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2025 Reading Challenge: Discover New Books and Reignite Your Love for Reading

kristen

Welcome to our 2nd annual reading challenge! I can’t believe it is 2025. That sounds like a science fiction setting. Wasn’t 12 Monkeys set in 2025? Or maybe it was Mad Max. I dunno. Probably there were a few. Anyway. Here are some new prompts for 2025. 

I cheerfully admit that I totally failed to complete even my own reading challenge in 2024. I have no idea what happened or why, but I hit a BIG reading slump that lasted for several months. At one point, it took me the better part of a month to read a 300-page Star Trek book that I should have plowed through in a weekend. So that was weird. Because of that, I decided to create a smaller challenge for 2025. I did 24 challenge prompts, which will average out to 2 books a month. That is a much more doable goal at the moment, for me anyway. I threw in 2 bonus prompts as well for extra fun while completing the tasks.

Did you complete a reading challenge in 2024, whether it was this one or a different one? What are the best books you read as a result? 

The Prompts:

  1. Set in a non-patriarchal society, because FUCK the patriarchy
  2. Set in or about nature
  3. Reread a favorite childhood book 
  4. A nonfiction by a woman about a STEM field 
  5. By or about a person struggling with a mental illness
  6. Recommended by a family member
  7. A middle grade book
  8. A nonfiction about an -ology
  9. Passes the Bechdel Test
  10. A book that was adapted to the screen
  11. A book that is a novelization of a TV show or movie
  12. A book that won an award in 2023
  13. A book with a yellow spine
  14. Flowers on the cover
  15. A retelling
  16. A banned or frequently challenged book
  17. Explores a culture that is different from yours
  18. Features snakes in some way (2025 is the Year of the Snake in Chinese zodiac)
  19. Set in a utopian society, because reality is dystopian enough, thank you
  20. Related to medicine
  21. About witches or nuns
  22. About geek culture
  23. Takes place over one 24-hour period
  24. Three or more point-of-view characters
  25. Bonus challenge 1: Complete the challenge using books only by people who identify as women
  26. Bonus challenge 2: Use the prompts to complete the A-Z reading challenge