Card
2024 Book Bingo
 Hard Mode ✓ First in a Series Read the first book in a series. Hard Mode: The series is more than three books long. |  Hard Mode ✓ Alliterative Title Read a book where multiple words in the title begin with the same letter. For example, Legends and Lattes, A Storm of Swords, Children of Blood and Bone. Hard Mode: The title has three words or more that start with the same letter. |  by Jules Verne Hard Mode ✓ Under the Surface Read a book where an important setting is either underground or underwater. Hard Mode: At least half the book takes place underground or underwater. |  Hard Mode ✓ Criminals Read a book in which the main character is a criminal. This could be a thief, assassin, someone who commits mail fraud, etc. Hard Mode: Features a heist. |  by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Hard Mode ✓ Dreams Read a book where characters experience dreams, magical or otherwise. Hard Mode: The dream is not mystical or unusual, just a normal dream or nightmare. |
 Hard Mode ✓ Entitled Animals Read a book that has an animal in the title. The animal in the title does not have to appear in the story. Examples: The Raven Tower, Wolfsong, A Feast for Crows. Hard Mode: The animal in the title is a fantasy or sci-fi creature, i.e. The Last Unicorn, Leviathan Wakes, or The Kaiju Preservation Society. |  by Nancy Farmer Hard Mode ✓ Bards Read a book in which the primary protagonist is a bard, musician, poet, or storyteller. Hard Mode: The character is explicitly called a bard. |  Hard Mode ✓ Prologues and Epilogues Read a book that has either a prologue or an epilogue. Hard Mode: The book must have both. |  Hard Mode ✓ Self-Published or Indie Publisher Self-published or published through an indie publisher. If a formerly self-published novel has been picked up by a publisher, it only counts for this challenge if you read it when it while was still only self-published. Hard Mode: Self-published and has fewer than 100 ratings on Goodreads OR an indie publisher that has done an AMA with r/Fantasy. |  Hard Mode ✓ Romantasy Read a book that features romance as a main plot. This must be speculative in nature but does not have to be fantasy. Hard Mode: The main character is LGBTQIA+. |
 by Mona Awad Hard Mode ✓ Dark Academia Read a book that fits the dark academia aesthetic. This includes school and university, secret societies, and dark secrets. Does not have to be fantasy, but must be speculative. Hard Mode: The school itself is entirely mundane. |  Hard Mode ✓ Multi-POV Read a book with at least three point of view characters. Hard Mode: At least five point of view characters. |  by John Wiswell Hard Mode ✓ Published in 2024 A book published for the first time in 2024 (no reprints or new editions) First translations into your language of choice are allowed. Hard Mode: It’s also the author’s first published novel. |  by Fonda Lee Hard Mode ✓ Character with a Disability Read a book in which an important character has a physical or mental disability. Hard Mode: A main character has a physical or mental disability. |  Hard Mode ✓ Published in the 1990s Read a book that was published in the 1990s. Hard Mode: The author, or one of the authors, has also published something in the last five years. |
 Hard Mode ✓ Orcs, Trolls, and Goblins - Oh My! Read a book featuring orcs, trolls, or goblins. Hard Mode: As a main character. |  by Stina Leicht Hard Mode ✓ Space Opera Read a sci-fi book that features a large cast of characters and has a focus on social dynamics which may be political or personal in nature. Set primarily in space or on spaceships. Hard Mode: Written by an author of marginalized gender identity (e.g. women, trans people, non-binary people). |  Hard Mode ✓ Author of Color Read a book by an author of color. Hard Mode: Must be a debut novel published in the last five years. |  Hard Mode ✓ Survival Read a book in which the primary goal of the characters and story focuses on survival. Surviving an apocalypse, surviving a war, surviving high school, etc. Hard Mode: No superviruses or pandemics. |  by K.J. Parker Hard Mode ✓ Judge A Book By Its Cover Choose because you like its cover. Hard Mode: Pick the book based only on the information available on the cover. No reading the blurb! |
 Hard Mode ✓ Set in a Small Town The primary setting is a small town. Hard Mode: The small town can be real or fictional but the broader setting must be our real world and not a secondary world. |  by Ted Chiang Hard Mode ✓ Five SFF Short Stories Any five short stories or novelettes. Hard Mode: Read an entire speculative anthology or collection. |  Hard Mode ✓ Eldritch Creatures Read a book featuring a being that is uncanny, unearthly, and weird. This can be a god or monster from another plane or realm and is usually beyond mortal understanding. See this link for further information. Hard Mode: The book is not related to the Cthulhu mythos. |  Hard Mode ✓ Reference Materials Read a book that features additional material, such as a map, footnotes, glossary, translation guide, dramatis personae etc. Hard Mode: Book contains at least two types of additional materials. |  Hard Mode ✓ Sequel (replacing Book Club/Readalong) Read a book that is a sequel to another SFF book. Hard Mode: Book 3 or on in the series. |
Mini-reviews
🎧 I listened to as audiobooks, ✨ are my favorites, 📚 I borrowed from Libby (❤️).
