Speculative Fiction Bingo Challenge

[ysabetwordsmith]

r/Fantasy's annual speculative fiction bingo challenge is up on Reddit.


It's a reading challenge, a reading party, a reading marathon, and YOU are welcome to join in on our nonsense!

r/Fantasy Book Bingo is a yearly reading challenge within our community. Its one-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new authors and books, to boldly go where few readers have gone before . . . (well, many actually because this is the TENTH year of our existence).

The core of this challenge is encouraging readers to step out of their comfort zones, discover amazing new reads, and motivate everyone to keep up on their reading throughout the year.

Comments

Question:

[dialecticdreamer]

Is it acceptable to spend the month noting stories/books to track down to read in May and June? I've just filled up the planned free reading time for the next two weeks, with twice as many books waiting for return or inter-library loan. (That uses up the remaining free time, and I can't afford to give up two hours of sleep, not even once a month.

Re: Question:

[ysabetwordsmith]

I don't know about the original bingo event offsite, but you can definitely do that here in allbingo. Go for it!

Re: Question:

[dialecticdreamer]

I really need a better way to track the things that I want to find to read. A plain list doesn't work. Worse, for nonfiction, I tend to find three to five more books that I want to read by reading the bibliography of the book in hand.

Re: Question:

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I really need a better way to track the things that I want to find to read. A plain list doesn't work. <<

https://basmo.app/reading-tracker/


>> Worse, for nonfiction, I tend to find three to five more books that I want to read by reading the bibliography of the book in hand. <<

I haven't found a solution for that, or any other problem that amounts to "I want to read All The Things!"

About the closest I've come is thinking about how most people consider you an expert on a topic if you've read 3 books about it. So I might look at a subject list and aim to assemble a set of basic, intermediate, advanced; three different subtopics; or an introduction and any two other things that build on it. After I've read those, I should have a better handle on whether I've read enough for my purposes at this time, or if not, what kind of additional material I need to track down.

Re: Question:

[dialecticdreamer]

Three. Books.

HORROR.

Seriously, I haven't been in position to have the time and brain space to do much research reading in the last year, so my way of working was to pick a topic, whether gardening or mathematics or pre-Egyptian civilizations, was to focus on the topic for a month. Even at my worst, that was four to six books in a month.

Oh, wow. I need to rethink my usual diatribe against modern education. It's woefully incomplete.

Re: Question:

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Three. Books.

HORROR. <<

Yeah, I know, that was my reaction too.

I think the subjects where I've read only three books or less were:

* things I wasn't that interested in to begin with

* topics that I could absorb as much as I needed from 1-3 books

* cases where I could only get 1-3 books on a topic.

I've inhaled whole libraries. Our Pagan collection is over a thousand books. I'm sure we've got hundreds of cookbooks and I've read dozens of them out loud on road trips. I have a small bookcase of linguistic and women's studies books. There are multiple shelves of books on gardening, plants, and other nature topics. Hell, I've got at least half a shelf of Golden Guides alone, and if I'm going to absorb any natural science from scratch, that is my go-to source. If I lean around the corner of my desk, I can see the bookcase of jumpstart-civilization texts.

Three books is about "yeah, this is good enough groundwowrk" by my standards. If I need more depth or detail, that much will give me an idea where to look next.

But then I think about how other people tend to treat me as a walking encyclopedia ("I am the Library.") and I suspect that 3 books = expert is true for most of those folks. 0_o

See my post on "How to Get Good at Anything" and its reference to the 3 Book Rule.

Oh, and the time estimate to read those 3 books? 3-4 months. Maybe if they were, I dunno, thermonuclear astrophysics or written in Navajo?

I can kill a book in a day. I can kill more than one if they are short and/or light reading. I used to write papers by checking out an armload of books on Friday, reading them (or at least the relevant parts) Friday night and Saturday morning, writing the paper later Saturday, proofing it Sunday, and turning it in Monday morning. It drove some of my teachers buggy. If I'm going on a weekend trip, I want at least one book per day, and 2+ is better, because if I'm in a car or lounging around for hours with nothing to do but read, a book won't last me long at all.


>>Seriously, I haven't been in position to have the time and brain space to do much research reading in the last year, so my way of working was to pick a topic, whether gardening or mathematics or pre-Egyptian civilizations, was to focus on the topic for a month. Even at my worst, that was four to six books in a month.<<

That's a good approach.

>> Oh, wow. I need to rethink my usual diatribe against modern education. It's woefully incomplete.<<

Yeah. It really, really is. But a big part of the problem is just that if kids don't come into school as bookworms, they quickly learn to hate reading, because school makes it really fucking miserable. The result is that most adults don't read because nobody can force them to.

Re: Question:

[dialecticdreamer]

Yesterday's library trip ended up with needing to request half of my wanted titles from other libraries. I went with the most popular twelve, and the library had ONE on shelves. So, just browsing the stacks I also picked up a book on library urbanization for librarians, a collection of essays supporting multilingualism and the use of translations on that path, and my just-for-funsies fiction novel was written before 1800.

I see no contradictions in any of it.

Re: Question:

[ysabetwordsmith]

See my answers to the booknook friending meme.

Re: Question:

[dialecticdreamer]

Thank you! Joined booknook!

Re: Question:

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm happy I could tip you to a new community.