This week was my birthday and I’m so excited that I can finally reveal the birthday surprise that I’ve been preparing for you during the past few weeks. It’s a reading bingo – and even better a feminist one!
As some of you might know already, I am a huge fan of reading bingos. It always brings me immense joy to take part in them. Reading books and crossing of squares until I have my first bingo. So for my birthday I decided to share a bit of that joy with you and create my own feminist reading bingo as a gift to you (to be honest, it’s also bit of a gift to myself because I’ll be using it as well of course).
Because I wanted it to have special twist and theme, I decided to focus on feminism. You know how passionate I am about feminism and feminist books. It’s playing such a big role in my life, on the blog and also when it comes to reading. So it seemed only natural that my reading bingo would also have a feminist theme.
Here it is! I can imagine that those of you who never heard the term reading bingo before must be a bit puzzled. So I summed up the basic rules and workings of the game down below.
What is a reading bingo?
A reading bingo works much like a normal bingo. You also have a bingo card which is separated into different squares. The aim of the game is to cross all the squares in one row in order to get a bingo. Bingos can be vertical, horizontal or diagonal. The square in the middle is a free space.
When playing a reading bingo you cross squares off by reading and fulfilling the different prompts. For example, by reading “a novel” or “a book with a great cover”. One book can count for several prompts. You can play the bingo by yourself or together with others. And you can decide whether you aim to get one bingo, several ones or whether you want to cross off the whole bingo card.
So, what makes it feminist?
The books you choose to read for the different prompts. I included some that are more designed towards feminist reading, such as “a second wave feminist text” or “a feminist classic”. But generally, it’s up to you, the player, to decide which books you want to include in a feminist reading bingo.
I also tried so include some prompts to make the reading choices for this feminist reading bingo a little more diverse and intersectional like “Written by a LGBTQIA+ author” or “Read Texts from at least three different continents”. But in the end, it’s up to you whether you want to cross of these squares for your personal feminist reading bingo or not.
The most important rule: Have fun!
I designed this bingo for fun and I hope that some of you will also have fun completing it and reading for your personal feminist reading bingo. But you don’t need to follow its prompts meticulously. Reading is supposed to be a enjoyable hobby, not a duty. Just have fun with it.
Personally, I’ll plan to read until I filled up the whole bingo card. But I won’t let the prompts dictate what I’ll be reading. I’ll simply cross a square of when I happened to have read a book that fits its prompt. If you choose to do this feminist reading bingo and post about it on social media, please tag me @therecoveringbookworm or use the hashtag #feministreadingbingo. You can also participate in this reading challenge on The StoryGraph.
Do you have any questions about the bingo or prompts? Will you take part?