A list of prompts is easy to love in December and hard to use in February. “A book with a map inside” is a fine idea until you are standing at a shelf with no notion of what has one. So here is a book for every prompt in our 2027 reading challenge that can have one, and a way in for the rest.
There are 99 books below. We chose ones that fit their prompt properly, that most libraries can lend you, and that mix old and new, short and long. No title appears twice, so you can treat the list as a plan without one book filling two boxes. They are suggestions, not a syllabus. If you have read one, take the next, or ignore the lot.
How to use this list
Do not try to plan all 52. Pick three prompts, look at the suggestions, choose one and start. When you finish it, choose again. That is how the challenge is meant to be used, and it leaves room for the book a friend hands you in April.
The prompts keep the wording and numbers of the free list on the challenge page. Here they are grouped by kind, which makes it easier to find a short book or a poem when you need one.
Place and time
Where the book is set, and when it came out.
Set in a country you've never visited
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy · India
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe · Nigeria
- Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto · Japan, translated by Megan Backus
Set in winter
- Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata · a hot-spring town buried in snow
- The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey · Alaska in the 1920s
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis · a land where it is always winter
Set in summer
- Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury · a boy's summer in 1928
- Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman · a summer in northern Italy
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald · the summer of 1922
From the year 1927
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
- Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse · first published in German that year
Set more than 200 years ago
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel · Tudor England
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens · London and Paris, 1770s to 1790s
- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas · France, 1625
Set in the future
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Dune by Frank Herbert
Set on a train, a ship or a plane
- Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie · a train
- Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne · trains and ships
Nonfiction about a place
- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson · the Appalachian Trail
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt · Savannah, Georgia
Set in a library or bookshop
- The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón · a Barcelona bookshop and a hidden library of forgotten books
- The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
- The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George · a bookshop on a barge
Set in the city where you live
Ask the librarian or the nearest independent bookshop for novels set where you live. They tend to know, and they like being asked.
Size and shape
Short, long, and the books that are not novels.
Under 200 pages
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
Over 500 pages
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
A short-story collection
- Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
- Dubliners by James Joyce
- Tenth of December by George Saunders
Poetry
- Devotions by Mary Oliver · selected poems
- Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
- Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
Written in letters or diaries
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker · letters
- Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster · letters
- Dracula by Bram Stoker · diaries, letters and clippings
A graphic novel
- Maus by Art Spiegelman
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
- Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
A play
- The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
- A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Read in a single day
- Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Kinds of book
Genre, subject and the stranger corners of the shelf.
A mystery
- And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
A fairy tale retold
- Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik · Rumpelstiltskin
- Cinder by Marissa Meyer · Cinderella
- Beauty by Robin McKinley · Beauty and the Beast
A memoir
- Educated by Tara Westover
- Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
- Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Science, explained
- Cosmos by Carl Sagan
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
For the mathematical end of science, our short notes on six famous equations are in gifts for math lovers.
A book about food
- Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
- Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
- Heartburn by Nora Ephron
A book about books
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman · essays
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The first in a series
- The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
A debut novel
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Translated from another language
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez · from Spanish
- Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata · from Japanese
- The Vegetarian by Han Kang · from Korean
A classic you pretended to have read
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Authors and reputations
Who wrote it, and what people said about it.
Written by someone over 70
- The Testaments by Margaret Atwood · she was 79 when it came out
- Home by Toni Morrison · she was 81
By a Nobel laureate
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
Banned somewhere, once
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- 1984 by George Orwell
Each has been challenged or banned somewhere at some point. The reasons are often more interesting than the books' reputations.
A book that became a film, read it first
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- Atonement by Ian McEwan
- The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Recommended on BookTok or Bookstagram
- The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
- It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover
- Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
Chosen because they are widely tagged, not because we think you will like all three.
Has a map inside
- The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
Check your edition, since not every printing keeps the map.
Its title is a question
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
- Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
A colour in its title
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
- A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
Its author died before you were born
Jane Austen died in 1817, Charlotte Brontë in 1855 and Virginia Woolf in 1941. Any of them qualifies, and so does most of the classics shelf.
Only you can answer these
Prompts that depend on you, your shelf or your town. Each has a way in.
Published the year you were born
Search for your birth year plus “in literature”. Wikipedia keeps a page for each year, and library catalogues can filter by publication date.
Recommended by a friend
Ask one person for one book, not a list. A list gives you an excuse.
A book you own but never opened
Look at the shelf you walk past. The one you bought on impulse and then felt faintly guilty about is the answer.
Chosen only by its cover
Stand in a section you never visit, give yourself five minutes, and pick by the cover alone. No back-cover blurbs.
By an author who shares your initials
Search a library catalogue by your initials. If you are J. A., Jane Austen is waiting. If you are C. D., it is Charles Dickens.
A reread of a childhood favourite
Choose the one you remember by feeling rather than by plot. If you cannot remember what happens, that is the one.
Published this year
Check the new-releases table in a bookshop or the library's recent arrivals. If you are reading this early in the year, mark the prompt and come back for the spring catalogues.
A book a stranger was reading
This one needs a train, a cafe and a little nerve. Ask what it is, and whether they would recommend it.
Fewer than 1,000 ratings online
Small presses are a good hunting ground. Sort a shelf on a book site by number of ratings and start from the bottom.
From a used bookshop
Go in, set a ten-minute timer, and buy the first thing that surprises you.
Gifted to you
If nobody has given you a book lately, ask for one. Or look at the gift you put aside and never read.
Has an animal on the cover
Check your own shelves first. You probably own several.
Picked from the library at random
Pick a shelf number and a position before you go in: the third shelf, the twelfth book. No peeking at the one next to it.
A book you'll gift to someone afterwards
Pick one you would put your name in. For more ideas on what to give a reader, see our gift guide for book lovers.
The one you've been saving
Save it for December, when the other fifty-one are done. Then read it.
Make it yours
Swap freely. If a pick has not earned your interest after fifty pages, put it down and take another from the same prompt. There is more on that in how to read 52 books in a year, along with how many minutes a day the full list takes. And if you are weighing this challenge against others, we compared them.
To tick them off, the 2027 Reading Challenge Kit is our own printable. It has a 52-spine bookshelf to colour in, one spine per book, plus monthly logs and bingo cards.
Questions
How do I choose a book for each reading challenge prompt?
Start with three prompts, not 52. Read the suggestions, pick one that appeals, and choose the next three when you finish. Prompts you cannot imagine yet can wait.
Can one book count for two prompts?
In our challenge, choose one box for each book, so that every completed prompt represents a different book. The suggestions above never repeat a title for that reason.
Do I have to read the prompts in order?
No. Read them in any order.
Do I have to read 52 books?
No. Fifty-two is the full list, not a requirement. A 12-book or 26-book version works too: choose the prompts you want and keep one book per completed prompt.
Do audiobooks and ebooks count?
Yes. Choose the format that suits you: a printed book, an ebook or an audiobook. Library books and books you already own count too.
What if I have already read the suggested books?
Take another from the same prompt, or ask a librarian for a book that fits it. The suggestions are starting points, not the only answers.