The 52 Book Club’s 2025 Reading Challenge

I finished the 52 Book Club’s 2024 challenge and really loved the prompts and how it made me read out of my comfort zone, so I’ll be doing it again in 2025! There were some books I loved, and some I didn’t like so much and only read because of the challenge, but that’s the fun of it and the reason I want to do it again! You can find a list of 2024’s prompts and the books I read for each of the prompts here.

The 52 Book Club’s annual reading challenge is made up of 52 unique prompts. The goal is to match one book to each prompt, for a total of fifty-two books over the course of the year. Prompts are related to everything from specific titles, to cover designs, authors, genres, settings, themes, characters, etc. (Think of it like a giant bookish scavenger hunt!) We encourage participants to try books outside of their regular reading comfort zones and push themselves to read more, read differently, and get creative with it!

Visit The 52 Book Club to find out more and join the challenge!

Below is the 52 Book Club’s list of prompts for 2025. These prompts are linked to Goodreads Lists of books that fit each prompt. I copy and pasted them from here, for easy access, and so I can link to each prompt with the books I finish.

The 2025 Goodreads Lists:

1. A pun in the title – The Crêpes of Wrath by Sarah Fox
2. A character with red hair – Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
3. Title starts with letter “M” – The Measure by Nikki Erlick
4. Title starts with letter “N” – Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
5. Plot includes a heist – The Art Thief by Michael Finkel
6. Genre One: Set in Spring – Dragons of Spring Dawning by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
7. Genre Two: Set in Summer – The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
8. Genre Three: Set in Autumn – Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
9. Genre Four: Set in Winter – Dragons of Winter Night by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
10. Author’s last name is also a first name – Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
11. A prequel – Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
12. Has a moon on the cover – Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
13. Title is ten letters or less – Guillotine by Delilah S. Dawson
14. Climate fiction – The Terror by Dan Simmons
15. Includes Latin American history – Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas
16. Author has won an Edgar award – In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
17. Told in verse – The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
18. A character who can fly – The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna
19. Has short chapters – Shark Heart by Emily Habeck
20. A fairy tale retelling – A Sorceress Comes To Call by T. Kingfisher
21. Character’s name in the title – Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley
22. Found family trope – The Love Haters by Katherine Center
23. A sprayed edge – The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst
24. Title is a spoiler – Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson
25. Breaks the fourth wall – If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino
26. More than a million copies sold – The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman
27. Features a magician – Oz: The Complete Collection by L. Frank Baum
28. A crossover (Set in a shared universe) – Revival by Stephen King
29. Shares universe with prompt 28 – Joyland by Stephen King
30. In the public domain – The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
31. Audiobook has multiple narrators – Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
32. Includes a diary entry – The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
33. A standalone novel – A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
34. Direction in the title – East of Eden by John Steinback
35. Written in third person – The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan
36. Final sentence is less than 6 words long – 1984 by George Orwell
37. Genre chosen for you by someone else – Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
38. An adventure story – Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett
39. Has an epigraph – When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
40. Stream of consciousness narrative – Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
41. Cover font is in a primary color – Vicious by V.E. Schwab
42. Non-human antagonist – Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
43. Explores social class – Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
44. A celebrity on the cover – Every Tool’s A Hammer by Adam Savage
45. Author releases more than one book a year – ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
46. Read in a “-ber” month – Taste by Stanley Tucci
47. “I think it was blue” – Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
48. Related to the word “puzzle” – Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia
49. Set in a country with an active volcano – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
50. Set in the 1940s – The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
51. 300-400 pages long – The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo
52. Published in 2025 – Swept Away by Beth O’Leary