52 Book Challenge: February Update

This year we're doing a 52 book challenge! We hope you follow along, and join us by taking the challenge yourself. You can borrow from our list or create your own! 

​I made it a goal to broaden my reading horizons, and I want to continue that resolution into the next year! Therefore, I'm challenging myself to read 52 books in 2026 (I'm counting books read in December of 2025....it's not cheating...okay, maybe it is a little, but we all have lives so get off my back!). To spice up the challenge even more, we'll pull books from all the different genres Birdwhistell Books has to offer.

Here is the list that we will update every month throughout the year. The good thing about this challenge is that once the book is finished, it goes right onto our shelves ready for the next reader! I hope you create your own list to share with us so we can see what we should read next!

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General / Literary Fiction: 3/10

1. ​Audition by Katie Kitamura - Slow-burn look at the roles people play and the narratives we construct. It's not a mystery but you begin the book thinking the story is one thing and then it completely flips. 
2. The Dog Master by W. Bruce Cameron - Historical fiction surrounding the domestication of wolves 30,000 years ago. The ancient history nerd in me couldn't pass it up. The imagining of how the first wolves were tamed was interesting, but the characters lacked depth and there was a little too much soap-opera drama for me.
3. A Burning by Megha Majumdar - I picked up this book without any idea about the story. It is an interesting look at how the incentives of modern society can influence the marginalized. Very good read for a first novel.

Mystery/Thriller: _/5
Si-Fi / Fantasy: _/5
Kentucky: 2/5

1. Pauline's by Pauline Tabor - The memoir of the Madam of Clay Street in Bowling Green, KY! If you like the Bluegrass Conspiracy and The Cornbread Mafia then you need to read this one as well, and it's actually really well written too.
2. Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story by Wendell Berry - Wendell Berry's newest edition to the Port William novels. Ostensibly, it's a story about the impact of the tobacco co-op on the Port William Membership, but reads much more like his essays.

Romance: _/3
Poetry & Plays: 1/3

1. The Mad Farmer Poems by Wendell Berry - I'm coming back to The Mad Farmer Poems more and more these days. I have found myself having a harder and harder time just going along to get along with the inane and the insane, and when that happens I know I can find some solace in the poems of the Mad Farmer. 

Classics: 1/3

1. Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse - Can't believe it has taken me this long to read this one. One of those books that took me like five tries to start reading it, but once I got into it I was hooked. See my highlight post for some of my favorite quotes.

Memoir & Biography: _/3
Religion & Philosophy: 1/3

1. On the Nature of Things by Lucretius - I read this so I could read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern which is about the rediscovery of this classic work of Epicurean philosophy. Absolutely beautiful poem.

History: 1/3

1. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern - Stephen Greenblatt - Had a hard time trying to figure out how to categorize this book. It is a fantastic piece of literature that transcends any one genre, but at its core, it is a story tracing of the foundations of our modern world through the history of Western Civilization by telling the story of the rediscovery of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things.

Society & Culture: 2/3

1. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad - Writes about crisis in Gaza, but connects it into a much larger and deeper story about who we are and the stories we tell ourselves. Part memoir, part war correspondence, part societal critique...it reads much like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me.
2. The Anti-Nuclear Handbook by Stephen Croall - I found this graphic novel from the 1970's, and I had to read it. I love artifacts from societal debates in the past (not that the debate between renewable vs. non-renewable energy ever stopped). I enjoy them even more than history books because you're not just reading about a different time, it's a portal that will take you there for a firsthand look around.

Science & Nature: _/3
Arts, Culture, and Sports: _/3