Rivers of London ✨ - First in a Series (Hard: >3 books)
Very British/Londoner Urban Fantasy with a cop that learns magic. Great fun. I do love the scenes where Peter tries to apply scientific thinking to magic.
“I never worry about theological questions,” said Nightingale. “They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen’s peace - that makes them a police matter.”
The Haunting of Hill House 🎧📚 - Alliterative Title (Hard: 3+ alliterative words)
A slow burning sense of dread ‘horror in a box’ (based almost entirely in and around the titular house and property). With some strange characters.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
Journey to the Center of the Earth 🎧📚 - Under the Surface (Hard: More than half)
I’ve seen the film (both the 1953 and 2008) versions, but somehow never read the book. It’s pretty much quintessential Jules Verne. An adventure tale that lovingly describes the scenes and trials of an adventure. The style shows the books age–did people actually talk like that?–but it does give it a certain charm.
We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.
Side note: I don’t think I really realized before that Verne was and wrote in French.
The Quantum Magician 🎧✨ - Criminals (Hard: Featuring a heist)
This is a fascinating bit of scifi space opera with a focus on impressively divergent subspecies of humanity and just what it means to be ‘human’. All wrapped around a space opera scale heist!
A con man called Gander had once taught him that there were only three bets. Sometimes, you play the cards. Sometimes, you play the player. Sometimes, you just throw the dice.
Frankenstein: The 1818 Text 🎧📚 - Dreams (Hard: Non-mystical/Just ordinary dreams)
Another on that list of long ago classics I’d never actually read. From a modern perspective, it’s weak as either scifi or horror, but it’s interesting enough from a completionist perspective.
It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.
The Voyage of the Basilisk - Entitled Animals (Hard: A fantasy animal)
Third in The Memoirs of Lady Trent, we continue to follow the exploits of the titular ’lady naturalist’. Exploring the world and finding dragons (and adventure!) along the way. This one follows Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and is best summed up by:
“That should be my epitaph when I die: ‘she did not have to do it’.”
The Sea of Trolls 🎧📚 - Bards (Hard: Explicitly called a bard)
A romp in a slightly more magical ~800 AD with Vikings (thorns and all1), monsters, and magic. It’s an interesting bit of historical fiction wrapped in a magical veneer.
Just say no to pillaging.
Orconomics 📚 - Prologues and Epilogues (Hard: Both)
A Dungeons and Dragons satire; basically taking the ‘what if the gamey bits of D&D were real’. Economic stakes in quests, leveling, NPCs. It’s all there.
Not all who wander are lost; some are on quests.
The Fire-Moon - Self-Published or Indie Publisher (Hard: Few than 100 reviews)
A fun find; a quasi-Egyptian fantasy world with monsters in the dark, demons, and magic run amuck. I just wish it were longer than a novella!
Although, from what Teshar had heard, every pyramid was intended to be entered. People would want to bring offerings for the dead Emperor, servants would want to tend things every once in a while; a lot of people prayed to past Emperors, because they were easier to talk to than the pure gods, and more accessible than the living Emperor or Empress.
The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry 🎧📚 - Romantasy (Hard: LGBTQIA+)
A bit of a con artist who happens to magically light fires, hired to protect a young Lady, and all the chaos that happens next. Plus a fun love story with a part Troll and a skeletal mouse that goes BONG.
…her perception of egregious enfucktation in her current, present, and unfortunate familial circumstances…
Bunny 🎧📚 - Dark Academia (Hard: In a mundane school)
One of a series of books I picked up this year and (by the time of reading it) completely forgot it was horror. Chock full of small liberal arts schools and fitting in, and of course magic. And bunnies.
“We never joke about bunnies, Bunny.”
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Multi-POV (Hard: At least 5 POVs)
Somehow I thought this book was a lot older than it actually was. It’s a magical sort of book–despite a surprising lack of overall magic with a whole cast of complicated ‘real’ feeling characters. And it’s a long book.
“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.
Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”
[[Someone You Can Build a Nest In]] 🎧✨📚 - Published in 2024 (Hard: Debut)
A shapeshifting monster… falling in love? A weird mix of horror and romance, cozy and queer and weird all at once.
