All year I have been keeping a fairly regular eye on my bingo card and for a while I was on track, then it seemed like I was behind, but finishing 2019 with two lines of bingo and the majority of my card filled I am seeing the success, but feeling a slight let down I was so close. It probably would have been easy to finish it off, I only needed a few squares, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Looking at my planned intentions at the start of the year I kept it relatively simple but with a decent challenge:
“For 2019 I’m looking at reading a variety of stories, voices, and genres I don’t explore that often.”
This was achieved because I spread out my categories once more and with the addition of the #LoveOzYABookBingo I was able to experience a lot of other amazing stories as well. The ideas for next year are already circling my mind – with the possibility of branching into narrative themes or maybe I’ll just have to challenge myself to do another bingo, smaller of course, but with a few different squares. Another thing I also said at the start of the year is “I don’t know if I will do a full card this year, but I will try for as many lines completed as I can” which, I think, 100% clears me from worrying about how successful I have been.
Graphic Novel: The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited by Clint McElroy
Read a Series: How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell
Self Published: And All the Stars by Andrea K Host
Gay MC: Play It Again by Aidan Wayne
Free Choice: The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson
Transgender MC: George by Alex Gino
Movie Adaptation: The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson
Own Voices: Catching Teller Crow by Ambelin Kwaymullina
TBR for Over Two Years: Return to the Hundred Acre Wood by David Benedictus
Classic: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Non-Human MC: Watership Down by Richard Adams
Fantasy: The Wicked King by Holly Black
Set in Australia: The Lost Man by Jane Harper
Non Fiction: Good Girl Stripped Bare by Tracey Spicer
Debut: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green
Reread: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Historical: Emmie and the Tudor King by Natalie Murray
Science Fiction: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
Bisexual MC: Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli
Chosen for the Cover: Mr Darcy by Alex Field
Dottie is waiting for the Christmas feeling to arrive—that fizzy, excited feeling, where everything is a bit magical. But this year, Dottie, her brother, Jem, and their dog, Shortbread, are staying with Grandma and Grandpa. Grandma and Grandpa are trying hard, but Christmas just isn’t the same . . . A gorgeous, heart-warming story about misplacing the Christmas spirit, and finding it again.
Eighteen-year-old Ellie Canning is found shivering and barely conscious on a country road, clad only in ill-fitting pyjamas. Her story of kidnap and escape quickly enthrals the nation: a middle-aged woman with a crazy old mother has held Ellie in a basement, chained her to a bed and given her drinks from an old baby’s sippy cup. But who was this woman and what did she want with Ellie? And what other secrets might she hide?
