We’re a month and some change into our 2026 Summer Reading Challenge, which means there’s PLENTY of time for you to join in and win that sweet, sweet prize:

A book-themed care package sent to your door!

The challenge runs until September 15th, and many of the challenges can be completed simultaneously with a single book. YOU CAN DO IT!

You can officially join the challenge by supporting us on Patreon at any paying level and commenting on each challenge thread with what you’ve read to complete it.

You can also read along for free! But our Patreon community is absolutely lovely (we have a book club!), book care packages are on the line, and we are so, so grateful for your support, so please do check it out.

Want to know how we’ve been completing the challenge so far (and add to your never-ending TBR pile)? Read on for our picks so far!

Sara: 

A Book with a Red Cover – I read quite a bit of non-fiction (StoryGraph says it’s about 25% of my overall reading), and one of my favorites so far this year is Having People Over by Chelsea Fagan. I lean introverted and (despite my best efforts) perfectionistic, but I also love hosting people at my house. As you can imagine, these two parts of myself sometimes yell at each other. Having People Over was such a balm for me – it’s a little bit memoir but mostly a practical guide to having people over in a relaxed, welcoming, and non-overwhelming way. I loved Fagan’s low-key recipes, her suggestions for themed parties, and especially just the permission to mix things you make from scratch with things you buy at the grocery store. I was able to put a lot of this into practice at the (themed!) World Cup Final watch party that Jared and I threw on Sunday, which was ridiculously fun and satisfying! (See: the hummus I bought at the store and the smoked red pepper dip I made from scratch.) (Having People Over would also work for a book that centers food, but I like fulfilling each challenge with a separate book.)

A Book that Features Tarot Cards – I think I’ve read at least 4 books that involve tarot cards since June started, but for this category, I’ll list Alchemy of a Blackbird by Claire McMillan. (I’m partway through the book as of writing this, will be done by the time it posts.) Alchemy of a Blackbird is a historical fiction novel that follows surrealist painter Remedios Varo as she flees Nazi-occupied France and rebuilds her life in Mexico, using tarot as a guiding influence in her art and life. I’m hoping to see a bit more about her friendship with fellow surrealist artist Leonora Carrington later in the book! The structure of the book (which mostly follows Remedios but also assigns different characters to tarot cards and offers a short first-person narration from their perspective) is really cool and the content is very compelling. Plus, REMEDIOS VARO! SURREALISM! 

A Book About a Haunted House – Is the haunted house a dilapidated house in LA or THE ENTIRE INTERNET? In If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You by Leigh Stein, it’s hard to say. There was a lot that I really enjoyed about this book (I’m not going to get over setting up a hype house for influencers in a storied, probably haunted house with a movie-star past any time soon), but also I wanted to upend a trash bin over the head of every adult in the novel. Which, to be fair, is probably the point. On the bright side, the protagonist has a bunny named Owen Wilson and crucially no harm comes to him over the course of the novel. (Would also work for a book that features tarot cards!)

Your Favorite Book – I re-read Sunshine by Robin McKinley for the 1278th time. It remains perfect. (If you don’t think it’s perfect, do not @ me, I’m not interested. If you think it’s perfect, I will happily read your email about it and send back one that look like this “🧛🥐!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”) In all seriousness, if you don’t know this one, it’s a very inventive, experimental retelling of Beauty and the Beast, where Beauty is a grumpy baker with magic powers and the Beast is an (ethical?) vampire. It’s kind of like if you put that fairy tale and then Interview with the Vampire, Misery, and Chocolat into a blender? Reading it will make you very hungry. (Also works for A Book with a Red Cover, A Book That Centers Food, or a Feminist Fairy-Tale Retelling.) 

A Book that Centers Food – I’m a massive foodie who is also a vegetarian and married to a vegan, so the French chef Alain Passard is kind of my hero. I’ve been insanely lucky to eat in his restaurant, L’Arpege, where the entire menu is plant-based and beautiful beyond description. He has a (wonderful) cookbook with recipes you can actually make in your own kitchen as well as visual collages by Passard. But he also has A GRAPHIC NOVEL. In the Kitchen with Alain Passard: Inside the World (and Mind) of a Master Chef by Christophe Blain is a wonderfully charming depiction of Passard, his restaurant, and all the work and vision that goes into creating and maintaining it. Plus recipes. I especially loved the parts where the author visited Passard’s gardens and spoke with the gardeners who oversee all the food that supplies the restaurant and the conversations with Passard’s staff. If you’re a foodie or someone who loves reading about passionate, eccentric people making something incredibly unique or are a graphic novel enthusiast, you’ll love this.

