Around the Year in 52 Books discussion

(i) First round plan: Everything you want is in the library: Only books from my local branch library. (ii) General second round.

1 A book from a genre that starts with A, T or Y
(i) Five Survive
Thriller, Young adult
(ii) Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found
Art

2 A book with a primarily red, green or blue cover
(i)
(ii)

3 A book that fits a prompt that did not make the list this year
(i) Alchemy
Character with an unusual, uncommon or extinct profession: alchemist
(ii) To Be Taught, If Fortunate
Character with profession that did not exist before 1900: astronaut

4 A book by a new-to-you author
(i) One Day I Shall Astonish the World by Nina Stibbe
(ii) Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes by Nick Hunt

5 A book that you want to read because of something you read in 2025
A Thousand Moons
Days Without End
(ii) The Covenant of Water
DNF 2025

6 A book related to blood, sweat or tears
(i) Meeting Churchill: A Life in 90 Encounters
(ii) Boudicca's Daughter

7 A book with a character who appears in more than one book
(i) Before Dorothy.
(ii) Sherlock Holmes and The Three Winter Terrors

8 A book set in Africa, Asia or Australia
(i) Amnesty
Australian setting with some Sri Lankan scenes
(ii) Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller

9 A book with a numeral, ordinal or iterative in the title
(i) Three Days in June
(ii) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

10 An award winning book
The God of the Woods
Antony Award
(ii) The Land in Winter
Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

11 A history or historical fiction book
(i) The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV
(ii) The Painter's Daughters

12 A book with cover text that is not black or white
(i)
(ii)

13 An author’s second/sophomore book
(i) Three Women and a Boat by Anne Youngson
(ii) Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn

14 A book related to a painting by Vincent Van Gogh
(i) Venus and Aphrodite: History of a Goddess
Torso of Venus
(ii) The Echo of Crows
Wheatfield with crows

15 A book that you’ve wanted to read for a long time
(i) Stone Yard Devotional
(ii) Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales

16 A book featuring a character with a similar occupation to one of the Cluedo characters
(i) Bella Donna
Professor Plum, Miss Scarlett
A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer
Reverend Green

17 A book set in the wellness or beauty industries
(i) Nine Perfect Strangers
(ii) Decolonising My Body: A Radical Exploration of Rituals and Beauty

18 A book with a location in the title
(i) Caledonian Road
(ii) Notre-Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals

19 A book related to yesterday
(i) Tomorrow's Ghost
(ii) Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age Transformed the West and Shaped the Present

20 A book related to today
(i) The Eternal Return of Clara Hart
(ii) The Rough Guide to Climate Change

21 A book related to tomorrow
(i) The Ministry of Time
(ii) Love in the Anthropocene

22 A book by a Korean/Korean diaspora author
(i) The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim
(ii) The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun

23 A book with a road trip or long journey
(i) Road Trip With a Vampire
(ii) Between the Chalk and the Sea

24 A book that’s frothy or gothy.
(i) The Masquerades of Spring
Frothy
(ii) Little Black Book of Stories
Gothy

25 A book from the ‘1001 books to read before you die’ list
(i) Nana
(ii) Middlesex

26 A book with a Z in the title and/or author’s name
(i) Zero Days
(ii) Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

27 A non-fiction book
(i) Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain
(ii) The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes : Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe

28 A book related to a resistance, rebellion or revolution
(i) The Girls in the Wild Fig Tree
(ii) Holler: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance

29 A vacation book
(i) Sandwich
(ii) Harvest

30 The most recently published book by an author
(i) Clown Town by Mick Herron
(ii) Metamorphosis: selected stories by Penelope Lively

31 A book from that same author’s backlist
(i) Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron
(ii) Heat Wave by Penelope Lively

32 A novella of between 100-250 pages
(i) Strange Pictures
(ii) Death and the Gardener

33 A book with an indigenous character or by an indigenous author
(i) The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
(ii) On Savage Shores

34 A book with a window on the cover
(i)
(ii)

35 A book where all or part of the action takes place in a library, a museum, a school or other public building
(i) The City and Its Uncertain Walls
(ii) The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

36 A book where a primary character is a woman over 40
(i) A Year of Marvellous Ways
(ii) The Impossible Fortune

37 A book that includes a science topic
(i) Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity
(ii) Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome

38 A book that’s part of a series
(i) There Will Be Bodies
(ii) Once Upon a Time in the North

39 A book connected in some way to the ‘Queen of Crime’, Agatha Christie
(i) Death in a Desert Land
(ii) Six Against the Yard

40 A book that has a punctuation mark in the title
(i) Writers & Lovers
(ii) John & Paul

41 A mystery or true crime book
(i) The Killer Question
(ii) Murder, Mystery and My Family: A True-Crime Casebook

42 A book set in an isolated location
(i) Haven
(ii) You Can't See Me

43 A book involving survival
(i) King of Ashes
(ii) The Last Murder at the End of the World

44 A book with a symbol of death on the cover
(i)
(ii)
Vanitas painting

45 A book connected to Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen
(i) The Other Mother
Mama, ooh, didn't mean to make you cry/If I'm not back again this time tomorrow/Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters
(ii) Daughters of the Winter Queen
Elizabeth of Bohemia and her daughters

46 A book that is not a novel
(i) Dearly: Poems
(ii) The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?

47 A book with this, that, those or these in the title
(i) The Songs That Saved Us: My Dad, Dementia and Me
(ii) These Streets

48 A book with something edible in the title
(i) Black Cake
(ii) Butter

49 A second book for your favourite prompt
New-to-you author.
(i) The Names by Florence Knapp
(ii) The Artist by Lucy Steeds

50 A book with a bird on the cover
(i)
(ii)

51 A book published in 2026
(i) The Grapples of Wrath
(ii) Fireflies in Winter

52 A book related to the name of one of Santa’s reindeer
(i) The Dance Tree
Dancer, Prancer, Comet, Cupid.
(ii) Running Like a Girl
Dasher

This sounds like a really interesting take on the challenge!! Good luck :)

Thank you (belatedly). I did manage to complete round 1 using just books from my local branch library (and a further eight locally sourced books in my second round.) I found some good books that I would probably not have read otherwise.

Stats:104 books read. 26 were non-fiction, two combined short stories and essays. Of the fiction, one was a volume of poetry, one a play, one a graphic novel, two short story collections; the rest were novels or novellas. Three were written for children or young adults. Four were written before C21st.

Rejects:

I've managed to use books read for ATY, PopSugar and seasonal challenges to cover most of the 2026 rejected prompts. Those that are left are:

A book with a jewel or precious stone in the title or author's name
The Diamond Girls

A book with an antonym in the title
The Foot on the Crown

A book with a fraction in the title.
Half Light

A book relating to planes.
Hostage

A modern retelling of an old story, myth or fairy tale
No Friend To This House
The Girl in Red

A book related to one of the complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales.
The Girl in Red

A book related to penguins
The Penguin Book of Penguins

A book involving pirates, puppies, parrots ,penguins, or pachyderms.
Frenchman's Creek; Murder at the Monastery; The Parrots; The Penguin Book of Penguins; The Elephants of Thula Thula [also contains rhinos]

An author who shows up most on your TBR, but is so far unread by you.
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

A book inspired by or related to the Charlie's Angels franchise
Dancing Angels

A book by a 2026 debut author
A Bad Bad Place by Frances Crawford

A book you read in a -ber month