Book Bingo NW 2025: New to You Format

Of all the 2025 Book Bingo categories, “New to You Format” is the one I see stumping folks the most. So let’s work through it and see if we can help even the most widely read participant find something that fits! Afterwards, visit this booklist with two examples of each category explored below: New to You Format ideas.

Beginning with low hanging fruit, and sticking to the idea of “format” as a mode-of-delivery: have you read an ebook, an audiobook, a large print book, a graphic novel? If you’ve listened to audiobooks, perhaps a full cast rendering with multiple narrators would be new to you.

Casting a wider net, looking at form as a type of format, perhaps read a play from the Central Library’s Level 9 play file. Try a zine! The Central Library’s Zapp Zine Collection is hosting open hours throughout the summer, or drop into the Broadview, Fremont or Northeast branches to view their zine deposit collections. Poetry is rich with options, from novels in verse to epic poems and more. Digging into art, check out an art monograph or an exhibition catalogue.

Explore an epistolary novel, or an oral history. Have you read a novel that includes recipes? How about a parallel text, with the work in its original language on one side and the English translation on the other? Or maybe try a novel-within-a-novel. You could check out a retelling. Several “Best of” series annually publish compilations of the best work across many genres each year.

And finally, if you have checked off every item on this list, I offer you the solution found by my most widely read friend: a libretto!

~ posted by Andrea G.

For more ideas for books to meet your Summer Book Bingo challenge, follow our Shelf Talk BookBingoNW2025 series or check the hashtag #BookBingoNW2025 on social media. Book Bingo is presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures and the King County Library System.

  Of all the 2025 Book Bingo categories, “New to You Format” is the one I see stumping folks the most. So let’s work through it and see if we can help even the most widely read participant find something that fits! Afterwards, visit this booklist with two examples of each category explored below: New to 

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