The Champaca Reading Challenge: 2025

Hello and welcome to the Champaca Reading Challenge!

Every year, the team at Champaca puts together a list of prompts that help us to read widely and diversely, and to discover books we may not otherwise pick up. For 2025, we’ve got twelve prompts for you — one for each month. Let’s discover our new favourite books together!

How this works: Just pick a book to read that fits each prompt! You could interpret the prompts in different ways, picking something that’s already on your TBR or finding something new to read. Think of this as a way to discover books beyond our horizons and comfort zones. And if you’re curious, you can revisit our prompts for 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Remember to use the hashtag #ChampacaReadingChallenge when you post on social media, and let us know what you’re reading. Read on to find our curated recommendations for this year, and follow along on social media throughout the year for more recommendations from our team!

Download a PDF of the prompts to print out here.

1. On walking

For this prompt, pick up a book that deals with walking in some way — a travel diary based on a writer’s walks, a novel featuring a long walk, or even a book about a walk in specific.

We recommend Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, in which author Taran N. Khan travels Kabul on foot, deliberately against the advice of people who tell her to never walk alone in the city. This is a personal, clear-eyed, and illuminating view of a vibrant city, a view often overpowered by narratives of war. We also recommend Son of the Thundercloud by Easterine Kire, a short fable-like story inspired by creation stories and myths, the tale of a man “destined to wander,” who leaves his village and walks for miles.

Find more recommendations here!

2. In the form of a diary or journal

Novels written in the form of diaries can be so interesting — there’s an implication of intimacy, of a secret shared between (fictional) writer and (real) reader. A similar thing holds through for the published journals of real-life people — a writer’s journal offers us a view into their creative process, for instance.

Our nonfiction recommendation for this prompt is Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary by Yuvan Aves, the result of years spent observing and thinking deeply about his surroundings and the natural world around us. We also recommend I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (who also wrote The Hundred and One Dalmatians!). This one takes the form of the diary of a young girl Cassandra who lives with her family in a ruined castle, and begins with the line “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”

More of our suggestions are here!

3. On grief

Sometimes writing and reading can help us grapple with emotions that feel bigger than us. Grief is one of those — a universal emotion, but one that often leaves us feeling isolated and scared. We hope you’ll pick up a book that’ll comfort you through that feeling.

We suggest Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, in which a woman, facing the loss of her best friend, takes in his Great Dane, and forms an unexpected bond with the dog in their shared grief. Jeet Thayil’s These Errors are Correct is a poetic exploration of grief, originally published in 2018 and brought back into print in the recent past.

Click here for more books for this prompt.

4. With flowers on the cover

We always like to add a fun prompt that covers a range of books. Anything goes for this one, as long as you can find a flower or two on the cover! Pick from your already existing TBR, or pick up one of the books we suggest.

We love Violet Kupersmith’s Build Your House Around My Body, which features a lot of flowers on its cover. Set in Vietnam, this is a deeply engrossing story of history, folklore, and haunting, as chimerical as its characters. The Garden Against Time is the newest book by one of Team Champaca’s favourite authors, Olivia Laing, in which she reflects on the space of the garden, in her own personal life, history, and literature.

You can find more flowery books here!

5. On protest or dissent

For this prompt, you can pick up something related to a protest or actions of dissent from anywhere in the world, or any time in history — from the ancient past to our vivid present — or even from imagined worlds and futures. The word “dissent” can encompass a world of actions, so we think of this as quite a wide-ranging prompt, full of possibilities — from political dissent to climate change activism, or writing and reading as an act of dissent.

We recommend picking up This Too Is India, a collection of writings by twenty people edited by Githa Hariharan, all engaging with the idea of diversity and dissent in our country. In the imagined space, we recommend Gautam Bhatia’s series The Wall and The Horizon, which takes place in a city, Sumer, surrounded by an impenetrable wall. When a young group of people begin to question what lies beyond the wall, they also begin to question the rules that govern their society.

More of our recommendations are here.

6. That's a translated mystery

Pick up a mystery translated from Japanese, or Swedish, or Urdu, or Tamil!

We recommend The Master Key by Masako Togawa, translated from Japanese by Simon Grove. Set in an apartment building, this is a classic Japanese mystery, brought into English by Pushkin Vertigo. Or follow Detective Maigret on a case in a dark, isolated neighbourhood in Georges Simenon’s Night at the Crossroads, translated from French by Linda Coverdale.

