Welcome to the 2026 Carterhaugh School Summer Reading Challenge!

We like to think that our primary purpose as Carterhaugh (and also just as people) is to make your TBR pile explode. Our annual Summer Reading Challenge is the pinnacle of this impulse. 

Ready to stretch your brain, find amazing new-to-you authors, return to beloved favorites, and feel terrifyingly accomplished? Want to read some books with us?

Let’s goooooooo!

First up, some challenge logistics, followed by the challenge checklist.

Le Logistics:

All are welcome to enjoy the challenge. Come read your heart out!

HOWEVER. If you’d like a chance to win a fabulous PRIZE (spoiler: it’s a box of books) and to support our work, you can enter by:

1. Joining our Patreon at any paying level (we strongly recommend the book club tier – our book club is legendary, the community is wonderful, and if you’re doing this challenge, you belong in there!) and
2. Commenting on each weekly designated challenge thread with what you’re reading to fulfill it.

One lucky winner who comments on all 15 threads will win THE GRAND PRIZE – a care package shipped to your door full of folklore-y books, stickers, and some additional surprises! Sadly due to unpredictable and rising costs for postage, we can’t send the prize to international readers. They are still welcome to participate in the challenge though!

As always, we have 15 challenge categories for you to conquer.

Please note that this doesn’t necessarily mean you must read 15 different books, though you certainly can! If your favorite book is A Court of Thorns and Roses (which happens to have a red cover), and it feels like a “beach read” to you, and you re-read it this summer, then congrats, crafty friend, you have checked off three categories in one fell swoop, and we salute you. 

We’ve (mostly) kept the categories pretty broad so that you can choose books that speak to you – with one exception that we feel VERY JUSTIFIED IN MAKING. And if you’re one of those people who just wants to be given a list or a place to start, we’ve also included specific recommendations from us so that you’re never stumped.

Without further ado, behold our challenge categories!

A Book with a Red Cover
Opening with a book cover color challenge is apparently now TRADITION here at Carterhaugh Enterprises. We feel like it’s the kind of request that a fairy would make during a challenge like this, and it feels like a natural progression from last year’s pink. Find your red-covered book while browsing your local library or book store or pick up one of these red-clad books that we love or that are haunting our own TBR list: Vicious by V. E. Schwab, Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, The Red Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, or Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu.

A Book that Features Tarot Cards
As we put together this challenge, we finished teaching a course on the folklore of tarot, and so most of the books we’ve both read over the last few months have been tarot-related. And there is so much amazing literature out there that features tarot!! We might have to teach a whole new class just on this. Here are a few that we didn’t teach in the course but wanted to: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna C. Clarke, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Magician and Fool by Susan Wands, Alchemy of a Blackbird by Claire McMillan, and If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You by Leigh Stein.

A Book About a Haunted House
One of our favorite genres of all time. We love that they can range from “OH MY GOD WHY IS THIS SO TERRIFYING?” to bittersweet to empowering to “I’m going to need to lie down and think about that.” Some of our all-time favorites include (but are not limited to): The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (obviously), If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You by Leigh Stein (yup, from the tarot list above), In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, Not Quite a Ghost by Anne Ursu, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand. 

Your Favorite Book
Ok, this one we can’t pick for you, but that’s fine because you already know it: your favorite-favorite, the one you tell everyone about because you literally can’t stop thinking about it, the one that blew your mind. The one where, when other people criticize it or don’t get it, you have to work really hard to not scream “YOU ARE SO WRONG, NO ONE HAS EVER BEEN THIS WRONG IN THE HISTORY OF TIME.” Re-read it and revel in it. Sara’s are Sunshine by Robin McKinley and Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Brittany’s are The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern and The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. 

A Book from the 1920s
We feel personally cheated that we didn’t get the roaring twenties (we were promised flappers and gin, wtf is this?) so let’s visit the version that actually happened. We both adore a ton of the literature that came out of the 1920s – it was a time of incredible innovation, and a lot of it is super readable, not to mention gorgeous. We’re suckers in particular for Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

A Book You’ve Seen Referenced in Another Novel 
Think of this as the Russian nesting doll portion of the challenge. When you’re reading your book with a red cover or your haunted house novel, keep an eye out for the names of other books as you go. You also might see quotes or clear allusions that aren’t named explicitly – those count, too! Maybe keep a running list and see what you note down that looks intriguing. If you read Eliot’s The Wasteland, maybe you’ll fulfill this challenge with Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Or maybe your favorite book is Roald Dahl’s Matilda, so you pick The Secret Garden, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, or one of the five million other books she reads!

