Law of Fives 2026 Reading Bingo

Nic (aka Dragon Rambles) shared her plans for her 2026 ‘Law of Fives’ reading challenge in early December, and it sat at the back of my mind as something fun I’d like to try. I haven’t done any kind of reading challenge or ‘bingo’ since I was a School Librarian and trying to come up with ways to get the kids reading (I probably had more fun with it than they did!). I already shared that I want to try to be a bit more intentional with what I read this year, and I thought this could be a fun way to plan that out. Can I explore the things I want to in my reading and “win” at bingo?

If you are interested, then Nic’s original post is here, and her updated tracking spreadsheet, with nifty progress tracking formulas,.

Over the last week, with January designated as my Planning Month, I’ve been thinking about this a lot and created my own spreadsheet to plan out what books I could read to meet these goals. Since any book can count towards any number of squares, I wanted to see how much overlap I could get with the various categories and see what options I’ve got to work with! I also wanted to work from books I already own or that I could easily get from the Library. There are also some books I’d happily, or even prefer, to read on audio versus print, which is important to work out as audiobooks I can multi-task with exercise and chores, and therefore get through quicker!

I actually found that I get a good amount of overlap for some categories. I was already planning to go back into Discworld and read the Tiffany Aching series of books. That would tick off a five-book series, of which I’ll read the first and second books; three of them were published in the 2000s, and apparently all five of them were in the Locus awards top 5 (4 of the 5 were winners)! Plus, they’d give me the Nac Mac Feegle as a fantastic creature. And even better, I really enjoy Discworld in the audio format, read by the fantastic Indira Varma again!

I was also already planning to reread the Adrian Mole series, which is 7 books in total, and they were published from 1982-2009, so I get a good spread of years covered too. I already own them, and since they aren’t particularly long books and written in diary format, they should be quick reads. I am really looking forward to revisiting them!

For my featured authors, I chose Philip K. Dick – which I have been going on about re-reading for a while now! – and Angela Carter. They both generally wrote books of shorter length, though I expect I will take my time with them because they also contain a lot of ideas! A lot of those will be re-reads, and I already own at least 5 of each of their works. They each write in my favourite genres too – science fiction and literary fiction (magical realism!). With Dick, I also have an e-Book of essays on philosophy in his works, so if I get inspired with learning more philosophy after I read How To Be Perfect next month, that’ll be an avenue of ideas I can explore.

My neglected genres will be Horror and Historical fiction. With Horror, I have just enough options in my eBook backlog and in the collection of Vintage Classics Weird Girl Fiction, which I got in print last year. Some of those would also count as historical if I needed the boost (Black Magic and The Gilda Stories). It actually just occurred to me that some of the Angela Carter books could definitely also count (The Passion of New Eve gave me nightmares in 2008 when I read it with the flu)! I’m also about to finish my (third) re-read of Rouge by Mona Awad, which is also under the umbrella of horror.

Historical is a bit more of a struggle, but it turned out there is some overlap there with Australian and New Zealand authors (particularly in terms of the ones I can most easily get hold of from the library!).

I already had two books by New Zealand authors in my TBR – The Books of Guilt by Catherine Chidgley and The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. The latter has a Historical setting and is well over 500 pages, so triple duty. The former is speculative fiction with an alternate historical setting, so I could count it if I wanted.

For Australian authors, I’ve been able to make a start with Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers, which I’ve had for a while to read. She is usually reliable for an entertaining thriller! I will probably try to do as many as possible on audio for this category because I do enjoy an Aussie narrator! I should be able to get a Kate Grenville book through BorrowBox. I learned that Heather Rose is Australian; she’s the author of The Museum of Modern Love, a book I’ve had my eye on since last year, so this is the poke to buy it (don’t think I’ll find that at the library).

For my genre exploration, I’m going with science fiction (technically a subgenre, I know). I think this prompt is a great one! Philip K Dick writes science fiction, and I’ve got a number of books in my eBook backlog to easily take care of reading in different subgenres. Some of these could overlap with the series prompts too – Octavia E. Butler’s Xogenesis (Lilith’s Brood) series (also includes aliens), the last Expanse book, Gideon the Ninth (also NZ author),

For the favourite subgenre, I think I’m going to switch this to literary fiction. I am not really a genre reader; I’ll give anything a go as long as it is well written and character-driven, and that’s what I am looking for when I’m choosing books to read (and why I am sometimes hard to please). So I need to have my Lit. Fic. represented on my bingo card, or it won’t feel right! Though maybe it is “cheating” because I will cross this one off without any special effort.

Many of the other squares will take care of themselves for me: re-reads, new to me authors, under 200 pages and the decades. Debuts, animals (can I count holographic sheep?), and fantastic creatures (I should get aliens, vampires, androids and Nac Mac Feegle at least), I may need to keep my eye on.

The ones that will be hardest are likely to be reading five books that are second in a series and finishing five series, as that relies on my enjoying all of the new series that I try.

The absolute hardest will be reading five books that are over 500 pages. This is the least likely one for me to achieve! Most books I read are around 300 pages or under, then for some reason there is a big jump up to 600-1000 pages, which is a very different proposition. I generally don’t like really long books – usually I find them to be too long and bloated – but there are some I do want to give a go: The Luminaries by Eleanour Catton, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Suzanne Clarke (Husband just got this for Christmas), and I do have Les Misérables on audiobook… all 67 hours of it! We are hoping to have a proper beach/pool holiday this year, so perhaps that will be my chance to get through some big books from my “beach reads” list!

With all my options mapped out, I should be easily able to get BINGO, and then we’ll see if I can get to a full house. Theoretically possible, but probably unlikely! Even if I don’t do it, this was actually really fun to research and plan.

(And of course I’m also thinking about how I can build a tracker into my Obsidian database…)