It was so much clearer a declaration of affection than any of those speeches spun by poets or playwrights. And stuffed into the mouths of actors who pretended to be enamored. One could only pretend to love in language. True love was a woman sinking up to her elbows in her viscera.
Jade Legacy 🎧✨📚 - Character with a Disability (Hard: Main character)
The conclusion of The Green Bone Saga; it’s such an impressive way to finish the story. It’s both larger scale (in time and place; it takes place over decades and much of the world) yet still personal (more close calls; more deaths). A solid end to an excellent series.
“You’d think it would be easier to face death as you get older, but it doesn’t work that way. You get more attached to life, to people you love and things that are worth living for.”
Snow Crash - Published in the 1990s (Hard: Author active in the last 5 years)
90s style cyberpunk, full of virtual realities, sword fights, and more linguistic programming language brain hacking that you’d ever expect.
We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.
Nine Goblins 📚 - Orcs, Trolls, and Goblins - Oh My! (Hard: As a main character)
A surprisingly cute and definitely funny story about a troop of goblins stranded well behind enemy lines–who else and who better to save the world?
Smart goblins became mechanics. Dumb goblins became soldiers. Really dumb goblins became officers.
Persephone Station 🎧📚 - Space Opera (Hard: Author of marginalized gender identity)
Space opera chock full of criminals and mercenaries and secrets and aliens layered together with an exploration of Artificial General Intelligence.
“In short, it is easier and requires far less energy and time expenditure to manage humanity than it does to replace them.”
Shutter 🎧✨📚 - Author of Color (Hard: In the last 5 years)
A story about Diné (Navajo) forensic photographer that can see ghosts, mixing the mysteries and crimes of the present to the flashbacks of growing up with a gift thought evil by all those around you.
Grandma always said to me that you never do things for people to get something in return. That is the white man’s way of living. You do it because they need you. You do it because if you don’t, no one else will.
Robopocalypse 🎧✨📚 - Survival (Hard: No superviruses or pandemics)
AIs come to life and use the millions of robots in our homes, factories, and cars to kill us all. After that, survival in a world without modern amenities and filled with killer machines.
I can only give you words. Nothing fancy. But this will have to do.
It doesn’t matter if you’re reading it a year from now or a hundred years from now. By the end of the chronicle you will know that humanity carried the flame of knowledge into the terrible blackness of the unknown, to the very brink of annihilation. And we carried it back.
Side note: If you count a computer ‘supervirus’ I suppose this wouldn’t count so well.
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City - Judge a Book By Its Cover (Hard: No reading the blurb)
Take a roughly medieval european tech level empire and an army corps of engineers (they build bridges) out on their own. Add a force somehow conquering everything, leaving said engineers really the only remaining hope. And then stick them in a city, the only hope to hold off against a siege.
I have strong views about not tempting providence and, as a wise man once said, the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow is, luck doesn’t work if you push it.
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires 🎧📚 - Set in a Small Town (Hard: In our world)
Pretty much exactly what it says in the title. A group of woman in the US deep south with their own perfect little lives and perfect little book clubs until a strange man moves in–with a mysterious aversion to sunlight.
“Why do you pretend what we do is nothing?” she asked. “Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.”
Exhalation 🎧✨📚 - Five SFF Short Stories (Hard: An entire collection)
A collection of shorts by Ted Chiang, with a focus on time travel and parallel realities. I do think that scifi fits short stories better than fantasy does in general.
Autodissection was the only option.
And also:
People are made of stories.
But not literally.
Or is it?
Perdido Street Station 🎧✨📚 - Eldritch Creatures (Hard: Not Cthulhu related)
A city full of a strange mix of sapient creatures all living and working and sleeping together in a sort of gritty mess (but in a good way) of a weird fiction tale. Oh it’s a fun bit of excellently weird setting.
Did I say it’s weird?
Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.
Small Miracles 🎧✨📚 - Reference Materials (Hard: At least two kinds)
A former guardian angle, coerced by her angelic book to come back and tempt one sinless mortal. Wacky hijinks ensue.
Chocolate shouldn’t be a sin at all. Everyone deserves a bit of chocolate.
The Dark Talent - Sequel (Hard: Book 3+; replacing Book Club/Readalong)
The final(ish) book of Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians, a supposedly in-universe autobiography of teen hero Alcatraz as he learns that the world he’s always known is LIES perpetrated by a cabal of EVIL LIBRARIANS. It’s a fun series, chock full of humor, especially meta humor all about writing and authors. With that ending though… it’s a good thing this isn’t actually the last book of the series.
“Fine,” Grandpa said. “You fetch your evil Librarian mother from the jail. I’ll go warm up the giant penguin!”
I did not in fact say horns. 😄 ↩︎