Academic Reading Challenge Categories for 2026

Hello reading friends, 

I'm very behind on my 2025 reading, and not only for the reading challenge. At the moment, I'm trying to read every short book I can get my hands on, including Adania Shibli's powerful and disturbing Minor Detail

Even though the year isn't over, about 15 challenge participants have nominated and voted on the categories for 2026, so I'm already planning what to read in January. There's some great ideas here and I think it will be a good year of reading.

 I want to make a couple of notes about some specific categories and the challenge in general here, since some of them are a little less straightforward than categories we've had before. I also decided to add some internationalization and earlier periodization as options to some categories to raise the degree of difficulty for those interested. I added a 19th category this year for "dealer's choice: book relevant to the US govt's ongoing murdering of people in boats and saber-rattling vs. Venezuela. 

  I had put several categories related to the ongoing "boat strikes" (murders of people in boats) and threats towards Venezuela into the nominations this year, and none of them made it into the final 17 categories, though individuals ranked a variety of them very high, including in the top five. I've never pulled something that I simply thought was important that didn't make it into the final list before and put it into the challenge, but I felt it was necessary this year. 

One goal behind this challenge is to read books that are relevant to current events. So in previous years, we've had categories to read books by writers who were punished for their support of Palestine and books about AI (2025), a book by a Palestinian author (2024);  books by Middle Eastern and North African authors (2022, 2018) Books about quarantine or lockdown (2021) and books about critical university studies (2019). In multiple years we've read books about fascism, anti-fascism and resistance to authoritarianism, labor unions; medicine; climate change and/or the environment; immigrants and/or refugees, militarism, colonialism, and revolutionary and counter-revolutionary politics, and books by indigenous authors and queer authors. 

We've never included a cateogry about Latin America and/or the Caribbean, though we have had many categories that could include that part of the world, such as books about colonialism, books by indigenous authors and refugees, and books about authoritarianism, or recently "books about borders and why they're bad." It seems like the time to be more intentional given what's happening in the Western hemisphere where most challenge participants live. This situation is likely to get worse over the coming year, and I think we should be educating ourselves about the broader context in whatever way makes sense to us.  Books in this special category 19 could include books about Venezuela, books about the US in Latin America and/or the Caribbean more generally; books about drug wars, international law, war crimes, and general crimes by nation states. 

The challenge has also long encouraged reading books originally published in languages other than English, books written before the 20th century, and books by non-Western authors, whether as categories on their own, or through adding extra points to a category by adding those characteristics. So, it's your choice to read any graphic novel or illustrated book, but to increase your points, you could read one that was originally published in a language other than English. I added similar extra-point options to the book of collected essays and book about a song or musical composition.  

Another less straightforward category this year is "book about slavery or book that compares something to slavery."This began with a somewhat different phrasing as "slavery in any form (physical, economic, sexual, etc)." I talked to the person who nominated this category and we tried to come up with the best way to encourage people to read books about slavery as a somewhat broad cateogry without opening the door to books that used slavery as a way to describe something that just isn't slavery. It seemed to me in the end that including books that made comparisons to slavery without conflating other historical experiences with slavery would allow for books like Sarah Haley's No Mercy Here that consider the legacy or impact of slavery in later time periods, as well as books about slavery in any place or time (such as slavery in ancient Rome), but would not ecourage people to read books that make over-broad claims about some non-slavery experience actually being slavery. 

As always, when it's not specified in the category, any book in the challenge can be an academic book and any book could be a novel, play or book of poetry

To join the reading challenge, just read a book in each one of the categories below. It can be any book you want that fits the description. I'll be posting a report on what I read for 2025 at some point in January. 

Who and What the Academic Reading Challenge is for: 

This is a challenge for academics who feel that their reading has become over-specialized and possibly joyless, who want to read more literature for pleasure, who want to broaden the way they approach their own research and teaching, who like to talk about reading with each other, who are interested in interdisciplinary reading, and who want to support their friends and colleagues by reading their books. You don’t have to be a professor to do the challenge. Maybe you graduated from school but you miss reading academic books. The challenge runs for a year and emphasizes reading across academic disciplines. If you are a professional academic or public intellectual outside the university, this challenge is meant to give you a structure for reading outside your area of specialization - including reading literature - and to provide a space to talk with others about the experience. If you are a general reader who likes reading serious works of non-fiction, this challenge is also for you. It's a structure that you can use to read works of the type that you might not have encountered since you were a student.

And now, here are this year's categories, with points in parentheses

1. A book by a friend, colleague, former teacher or former student (10)

 2.A book about an island  (10)

3.A book that last read as a student, or a book that had an influence on you in the past  (10)

4. A book about decolonization (20)

5. A collection of essays by or about an individual writer. Double points if the author is not from the US or the UK (10/20)

6. A collection of letters or an epistolary novel (20) 

7. An illustrated book (can be a graphic novel, memoir, or other graphic non-fiction book)  Double points if the work was originally written in a language other than English  (10/20)

8. A book about food seurity, food policy, or the political uses of food (anything from the history of food stamps to the use of hunger strikes) (20) 

9. A book about slavery or a book that compares something to slavery (10)

10. A historical novel or play (10)

11. A book about a part of the body or with a part of the body in the title (10)

12. A book about the last place you visited (can be a book about household interiors or a local neighborhood) (20)

13. A book whose publication was controversial or banned (10)  

14. A book by a first nations or indigenous author  (20)

15. A book about a song or musical composition. Double points if the composition or song is from earlier than 1950  (10/20)

Extra Credit:

16. Extra Credit: An academic book that won a major prize (20) 

17. Extra Extra Credit: A book about ghosts, poltergeists, seances, or something else supernatural. Double points for an academic book on this subject (10/20) 

18. Super-Duper Extra Credit:  A book about anarchism (10)

19. Dealer's Choice Extra Credit:  book relevant to the US govt's ongoing murdering of people in boats and saber-rattling vs. Venezuela* (20) 

 The Rules 

The challenge starts on January 1, 2026 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2026. 

There are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge, and four “extra credit” categories for over-achievers. 

 The academic books must be at least 175 pages long . 

Novels must be at least 200 pages long 

Books of poetry or special issues of journals must be at least 100 pp. long 

One book can be a children's or YA book. 

To decide whether a book is academic, look for something published by a university press, or check the acknowledgments for references to scholarly mentors and anonymous readers. 

 Any book on the list, except where specified otherwise, can be a novel, book of poetry, or a complete journal issue as long as it fits the general category 

Books can only count for one category, but you can switch them from one category to the other before you’re done if you like. (In other words, you cannot count a book by your friend who wrote a book about  for both  and the "by a friend" categories.) 

Only one book can be something you’ve read before 

Audiobooks are fine as long as they are unabridged and the print edition is at least 175 pages long. Books must be started no earlier than midnight 1/1/26 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2026

The Points: This isn't a competition, but some find this motivating, so if you're counting… 

In case you're wondering what makes some books worth 20 and some books worth 10 points, it's all about how difficult it might be to find and/or read books in that category.

Total possible points for 1-15 without any extra points: 200 

Total possible points w/4 extra-credit and bonus points for making categories harder: 300