Congratulations, and thank you for participating in the inaugural Book Bingo for c/Books@Lemmy.World!

If the existence of this bingo is a surprise to you, or you want to revisit the guide, see this link.

If you would like to join us for 2025 bingo, we’ll be posting information on the morning of May 1st, US Central Time (UTC -5)!

There are 2 official ways to submit your card and be recognized:

  • Fill out the web form we made using Tally, which will organize the data for us. Completing the form will also give you a Markdown-friendly list to copy and post in this thread if you would like.
  • Or, if you would prefer, comment in this thread with your list of completed squares, including the titles/authors you read. Here is a list of squares for reference/copypaste:
2024 Bingo Squares (click to expand)

1A: Older Than You Are - 1B: Water, Water Everywhere - 1C: What’s Yours is Mine - 1D: Family Drama - 1E: It Takes Two - 2A: New Release - 2B: Plays With Words - 2C: Independent Author - 2D: Bookception - 2E: Disability Representation - 3A: Eazy, Breazy, Read-zie - 3B: Stranger in a Strange Land - 3C: One Less - 3D: There is Another… - 3E: LGBTQIA+ Lead - 4A: Now a Major Motion Picture - 4B: It’s About Time - 4C: Award Winner - 4D: Mashup - 4E: Local to You - 5A: Debut Work - 5B: It’s a Holiday - 5C: Institutional - 5D: Minority Author - 5E: Among the Stars -

Alt. Same Author, New Work - She Blinded Me With Science - Pseudonymous Work - Translated - A Change in Perspective -

ADDITIONAL POINTS TO READ BEFORE TURNING IN YOUR CARDS!

Questions? Please ask!

Turn-in Guidance

  • Please make an effort to spell titles and author names correctly! For titles with more than one author, please separate author names with a comma. This will help with data compilation for a bingo stats thread coming later!
  • If you didn’t do a square, don’t list it. Please leave incomplete squares completely blank on the Tally form.
  • You can substitute any square, but please remember: only one substitution per card. On the form, there’s a substitution dropdown for each square. If you accidentally choose a substitution for the wrong square, please de-select the substitution to clear it.
  • Please make a note if you did a square on hard mode. On the form, there is a hard mode checkbox for each square.
  • Only turn in your card(s) once you have finished with bingo; do not submit a card still in progress. If you’re using the Tally form, there is a review page before submission; please make sure that you click submit after double-checking your entries! You cannot edit your card once submitted, so if you realize you’ve made a mistake, please post in this thread to notify us.

More than one card?

If you did more than one card, and are submitting via Tally, please differentiate your username for each additional card. For example, I would list my first card under “JaymesRS@literature.cafe” and my second under “JaymesRS@literature.cafe - 2”.

Timeline

Submit your finished card(s) by May 1st, 2025! This thread and the Tally submission form will remain open until 12 noon, US Central Time (UTC -5) on May 1st as a courtesy, so please make sure your cards are turned in by then, so they can be counted.

Reward

Any five in a row is considered a win! Your only reward this year (as of the time of posting) is the warm glow of satisfaction and bragging rights. However, our ultimate plan is to recognize bingo participation with a flair-like system when supported by Lemmy in the future, so we plan to calculate completion retroactively whenever that’s available.

In Closing

Again… HERE IS THE LINK TO THE TALLY FORM TO TURN IN YOUR CARD (or you can comment in this thread). The form goes live on April 17th, 2025, and both it and this thread close around noon on May 1st, US Central Time (UTC -5). Be sure to get your card(s) in before then!

Thanks to everyone that participated this year! This was a fun challenge to put together for us. If you are interested in helping to coordinate the bingo challenge or related resources, please reach out to the moderators of !books@lemmy.world and let us know!

  • EyeBeam
    5·
    6 days ago

    There’s probably a way to engineer a bingo here by reclassifying things that fit multiple boxes. I just put things in the better fitting or more interesting category.

    • 1A: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie. Missed Hard mode by 2 years. Old enough to read via wikisource. Everything else here was read in dead tree format.
    • 1C: The Quantum Spy – David Ignatius. Quantum computing, espionage thereof, and USA-China relations. Very Macguffin.
    • 1D: Secrets to the Grave – Tami Hoag. A single mother is brutally murdered. Her young daughter witnesses and survives the attack. Investigators wonder who the father is.
    • 2C: Hannibal Fogg and The Supreme Secret of Man – Tahir Shah. Hard Mode Published by and available free at http://secretum-mundi.com/
    • 2D: The Cartographers – Peng Shepherd. Hard Mode. About the 1930 General Drafting highway map of New York state, with the Agloe copyright trap. Additionally, includes a discreet, but significant shout-out to Ursula LeGuin’s Lathe of Heaven.
    • 2E: Boar Island – Nevada Barr. A main character suffered a severe spinal injury (in a previous book, while mountain climbing with Anna Pigeon). She can walk with technological assistance. Boar Island was not designed for the mobility impaired; they move there for her teenage daughter’s comfort, not her own.
    • 3B: The Scent of Death – Andrew Taylor. Hard Mode The narrator is a English clerk, assigned to New York City for the duration of the book, during the American Revolution. (I didn’t look up the hard mode criteria, but assume it isn’t this.)
    • 3D: A Column of Fire – Ken Follett. Follows Pillars of the Earth and World Without End in the Kingsbridge series.
    • 4A: Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn. I haven’t seen the movie, but am told they made one.
    • 5E: The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury. Short stories, the majority of which involve extraplanetary travel, interstellar in some cases.
    • AltA: Fatal Error – F. Paul Wilson. I read Implant some years ago, but nothing of his recently or from this series. Order matters in this series; don’t start here.
    • AltB: Bones to Ashes – Kathy Reichs. The author is a well-credentialed and academically respected forensic anthropologist who cares about getting the science right in her novels.
    • AltC: Demon Crown – James Rollins, ne James Czajkowski
    • AltD: Inferno – Dante Alighieri tr. Allen Mandelbaum. Hard Mode. I couldn’t read it in the original Italian.
    • misericordiae
      3·
      6 days ago

      Nice! You could move AltC to 4D and 2C to 5D (or just use your substitution square and put AltD in there), and get D column. (Demon Crown’s military thriller + scifi might count as unusual for 4D hard mode, idk.)

      I looked up some of these because of your summaries. Did you have a favorite?

      • EyeBeam
        3·
        5 days ago

        Row 1 is also still in play since I’m currently in progress on one of the books from your card, Relic.

        Roger Ackroyd and Gone Girl were both recommended by someone who thought I’d like them. She’s often right about things, and was this time too. Scent of Death most exceeded my expectations and also gets a favorable review. The first-person narrator and detailed descriptions of colonial NYC made for a very immersive setting. No particular order among them, but that’s my top 3.

        • misericordiae
          2·
          3 days ago

          Ooh, awesome! I hope you end up enjoying Relic. It wasn’t my favorite book ever, but I thought it was fun.

          Thanks for the recs!