A Ghost Story – I could not put The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware down. I think I read it in less than a day. It’s a retelling of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, a beloved 19th-century ghost story classic, and it really does Turn of the Screw justice. I honestly don’t want to say too much more because I don’t want to ruin it. But I will say that the ambiguity of the original story (is the house haunted or is the governess crazy?) is amplified by the decision to make the haunted (?) house haunted by smart technology, specifically through a pervasive and invasive app called Happy. OMG. So good. (This one could also count as A Beach Read or A Book about a Haunted House.)

A Book with a Cat in It – I recently re-read the short story collection The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter for our book club (seriously, if you’ve read this far and you’re not in our book club, JOIN OUR BOOK CLUB) and realized I’d completely forgotten that there was a Puss in Boots retelling in there! In our book club discussion, one of our students who’s an opera buff pointed out the extent to which this short story is entwined with opera, which only made it even more fun. This particular story strikes such a different note than the rest of the collection (which, to be fair, does have many other cat stories, even if they’re not exactly house cats!) and it was a delight to revisit. (I’ll add that I’ve read this book at the beach more than once, so it could be A Beach Read, but also I’m a monster, so.)

Fairylore: A Compendium of the Fae Folk – I may have read this one just a few times. Seriously though, I’m so proud of what we made, and I remain humbled and thrilled by how beautiful the actual physical book is. Endless props to Annie Stegg Gerard and Kristin Kwan for their beyond stunning illustrations. I still need to frame Kristin’s original sketches of a moksin tongbŏp and a tengu! 

Brittany:

A Book with a Red Cover – I came across The Ghost Women by Jennifer Murphy when we were doing research on novels inspired by tarot cards for our last big course, and I was very intrigued by the premise – basically, bodies start popping up all over an exclusive art school, all staged to look like tarot cards. There was a dose of the maybe supernatural, some witchcraft, a lot of pretentious art school babble, dark academia vibes, all things I enjoy, but ultimately this one fell a little flat for me. The solutions to the mysteries all seemed, I don’t know, too bizarre, too over-the-top, too outside the bounds of reality for how gritty and realistic the book also was, if that makes any sense. Like, sure, Devil worshiping cult, I get this… but ancient, priceless Italian tarot cards winding up hidden in old furniture that’s then sold to a kid? Really?? The other thing is that I never felt 100% sure about the status of the supernatural in this world at all – was it real? What’s actually happening here? I love ambiguity, but some things were so fantastical that no rational person could dismiss them… but then they did. And because the book couldn’t fully embrace “yes supernatural,” “no, not supernatural,” OR “maybe supernatural…?”, it was hard to get invested. (Would also work for a book that features tarot cards!) 

A Book that Features Tarot Cards – Sara already wrote about If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You by Leigh Stein above, but it’s my pick for this category. I 100% agree with everything she said, though I do think I overall enjoyed it more? I think a lot of that was because I was VERY delighted by the idea of the Internet as a Gothic-novel-esque haunted house, filling that same role within the structure of the novel, and I also had a huge nostalgia factor for this one. Like one of the main characters, I was super into the artsy girl websites of the early 2000s (#iykyk), and this brought it all back vividly. There are definitely blurry pictures of me in a torn lace slip and a single rose floating around the Internet somewhere that I thought were QUITE artistic. Also hurray for Owen Wilson being 100% fine (yes, I totally looked this up before I committed to finishing this one because life is too short.) (Would also work for a book about a haunted house!)

A Book About a Haunted House – I found the novella Rose/House by Arkady Martine in the book store that hosted the Boozy Book Faire where Sara and I were featured authors last month, and I just had to get it. The premise was, basically, haunted house but make it gothic sci-fi. Science fiction and the Gothic are always entwined in fascinating ways, so I was delighted to see someone take the idea of a (super/highly futuristic) smart house and really run with the concept of it being murderously, digitally haunted. Ware’s The Turn of the Key, which Sara mentioned above and I write more about below, does this as well, but in more of an “is the house really haunted or is it the smart house being weird?” kind of way, which also totally works, but here it’s “oh no, this is definitely the smart house, and it wants you not only dead but mentally twisted when you get there because you amuse it.” Oh and also the original owner’s body is there, or, rather, the carbon from his body that he had made into a diamond to display after he died… there’s a lot going on here. Overall I found it pretty compelling, but it’s a very quick read, and I found myself feeling a little dissatisfied in the end. I’m not sure if I wanted just a bit more or if the premise just wasn’t executed in a way that satisfied me?   