A Book from a Genre You Do Not Read
We can’t give you an exact recommendation for this one either, since we don’t know what you don’t usually read! For us, this is definitely horror – we love the Gothic and the uncanny, but horror is usually a hard no. (We’re chickens.) But every genre out there has amazing scope, and we can still find the occasional horror novel that we adore. It can be so cool and rewarding to find something you love in a realm that you thought wasn’t for you – or just to give it a shot, even if you find it’s still not quite your thing. We’d personally fulfill this quest by reading something like Shelley’s Frankenstein (ye old horror doesn’t bother us!) or one of T. Kingfisher’s more terrifying books like What Moves the Dead (an incredibly creepy and mushroom-y take on Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.”) Anecdotally, we’ve noticed that romance is perhaps the most wildly disparaged genre we hear about (to which we say, how interesting that a genre that tends to center happiness – and the happiness of women and, increasingly, other marginalized identities – gets the most flack culturally.) So, just in case, a couple romances we wholeheartedly recommend include Looking for Group by Alexis Hall (not at all spicy, about two people who meet in an online game), You Should be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian (one of the best books about grief we’ve ever read), and One & Only by Maurene Goo (about a Korean American woman who runs a magical matchmaking business with her family in LA.)

A Book that Centers Food 
Interpret this however you like! You can read a novel about a thinly veiled version of the Great British Bakeoff (Roseline Palmer Takes the Cake by Alexis Hall), a sprawling history of a specific food or ingredient (Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky), or a book that has hunger and vampirism as its core (Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda). We’re really excited to see how you fulfill this one. 

A Ghost Story 
Please know that we took a moment to consider: do we really need a haunted house book and a ghost story? Whereupon, we decided that yes, absolutely, this is a decision that is reasonable, justifiable, and normal. Besides, we maintain that these are different, albeit sometimes overlapping, categories. Anyway, might we recommend Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn, Beloved by Toni Morrison, or The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas?

A Book You Already Own but Haven’t Read Yet
Ah, the secret shame of the book lover… the books you were so excited about, ran out to purchase, and then… just… haven’t read yet for some reason. Maybe you got distracted by another book, maybe it got buried in your TBR pile, maybe you put it on a shelf and lost track of it, but whatever the reason, now is your opportunity to find it and give it its moment. Books on our list for this category include The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley and Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand. Raid your own shelves and see what you find!

A Beach Read
What counts as a beach read can be pretty subjective, but if you can picture reading it while the waves crash in front of you and sand sticks between your toes, we’re going to say it counts. We like fast moving, thrilling, and/or funny for our beach reads, so we’ll recommend the thriller The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware (which is 1, also technically a retelling of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and 2, a book that Brittany recently plowed through in about a day) and Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers.

A Feminist Fairy-Tale Retelling
Another Carterhaugh Summer Reading Challenge staple. A few feminist fairy-tale (or mythic) retellings that we have on our own TBR lists include Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell (a retelling of the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd) and Not Good for Maidens by Tori Bovalino (a retelling of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.”) Old favorites include Cinderella Is Dead by Kalynn Bayron and The Girls of the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine. And if you need MOAR, we also have this blog post we wrote with a list of queer fairy-tale retellings for you to investigate. 

A Book with a Cat in It
Books completely centered around animals can be hard for us because, as enormously empathetic animal lovers, we hate the fact that they often end with the main animal’s death (think Marley and Me by John Grogan…noooooo!) If that kind of book is your thing, you are welcome to use one for this challenge, but we’re going to stick to books that just happen to have an excellent cat or two or sixteen in them. We are definitely looking forward to Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett, for example, and, yes, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman would totally count for this challenge! We also love The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa.

A Book in Translation
Books in translation pretty much always need more love, and they’re often excellent to boot. Plus you get to think about the process of translation itself, which is endlessly fascinating if you are a #nerd like we are. Translated books on our radar right now include Vita Nostra by Marina Dyachenko and Sergey Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey, and getting more works by Italian author Italo Calvino under our belts (Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver, sounds especially fantastic!)

Fairylore
Heck yes we’re putting this one on the list, it’s OUR CHALLENGE 😁. Read our new book Fairylore: A Compendium of the Fae Folk – it just came out this spring, and it’s RIDICULOUSLY BEAUTIFUL and pretty much written in the style of our emails. It’s absolutely bursting with lore and stories about fairies found all around the world, and we’ve been told it’s like reading a medieval bestiary written by your best friend. If you enjoy it, please, please leave a review. Amazon has the most impact (and you don’t even have to have bought it from them, you can leave a review there if you borrowed it from the library), but honestly any review is wonderful. 

As always, we’re looking forward to expanding our already ridiculous TBR piles, too… so be sure to tell us all about the books you pick!

Again, if you want to win a massive, lovely book-themed care package, don’t forget to join any paying tier of our Patreon (though we recommend $7+ because that’s the BOOK CLUB TIER! You read books! So come read books with us!) and comment on each weekly thread for a chance to win!

And please, if you have a friend that you think would love to do this challenge with you, forward them this post! All are welcome.

P.S. Here’s a bookmark-sized version of the list if you’d like to print it out and cross things off as you go!

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