Is your new year's resolution to read more? Or do you want to push yourself to broaden your reading and try some new genres and authors? Take on the challenge and read 25 books in 2025! Our Reading(s) challenge bingo card has 25 different prompts to inspire your reading this year. And to help you further, we'll be posting blogs full of books relating to some of the prompts!
Download the bingo card here or pick up a printed copy in our shops.
Checkout our blog for recommendations for the prompts 'One-word title', 'An animal on the cover' and 'Adapted into a show or movie'!
Prompt: Based on the cover
We all know the saying 'don't judge a book by its cover', but, just for once, I want you to let your judgement flow and pick your next read solely based on the cover. And to help, here are some great covers that I think will inspire you.
Lonely Mouth
Jacqueline Maley
Matilda and Lara are half-sisters who share an unreliable mother and a chaotic past. In every other way, though, they are very different from each other. Lara, ten years younger than Matilda, is a model, living and working in Paris – for her, life is expansive, carefree, beautiful, careless. Matilda's life, in contrast, is solitary, contained, ordered. She works in one of Sydney's buzziest restaurants, Bocca, with an unrequited crush on her boss, celebrity chef Colson. If she's careful – and she always is – she can keep everything in its proper place. Hold the balance between hunger and satiation.
But when Lara's father, the long-absent, erratic Angus Del Ray, comes back into the sisters' lives, determined to apologise for his past misdeeds, Matilda's compartmentalised life goes seriously awry. As everything blows apart, Matilda is forced to come to a reckoning with who she is, and how to satisfy the hunger she wants to deny.
Rytual
Chloe Elisabeth Wilson
Marnie Sellick is adrift when she lands a job at the coveted, mysterious beauty brand rytuał cosmetica.
The enigmatic founder and CEO, Luna Peters, takes a liking to Marnie, and as the two grow closer Marnie becomes intoxicated by the life that Luna, and rytuał, can offer her.
But all is not what it seems at rytuał. Luna has a cult-like hold over the all-female staff, and that's not to mention what happens at their weekly Friday Night Drinks.
As Marnie edges closer to the darkness at the centre of rytuał's millennial pink facade, cracks begin to show. Luna is hiding something, but will Marnie uncover the truth – and the role Luna has cast her in – before it's too late?
Stag Dance
Torrey Peters
'Two hours later, a chill rose off the long shadows and we had readied ourselves for the dance. I had my eyelashes darkened. He pricked his finger with the tip of a pocket-blade, and on the newly exposed globes of my cheeks, we made circles of rouge. I'd never shared much time with any other person. Never been so open and sharing and naked in the intentions of our bodily preparations. Not brother, not sister, not good-time girls, nor fellow jacks.'
From the adventures of a lonely logger who, deep in the forest, joins his workmates to dance dressed as a woman, to the story of an obsessive boarding-school romance, to the dizzying spectacle of a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend, Peters' keen eye for the rough edges of trans community and desire reveals fresh possibilities. Acidly funny and breath-taking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of Lauren Groff or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles and delights.
This All Come Back Now: An Anthology of First Nations Speculative Fiction
Edited by Mykaela Saunders
The first-ever anthology of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander speculative fiction – written, curated, edited and designed by blackfellas, for blackfellas and about blackfellas. In these stories, ‘this all come back’: all those things that have been taken from us, that we collectively mourn the loss of, or attempt to recover and revive, as well as those that we thought we’d gotten rid of, that are always returning to haunt and hound us.
Some writers summon ancestral spirits from the past, while others look straight down the barrel of potential futures, which always end up curving back around to hold us from behind. Dazzling, imaginative and unsettling, This All Come Back Now centres and celebrates communities and culture. It’s a love letter to kin and country, to memory and future-thinking.
The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat
Sara M Saleh
A stunning collection from Sydney poet, human rights activist, community organiser, and refugee campaigner Sara M Saleh.
With her first full-length poetry collection, Sara M Saleh introduces us to the polychromatic lives of girls and women as they come into being amidst war, colonial and patriarchal violence, and exile and migration. This searing work interrogates and represents the complexity of Arab-Australian Muslim women's identities as they negotiate an irresistible world full of music and family, grit and grief, love and loss.
Saleh's poetry is not only an inherently political act, but a deeply personal one, charged with multilayered conversations and meditations amongst three generations of women in Sara's family. Her poems dazzle with an incantatory force of spirit, survival and selfhood, proving without a doubt that Saleh is one of this country's most compelling, contemporary poets.
Geraldine
Andrea Thompson
This is the story of a woman who changes the world that wants to change her.
Geraldine is born with an adventurer's heart. Whether it's escaping from boarding school in Rhodesia, or buying hormones from the local speed dealer in Weston-super-Mare, Geraldine is open to all the world has to offer – even if the world doesn't quite know what to make of her.
Arriving in Australia as an adolescent, Geraldine finds solace and self-discovery through music. As she grows into a woman, she not only inspires others but also learns to be accepted for who she truly is.
