The Entire Kobo Staff

2018 has been a fantastic year for books and publishing. At the beginning of the year, we posted a KWL Reading Challenge with the aim of diversifying our own reading, trying new books and sparking great discussions around new favourites. 

If there’s one thing that everyone at Kobo loves, it’s reading. We at KWL reached out to the entire company to ask which books they read for the challenge, and which they would recommend. Within ten minutes, we had well over 100 recommendations––check out our incredibly extensive list!

Strap in; it’s a long one. We really love books around here. (Click on titles to see the full descriptions).

• An audiobook read by the author
  
• • Make Trouble – Cecile Richards
• • Norse Mythology – Neil Gaiman
• • This Will Only Hurt a Little – Busy Philipps 
• • My Life as a Goddess – Guy Branum
• • Hunger – Roxane Gay
• • Hillbilly Elegy – JD Vance
• • The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolaño
• • How to Murder Your Life

• A book set in a country that fascinates you
• • 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami
• • The Accusation – Bandi
• • The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolaño
• A book that has been translated
• • Beartown by Fredrik Backman
• • The Winter Queen – Boris Akunin 
• • Judas – Astrid Holleeder
• • Gachar Ghochar – Vivek Shanbhag

• A book that looks frightening/a horror story
• • I’m Thinking of Ending Things – Iain Reid 
• • Geek Love – Katherine Dunn
• A cast recording audiobook
• • Sadie – Courtney Summers
• A book with an unreliable narrator
• • The Thief – Megan Whalen Turner
    
• An audiobook narrated by a celebrity
• • The Odyssey and The Iliad narrated by Dan Stevens
    
• • Anansi Boys – Neil Gaiman narrated by Lenny Henry
• A book set in your hometown
• • Cobalt Blue – Sachin Kundalkar
• • Saturday Night Ghost Club – Craig Davidson (Niagara Falls) 
• • Dyschronia, – Jennifer Mills (near Adelaide)
• A book written by somebody born in the 1800s
• • Aurora Leigh – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• • Walden – Henry David Thoreau (1845) 
• • Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
    
• • Dubliners by James Joyce
• • The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories – H.P. Lovecraft 
• A book written by a man writing as a woman
• • Mrs Fletcher – Tom Perrotta
• • American War – Omar El Akkad
• A book set in a European city
• • Prague Fatale – Philip Kerr 
• • Snow – Orhan Pamuk
• • The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer
• • The Heart’s Invisible Furies – John Boyne (Dublin) 
• • The Day of the Jackal – Frederick Forsyth
• • Take Nothing With You – Patrick Gale 
• • A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
• A book written by a woman writing as a man
• • A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
• A book published in the year you were born
• • The Secret History – Donna Tartt
• Something from Barack Obama’s reading list
• • Brown Girl Dreaming – Jacqueline Woodson
• • Moby Dick – Herman Melville
• A New York Times bestseller
• • Me Before You – Jojo Moyes 
• • From the Corner of the Oval – Beck Dorey-Stein
• A book written for young adults
• • Alanna – Tamora Pierce
• • We Are Okay – Nina LaCour 
• • Neverworld Wake – Marisha Pessl
• • What I Leave Behind – Alison McGhee

• A book from a genre you don’t usually read
• • My Best Friend’s Exorcism – Grady Hendrix 
• • Grunt – Mary Roach
• • The Happiness Project – Gretchen Rubin
• A book recommended by a friend or family member
• • Educated – Tara Westover 
• • Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore – Robin Sloan
• • Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman 
• • Big Little Lies – Liane Moriarty 

• A book you loved as a child
• • Good Omens – Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman 
• • Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – Judy Blume
    
    
• A novel that incorporates recipes or food
• • The Measure of My Powers by Jackie Kai Ellis 
• • The Beastie Boys Book by Michael Diamond and Adam Horowitz 
• A book made into a movie/television show that you enjoyed
• • Dumplin’ – Julie Murphy
• • IT by Stephen King 
• • Fleabag: The Original Play (NHB Modern Plays) – Phoebe Waller-Bridge
• • The Darkest Minds – Alexandra Bracken 
• • Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick –
• • Altered Carbon – Richard Morgan 
• • Rock-N-Roll Victims, the story of a band called Death – Bobby Dean Hackney 