Find more of our suggestions here!

7. Published by Women Unlimited, Blaft, Navayana, or Daunt Books

We’re highlighting some of our favourite indie publishers, in India and abroad!

Women Unlimited is a feminist publishing house that publishes a range of fiction and nonfiction, in English and in translation. We recommend picking up The Collector's Chughtai, a collection of short stories by Ismat Chughtai, translated from Urdu by Tahira Naqvi.

Blaft Publications publishes unusual and offbeat stories — ghost stories, folklore and myths, weird fiction and graphic narratives. Pick up The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, an anthology of sci-fi and fantasy from writers both well-known and new.

Navayana is a publishing house with a focus on political and anti-caste narratives. We recommend Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir Of A Lapsed Revolutionary, Gita Ramaswamy’s groundbreaking memoir of an extraordinary life.

Daunt Books Publishing is a London-based publisher, which grew out of Daunt Books, a chain of independent bookstores in London. They publish bold and original writing, as well as bringing lesser-known classics back into print. Pick up John McPhee’s Coming Into The Country, an unforgettable and vivid account of the prolific writer’s journeys into Alaska.

Find more books for this prompt here.

8. With a name of a person in the title

So many great books are named after the characters that inhabit the pages — Jane Austen’s Emma, Baburnama, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Pick up something that has the name of a person in the title! This could be fiction, nonfiction (the subtitles of biographies will be a great place to look for people’s names), or even poetry (there are tons of poetry collections called The Selected Poems of…).

We recommend Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a play in which Virginia Woolf doesn’t actually make an appearance, but her name is invoked multiple times. Or pick up Shrayana Bhattacharya’s Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh for an exploration of the incredible impact Shah Rukh Khan has on the women of India.

More names in book titles are here!

9. Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize

The Wainwright Prize celebrates nature writing in all its forms, and awards books published in the UK since 2013. The books shortlisted across the prize’s history include books on whales, weather, and walking; they include memoirs, travel writing, and children’s books.

Pick up Katherine Rundell’s The Golden Mole and Other Vanishing Treasure, an illustrated journey across the world’s most unusual, fascinating, and endangered creatures – the pangolin, the seahorse – as Rundell draws our attention to the wonder of the world. Or read Cal Flyn’s  Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape, an exploration of what happens in those strange zones of the world where humans no longer live, and where nature has adapted to new rules.

Find more of Wainwright Prize’s shortlisted titles here.

10. About maths

If you’re the kind of person who runs away from the idea of maths, we hope this prompt will help you find a new love for the subject! Pick up a book about how maths works in nature, or the maths that underpins the technology we all use. Or perhaps a novel about a mathematician!

We recommend The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, a children’s novel that you’ll find delightful for all ages. In it, young Milo finds himself in the “Lands Beyond,” a strange world in flux as its two rulers – Azaz, the king of words, and the Mathemagician, the king of numbers – war against each other. In Around the World in 80 Games, author Marcus du Sautoy looks with delight at a variety of games from Monopoly to chess, with a mathematician’s eye.

Find more maths books here!

11. That is a debut novel

Pick up a debut novel! You could find an author you love, and track down their first-ever published book. Or, perhaps, you could pick up a new debut, the first book by an author you’ve not read yet. You could even read a book by someone with only one published novel under their name!

We suggest Kanan Gill’s Acts of God, the stand-up comedian’s debut science fiction novel. Intricate, ambitious, and often very moving, this book is full of clever witticisms and big ideas. We also recommend Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. Before she wrote Gone Girl, Flynn took us on an unsettling and unforgettable journey as a journalist returns to her family home, where she researches a crime and uncovers secrets and memories far more serious than she bargained for.

Click here for more recommendations for debut novels.

12. About paintings or artists

There’s a lot of ways to interpret this prompt. You could read a biography of a fictional account of your favourite artist. You could find a book about a painting you really love. Or you could simply find a book set in a museum or featuring a painter.

We recommend Rosarita by Anita Desai, in which a young woman on holiday in Mexico is approached by a woman who claims to have known her mother, who apparently visited Mexico years ago as a young artist. Or pick up Katy Hessel’s The Story Of Art Without Men, a look at art history from the margins, attempting to put women artists from around the world at the centre of the narrative they’ve been excluded from.

Find more of our recommendations here.