A Book from the 1920s – I’ve been wanting to read some of Dorothy L. Sayers’ mysteries for a long time, so I thought this would be the perfect moment! I wanted to start with Gaudy Night, as that’s the most famous and beloved one, but it was actually published in 1935, so I went back to the very beginning of the series in 1923 with the first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, Whose Body? instead. And I’m not going to lie, it was a total delight! I can absolutely see why this series took off the way it did – the characters are all fantastic and interesting, the writing is superb, and it’s often laugh out loud funny. I was especially impressed with the nuanced depiction of Lord Peter’s PTSD (or “shell shock,” as they referred to it), which I didn’t know was a key part of the character beforehand. I can’t wait to read more of these!

A Book You’ve Seen Referenced in Another Novel – I went into this category knowing that I was going to pick something referenced in The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (which is one of my favorite books of all time and will likely be the book I reread for that challenge), and I actually picked Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger. However, very early on, I got clued into the fact that one of my big nos of reading (animal death) happens in the book and happens in a particularly AWFUL way, and I just did not want to deal with that at all. Luckily I wasn’t too far in, so I picked another book from those in The Starless Sea, deciding to try my first hard-boiled noir, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. And let me tell you friends, I may be just a frail, but Ray and me, see, we’re on the whole rather simpatico :P. I was seriously delighted by this. Yes, it was cliche, but it was cliche in an entirely earnest way because it was literally taking part in the invention of a genre. And the writing was good, like, far better than I expected. Some of the metaphors were absolutely excellent. Sure, it’s dated, more than a little obnoxious re: women/homosexuality/disability/etc (but less than I would have predicted if I’m being honest), and literally everyone’s hats are constantly in danger of falling off due to all the jaunty angles, but if you’ve ever been curious about noir, this is an absolutely great place to start. (Would also work for a book from a genre I do not read!)

A Book from a Genre You Do Not Read – Okay, I decided I was going to go really gung-ho on this category, and vowed to find and read not only a horror book, but a COSMIC horror book. Determined to scare myself silly, I picked A Lush and Seething Hell by John Horner Jacobs because of the fantastic reviews, the award nominations, and the fact that it’s actually a combo book of two novellas, both with premises that intrigued me. I mean, one was about a Latin American poet fleeing his home whilst doing a translation of a sinister book, the other was about a folklorist at the Library of Congress doing archival work that involves a song that may or may not have come straight from Hell. If I’m going to read about things that scare me on this level, let’s at least make them relevant to my interests, I guess? I have to say though, I wound up almost disappointed with this choice. The writing was largely gorgeous (if maybe a little masculine (?) overall for my taste), and the plots were interesting, but I can’t say that I ever felt truly disturbed or even shaken by the stories. Cosmic horror can be so vague, so subjective, that I think this just missed the mark for me personally. Plus there’s literally a scene in the second novella where the guy looks up and sees a slice of the starry skies through the clouds and thinks about how small he is and I’m still thinking about it because REALLY? That’s so on the nose it’s almost insulting!  

A Beach Read – I’m going with A Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware for this one, as this is definitely the kind of easy-to-read thriller you devour at the beach BUT, in this case, make it also a brilliant literary adaptation. I too practically inhaled this one, it was so fascinating, and I cannot get over how brilliant some of the adaptation choices were. I was also incredibly impressed with how well Ware evoked the same… vibes (?) that James does. Mimicking James is never an easy thing to do, and the fact that this book really made me feel the same kind of vague uneasiness throughout, the same kind of doubt about the protagonist, the same mounting feeling that something is very, very wrong as The Turn of the Screw does seems like a masterful achievement. I really want Ware to write more takes on the classics. (This one could also count as a book about a haunted house!)

Fairylore: A Compendium of the Fae Folk – Well obviously I have read this one! Multiple times. So many times :P. But seriously, as Sara said above, I still can’t get over how beautifully it turned out, and how thankful I am that Sara and I got to make it together with Terri Windling, Annie Stegg Gerard, Kristin Kwan, and so many wonderful others.

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.

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