Hello and welcome to the Champaca Reading Challenge for 2026!
Every year, our team has the most fun putting together a list of prompts to help us to read widely and diversely across the year, and to discover books we may not otherwise think of reading. We hope these prompts will introduce you to new authors, new worlds, and new favourite books!
Remember to use the hashtag #ChampacaReadingChallenge when you post on social media, and let us know what you’re reading. We’d love to know!
For 2026, we’ve got twelve prompts for you — one for each month:
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, 2024, and 2025.
While we have a prompt for every month, you can choose to read them in any order. There’s no deadline and no expiry date — these prompts and our recommendations will always be there to help you discover new reads!
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. Every month, we’ll be spotlighting one book for a theme that we love.
(Each book in this illustration fits at least one of the prompts for 2026. Can you figure out which?)
Our Recommendations
January: That's a coming-of-age story
Let’s start 2026 off with something fitting — a coming-of-age story! Coming-of-age stories are typically ones that follow characters from childhood into adulthood, or through an important transitional experience. Great for the beginning of a new year.
We recommend Bhavika Govil’s Hot Water, which follows three characters — single mother Ma, fourteen-year-old Ashu, and nine-year-old Mira — across one eventful summer. Or pick up Elif Batuman’s spectacular The Idiot, a thoughtful, funny, and unforgettable novel about an undergraduate at Harvard as she navigates love, language, and a search for meaning.
Find more recommendations and get your copies here.
February: About sea creatures
For this prompt, we’re going underwater. Pick any sea creature you’d like — real or mythical — and read all about it. We recommend The Gospel of the Eels, a moving memoir about a very mysterious creature: the eel. Or pick up one of the many octopus books we love — The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, one of our favourite SFF novels.
More of our suggestions are here.
March: That was previously banned
There are many reasons books are banned, historically and in our present day. In the USA, “Banned Books Week” was launched in 1982 to respond to a sudden surge of books being challenged in schools, libraries, and stores, for their themes or characters or use of language. We recommend looking into books that were banned in your state or country, and figuring out why — what made them a challenge for the people who opposed them?
We recommend picking up The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson, a picture book that was banned (and burned) in Nazi Germany and Spain, as people were convinced its story had a subtle political meaning. Closer to home, The Adivasi Will Not Dance was banned in August 2017 in Jharkhand. The ban was removed in December 2017.
Click here for more books for this prompt.
April: About technology
For April, pick up a book about technology. This prompt is purposefully vague — you could dip into something technical, like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, or some fun science fiction, like a Philip K. Dick. If you want our suggestions, we recommend in fiction Real Life by Amrita Mahale, a mystery that revolves (partly) around the ways in which privacy and technology intersect. For nonfiction, Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia is a Champaca favourite — a well-researched and clear-eyed view of tech that deliberately takes the focus out of Silicon Valley and onto the multitude of people who either have a hand in making the tech we use, or are disproportionately affected by the best and worst of it.
You can find more books about technology, in its various forms, here.
May: By José Saramago, Toni Morrison, or Eunice de Souza
In May, we’re highlighting three authors we admire.
José Saramago was a Portuguese writer, and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His books are imaginative and ironic, and come to us in wonderfully readable translations. We recommend The Double, a doppelgänger story.
Toni Morrison’s books are moving and beautiful stories that touch upon — among much else — race, gender, a reckoning with America’s past and America’s present. Her novel Beloved, which won the Pulitzer in 1988, is a perfect place to start if you haven’t read her yet.
And finally, Eunice de Souza, one of the most original and delightful poets you’ll read. Volcano collects some of her best-known poetry across decades of writing, a look into themes like family, selfhood, gender, and society.
Take your pick from here.
June: Set in extreme weather conditions
A compelling setting for a book can be when something is taken to an extreme — like the weather. Think the cold of Antarctica or the heat of a desert; think tornados, volcanoes, floods. This prompt could cover non-fiction travelogues or ecofiction that reckons with our warming world.
We suggest picking up our forever favourite, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, a beloved science fiction novel which takes place on an ice-covered planet called Winter. Or pick up The Heat and the Fury, which is a compelling and unforgettable journalistic view at the frontlines of climate violence around the world, interrogating climate change’s effect on people, relationships, livelihoods, and nations.
Find more of our suggestions here!
July: About time travel
For this prompt, pick up something that plays with time a bit. And if you’re not a science fiction reader, never fear — time travel can be a part of a larger literary story, or even a children’s book like A Wrinkle in Time!
We suggest Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, which gently and movingly takes us across time and space through interconnected lives that link up in very surprising ways. And When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead is one of those middle grade books that you can read and love at any age — a delightful read that brought this bookseller to tears.
And watch out for Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch, releasing in 2026 — a crackling, funny, gripping story set during World War II, that plays with time and history in endlessly fun ways.
Find more books for this prompt here.
August: About language
Books about language take many forms, and we guarantee you’ll find something of interest. How about a nonfiction book about how language has evolved on the internet, as in Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet? Or a scifi world where only a specialised group of people can speak the language of the Ariekei, which requires two people to speak with one mind, as in China Mieville’s Embassytown? Or maybe you’d be interested in Jhumpa Lahiri’s experience learning and living in Italian, in In Other Words and Translating Myself and Others.
We recommend Peggy Mohan’s Father Tongue, Mother Land, a fascinating look at the way South Asian languages came to life — interacting with each other, spreading across the continent, and always evolving. Or pick up Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, which follows an interpreter working at the Hague, whose experience with language and selfhood involve a constant blurring of boundaries.
More language books here!
September: About the means of production
The means of production are, basically, the tools and resources that enable production — land, labour, capital; things like factories, tools, and infrastructure. This is a wide-ranging prompt that we encourage you to have fun with! For example: what do labour and resources look like in the digital age?
We suggest Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, a novel inspired by Erdrich’s grandfather’s experiences resisting American bills meant to end federal recognition of the sovereignty of indigenous tribes. Gita Ramaswamy’s Land, Guns, Caste, Woman is a memoir of the author’s involvement in the Naxalite movement, in activism for Dalit rights, and reflections on land struggles, casteism, and gender dynamics.
Find more here.
October: With an animal on the cover
Anything goes for this prompt! Look at your bookshelf and pick up any title with a creature on the cover. Our suggestions are Biopeculiar by Gigi Ganguly, a set of fantastical and speculative short stories about the natural world and our interactions with it. Or Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, a beautiful memoir of the relationship between a woman and a newly born hare thrust into her care.
Find more creatures on covers here!
November: About flying
We love prompts that encourage us to think outside the box. For this one on flying, you can go so many routes: books about travel via airplane; books about birds and insects; books about fantastical things with wings, like dragons. Maybe you could interpret this in a completely new way we haven’t thought of!
We recommend Shahnaz Habib’s Airplane Mode, a series of essays about travel that touch on the personal, the historical, and the cultural, to give us a surprising and wide-ranging view of what travel means today. Or Indra Das’s The Last Dragoners of Bowbazaar, a gentle and immersive coming-of-age story that, obviously, involves dragons.
Click here for more recommendations!
December: About cities
And finally, pick up a book about a city or cities — maybe a memoir or a novel set in the city you live in, or one that you want to visit. Or a fictional one that never existed! This is maybe the widest ranging prompt on the list, so if you’re looking for stories of a city in specific, drop us an email or a message and we’d be happy to suggest our favourite reads.
To start you off, we suggest The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City, edited by Bilal Moin, an anthology of 375 poems about cities across our country, past and present. Organised by place, this one is a perfect read for poetry-lovers. Or pick up Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a fictional conversation about “fragmentary urban images” between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
Find more city books here!