• A book you were made to read in high school
• • Lord of the Flies by William Golding 
• A book by an indie author
• • Let’s Get Digital – David Gaughran
• • Scribe – Alyson Hagy 
• • Royally Yours – Emma Chase 
• A book that has been/is banned somewhere
• • A Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• • One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
• • The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie 
• • The Devils’ Dance – Hamid Ismailov (Banned in Uzbekistan, my press released an English version)
• A book with a cover you love
• • They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us – Hanif Abdurraqib 
• • Bookworm – Lucy Mangan 
• • Children of Blood and Bone – Tomi Adeyemi 
• • My Absolute Darling – Gabriel Tallent 
• • Annihilation – Jeff VanderMeer 
• A Booker Prize winner
• • Milkman – Anna Burns 
• • A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James
• • Disgrace – JM Coetzee 
• A book that inspired a successful television show
• • The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson 
• • The Last Kingdom – Bernard Cornwell
• A book you have always meant to read but never have
• • The Power of Myth – Joseph Campbell 
• • The Sisters Brothers – Patrick DeWitt (Does “for the past 8 years” count as “always”?)
• • The Histories – Herodotus 
• • Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro 
• A biography of someone you admire
• • John Brown – W E B DuBois
• • Ninth Street Women – Mary Gabriel
• • Becoming – Michelle Obama
    
• A book set in the 1920s
• • The Diviners – Libba Bray
• A cozy mystery
• • Tell No One – Harlan Coben
• The first book in a series
• • Dawn – Xenogenesis #1 – Octavia E. Butler
• • The Burning – Jane Casey 
• • The Cruel Prince – Holly Black
• A biography of someone you dislike
• • Fear by Bob Woodward (- not sure that counts as a bio…)
    
• A book featuring magic
• • The Invisible Library – Genevieve Cogman
• A play
• • Pontypool – Tony Burgess 
• A book you would like to pass on to a child/young person
• • Cosmos – Carl Sagan
• A lesser-known book by a well-known author
• • The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler 
• • Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
• • South & West by Joan Didion
• A dystopia
• • Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury 
• • Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel 
• • Shelter – Dave Hutchinson
• • Dry – Neal Shusterman, Jarrod Shusterman 
• • Only Ever Yours – Louise O’Neill
• A book featuring a religion you’d like to know more about
• • 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus – Charles C. Mann
• A travelogue
• • Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper – Fuschia Dunlop
• • Following Fish – Samanth Subramanian
• • Berlin-Warszawa Express – Eamon McGrath
• A book by a woman of colour
• • Not That Bad – Roxane Gay
• • I’m Afraid of Men – Vivek Shraya
• • The Wedding Date – Jasmine Guillory 
• • The Hussani Alam House – Huma Kidwai 
• • An American Marriage – Tayari Jones 
• • Children of Blood and Bone – Tomi Adeyemi 
• • The Hate U Give – Angie Thomas 
• • Whiskey & Ribbons – Leesa Cross-Smith

• A book that began as a blog
• • Let’s Get Digital – David Gaughran 
• • Nobody Cares – Anne T. Donahue
• • Hey Ladies –  Michelle Markowitz, Caroline Moss
• • The Merry Spinster – Daniel Mallory Ortberg
• A book with a famous first line
• • One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Marquéz 
• • The Gunslinger by Stephen King: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”
• A book by an Australian author
• • The Hating Game – Sally Thorne 
• • Nine Perfect Strangers – Liane Moriarty 
• • Gould’s Book of Fish – Richard Flanagan 
• A book on a subject you’ve always wanted to learn more about
• • How Google Tests Software – James A. Whittaker
• • Marx: A Very Short Introduction – Peter Singer
• A book about enduring friendships
• • The Gunners – Rebecca Kauffman 
• A book based on a historical event
• • Dead Wake – Erik Larson
• • The Tattooist of Auschwitz – Heather Morris
• • The Dutch Wife – Ellen Keith
• • The Lost Queen – Signe Pike

We would love to know what you read and loved this year! Should we do the challenge again next year? Comment below and share your thoughts!

[bctt tweet="Looking for your next great read? Check out what the staff @Kobo read in 2018 for the #kwlreadingchallenge!"]