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| My Bingo card (mostly). I didn't save a pdf version so this is a recreation with the same categories but in a different configuration. |
Even though I'm already doing three challenges for 2015 - Back to the Classics, the Nonfiction Reading Challenge, and the European Reading Challenge
- my sister and I have agreed to do the Books on the Nightstand Book Bingo challenge as well. This lets me combine love of reading with my
love of competing against my sister so I'm excited to get started.
We
modified the rules a little bit to account for her class schedule,
which worked out perfectly because our friend S later signed on to
compete as well and she is busy with her thesis research this summer!
So, rather than set Labor Day as our date to finish, we have set Labor
Day as the date to get bingo and Christmas 2015 as the date to get a
blackout. We also boosted the competitive aspect by agreeing to compete
to see who could get bingo and blackout first. Winner gets lunch so we
are taking this very seriously!
I should also
admitted, I suppose, that we complicated it more by exchanging the
middle free square for a category picked by the other competitors. These
categories, of course, ended up being huge challenges for the person
who got them. My sister picked a "Young Adult novel" for me, knowing
that it isn't a genre I frequently read (will I be banned from the world
of book blogging by admitting this?). I, in turn, gave her the dreaded
"Sports-related" category and told her she could borrow one of my many
hockey books. Weirdly, she declined my generous offer. Poor S got stuck
with "That you've pretended to have read." I suspect that we may all
curse each other by the time Christmas comes!
My
card is not bad otherwise, although I have already discovered that, even
in my late twenties, it is very difficult to find a book "By an author
born the same year as you." If anyone knows of a great author born in
1986, please pass along the information. My blackout depends on it! As
some fairly extensive searching has uncovered, finding an author of the
same age would be much easier if I had passed the thirty threshold.
The
only category I truly dread is the "Historical Fiction" square, since I
find increasingly that I can't stand to read fiction that reflects the
outdated gender roles that existed for much of human history.
Conversely, I hate novels in which the female characters seem too
out-of-their-time, since they strike me as substituting wishful thinking
for historical accuracy. And, worst of all for someone seeking
historical fiction to read, I don't enjoy books about kings and queens
and the courtiers who loved them or at least slept with them to advance
their own interests. This may take some digging.
Still, the project should be great fun. Any suggestions for any of these categories would be appreciated!