The Book of Guilt
Catherine Chidgey
England, 1979. Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents of a secluded New Forest home, part of the government's Sycamore Scheme. Every day, the triplets do their chores, play their games and take their medicine, under the watchful eyes of three mothers: Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night.
Their nightmares are recorded in The Book of Dreams.
Their lessons are taken from The Book of Knowledge.
And their sins are reported in The Book of Guilt.
All the boys want is to be sent to the Big House in Margate, where they imagine a life of sun, sea and fairground rides. But, as the government looks to shut down the Sycamore Homes, the triplets begin to question everything they have been told
This Dream Will Devour Us
Emma Clancey
Eighteen-year-old Nora Blake is the opposite of lucky. She’s still wrangling her dead dad’s debts when a mysterious illness lands her brother in hospital. But her fortunes take an unexpected turn when she wins a lottery to attend the exclusive magical Dream Gala with the charming – and very off limits – heir to the Lamour fortune, Remy Lamour. If Nora can win him over, she’ll get a coveted spot on the Lamours’ magical training program – and the money she needs to save her brother.
There’s just one problem: Nora never bought a lottery ticket.
Determined to discover who wants her at the Gala – and why – Nora plunges headfirst into magical high society. Caught up in an intoxicating world of beautiful billionaires and charismatic celebrities, Nora is soon in over her head. When her search for answers uncovers a sinister conspiracy, will Nora stay silent or risk the wrath of a family powerful enough to get away with murder?
Always Home, Always Homesick
Hannah Kent
In 2003, seventeen-year-old Australian exchange student Hannah Kent arrives at Keflavik Airport in the middle of the Icelandic winter.
That night she sleeps off her jet lag and bewilderment in the National Archives of Iceland, unaware that, years later, she will return to the same building to write Burial Rites, the haunting story of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last woman executed in Iceland. The novel will go on to launch the author's stellar literary career and capture the hearts of readers across the globe.
Always Home, Always Homesick is Hannah Kent's exquisite love letter to a land that has forged a nation of storytellers, her ode to the transcendent power of creativity, and her invitation to us all to join her in the realms of mystery, spirit and wonder.
Mean Boys
Geoffrey Mak
You know them when you see them – mean boys take up space, wielding cruelty to claim their place in the pecking order. Some mean boys make art or music or fashion; others make memes. Mean boys stomp the runways in Milan and Paris; mean boys marched at Charlottesville. And in the eyes of critic and style expert Geoffrey Mak, mean boys are the emblem of our society – an era ravenous for novelty, always thirsting for the next edgy thing, even at our peril.
In this pyrotechnic memoir-in-essays, Mak ranges widely over our landscape of paranoia, crisis, and frenetic, clickable consumption. He grants readers an inside pass to the spaces where culture was made and unmade over the past decade, from the antiseptic glare of white-walled galleries to the darkest corners of Berlin techno clubs. As the gay son of an evangelical minister, Mak fled to those spaces, hoping to join a global, influential elite. But when calamity struck, it forced Mak to confront the costs of mistaking status for belonging.
Mumming
Victoria Vanstone
Victoria Vanstone thought she'd be the kind of mum who would spend her days ironing names onto school shirts and who knew the best chocolate-chip cookie recipe off by heart. But as the years have ticked by, she's got the feeling that woman isn't going to show up. Instead, she's the kind of mum who shouts a lot and throws plastic cups at walls.
So Victoria decides to become the mum she's always wanted to be. She embarks on a year of parental development – enrolling in a parenting course, implementing an exercise regime, awkwardly trying to make friends as an adult, and a holiday away from her family – to reset the dials.
What follows is a year of trying, failing and trying again. But as Victoria stumbles from one misadventure to the next, she begins to realise that getting things wrong is actually where the fun begins.
I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki
Baek Sehee, Translated by Anton Hur
Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her – what to call it? depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgemental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends; adept at performing the calmness, even ease, her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can't be normal.
But if she's so hopeless, why can she always summon a desire for her favourite street food, the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like?
Recording her conversations with her psychiatrist over 12 weeks, Baek Sehee begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions and harmful behaviours that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. Part memoir, part self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness.
The Art of Kelogsloops
Hieu Nguyen
The Art of Kelogsloops: From Sketch to Finish is the debut art book from the popular mixed-media artist.
Though Hieu is based in Melbourne, Australia, his incredible artwork has been showcased in exhibitions around the world, including Los Angeles, Berlin, San Francisco, and Sydney. Known for both digital and watercolour paintings, Hieu masterfully blends his love of surreal-art styles and Japanese anime. In this stunning art book, Hieu takes readers through his journey as an artist, from being taught a simple way to draw manga art by his older sister aged five, to reaching over a million followers on Instagram as 'Kelogsloops' and achieving commercial success.
The City of Today is a Dying Thing
Des Fitzgerald
Cities are bad for us: polluted, noisy and fundamentally unnatural. We need green space, not concrete. Trees, not tower blocks.
So goes the argument. But is it true? What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there?
Here, Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in deepest Wales, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings.
Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often controversial roots of today's green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are – in all their raucous, constructed and artificial glory.
