Missoula Reads
The 5th annual Missoula Reads year-long reading challenge
Read one book in each of 50 categories by December 30 and win a fabulous prize! The first 150 registrants receive a free book journal to track their progress; bring your tickets to the library to claim your journal and your reading categories list.
Friendly reference staff members will be available all year to suggest titles or to chat about the challenge. Contact us any time!
*Missoula Reads is open to Missoula Public Library cardholders only.
50 Categories
Find all categories listed here. For reading recommendations in select categories, see below.
- #OwnVoices Book
- 200 Pages or Fewer
- 2020 Montana Book Award Nominee
- 400 Pages or More
- About an Item on Your Bucket List
- Action
- Alliterative Author
- Any eBook, any audiobook, or re-read an old favorite
- Best Book About Montana (according to Harry Fritz)
- Biography
- Call Number 978.xx
- Controversial Issue
- Cookbook
- Current Event
- Debut Novel
- Dog on the Cover
- Dystopian
- Edgar Award Winner
- Folklore
- Genre You’ve Never Read Before
- Graphic Novel
- Guilty Pleasure
- Health
- Infidelity
- Left-handed Author
- Love Story
- Nature
- Out of Your Comfort Zone
- Outside the United States
- Pick a Card, Any Card
- Politics
- Psychological Thriller
- Published in 2021
- Published in the Best Year of Your Life
- Recent Bestseller
- Religion
- Science Fiction
- Set in an Airplane
- Short Story Collection
- Slipstream
- Teacher or Teaching
- Time of Day in the Title
- Travel
- True Crime
- Turquoise Cover
- Uplifting
- Utopian
- Western
- Written by a Person of Color
- Your Favorite Historical Period
Select Reading Lists
Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson
American Street by Ibi Aanu Zoboi
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Auma’s Long Run by Eucabeth A. Odhiambo
Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas
Head Off & Split: Poems by Nikky Finney
History is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
Into White by Randi Pink
Letters to a Young Muslim by Omar Saif Ghobash
The Lines We Cross by Randa Abdel-Fattah
Piecing Me Together by Renée Watson
Saints and Misfits by S.K. Ali
The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli
When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon
American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West by Betsy Gaines Quammen
Artifact Hunters by Janet Fox
Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green
*HONOR BOOK* The Blaze by Chad Dundas
Bringing Back the Wolves: How a Predator Restored an Ecosystem by Jude Isabella
Eden Mine by S.M. Hulse
Grounded: A Senator’s Lessons on Winning Back Rural America by Jon Tester
Horsefly Dress by Heather Cahoon
Kingdomtide by Rye Curtis
*HONOR BOOK* Life List by Marc Beaudin
May We One Day Pick All the Shrapnel from Our Hearts by Shaenrayce Leigland
Meateater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival by Steven Rinella
Myth of Chinese capitalism by Dexter Roberts
Noble Calling by Rhona Weaver
*HONOR BOOK* Regarding Willingness: Chronicles of a Fraught Life by Tom Harpole
Reign of Wolf 21: The Saga of Yellostone’s Legendary Druid Pack by Rick McIntyre
Roadside Geology of Montana, 2nd edition by Donald Hyndman
*WINNER* Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World’s Most Famous Writer by Gretchen E. Minton
Small Crimes of Tiffany Templeton by Richard Fifield
Sons of Philo Gaines by Michael R. Ritt
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini
Willa’s Grove by Laura Munson
In the Winter 1982 edition of Montana the Magazine of Western History, longtime University of Montana history professor Harry Fritz published a list of the best books about Montana. Try one (or more!) and see what you think.
Please note that the list below is a selection from the original list. Any of the book titles from Harry Fritz’s article will satisfy this category requirement.
40 Years’ Gatherin’s by Spike Van Cleve
Before Barbed Wire by Mark Herbert Brown
The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie Jr.
The Bloody Bozeman by Dorothy M. Johnson
The Charles M. Russell Book: The Life and Work of the Cowboy Artist by Harold McCracken
Copper Camp: Stories of the World’s Greatest Mining Town, Butte, Montana by the Works Progress Administration
Custer’s Luck by Edgar I. Stewart
Forty Years on the Frontier by Granville Stuart
Free Grass to Fences by Robert H. Fletcher
From Wilderness to Statehood by James McClellan Hamilton
The Generous Years: Remembrances of a Frontier Boyhood by Chet Huntley
Good Medicine: The Illustrated Letters of Charles M. Russell by Charles M. Russell
The Frontier Years: L.A. Huffman, Photographer of the Plains by Mark Herbert Brown
The Journals of Lewis and Clark edited by Bernard DeVoto
Montana: A History of Two Centuries by Michael P. Malone
Montana: An Uncommon Land by K. Ross Toole
The Montana Frontier by Merrill G. Burlingame
Montana: High, Wide and Handsome by Joseph Kinsey Howard
Montana Margins: A State Anthology by Joseph Kinsey Howard
Montana Pay Dirt by Muriel Sibell Wolle
Not in Precious Metals Alone by the Montana Historical Society
One Man’s Montana: An Informal Portrait of a State by John K. Hutchens
Pioneer Cattleman in Montana: The Story of the Circle C Ranch by Walt Coburn
The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone by Mark Herbert Brown
A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
Stay Away, Joe by Dan Cushman
This House of Sky by Ivan Doig
Trails Plowed Under by Charles M. Russell
Tough Trip Through Paradise, 1878-1879 by Andrew Garcia
Twentieth Century Montana: A State of Extremes by K. Ross Toole
Vigilante Days and Ways by Nathaniel Pitt Langford
The Vigilantes of Montana by Thomas J. Dimsdale
The War of the Copper Kings: Builders of Butte and Wolves of Wall Street by Carl B. Glasscock
We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher by E.C. Abbott
Whoop-up Country by Paul F. Sharp
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Severance by Ling Ma
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
There There by Tommy Orange
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin
We Need New Names by NoViolet Belawayo
The Vegetarian by Kang Han
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
We the Animals by Justin Torres
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
1984 by George Orwell
American War by Omar El Akkad
Blindness by José Saramago
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Children of Men by P.D. James
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
The End We Start From by Megan Hunter
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Silence by Don DeLillo
Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Stand by Stephen King
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Wall by John Lanchester
The Mystery Writers of America present the Edgar Awards each year. Visit theedgars.com for a full list of winners.
The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson
Adultery by Paul Coelho
All My Mother’s Lovers by Ilana Masa
Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Blood Orange by Harriet Tyce
The Copenhagen Affair by Amulya Malladi
Death of the Black-haired Girl by Robert Stone
The Ditch by Herman Koch
Hausfrau by Jill Alexaner Essbaum
House of Names by Colm Toibin
Ike and Kay by James MacManus
The Margot Affair by Sanae Lemoine
Monogamy by Sue Miller
More Better Deals by Joe R. Lansdale
Nutshell by Ian McEwan
The Second Mrs. Hockaday by Susan Rivers
A Separation by Katie M. Kitamura
The Vacation by T.M. Logan
White Houses by Amy Bloom
Draw a card to select a Dewey Decimal range to read from. Ace is for 000s, 1 for 100s, 2 for 200s, etc. Contact a reference librarian to draw a card for you, or try your luck with your own cards at home.
Airframe by Michael Crichton
Before the Fall by Noah Hawley
Blue Skies by Robyn Carr
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano
Flight or Fright by Stephen King
Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith
Freefall by Jessica Barry
Her Last Flight by Beatriz Williams
In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume
The Language of the Sea by James MacManus
Night Fall by Nelson DeMille
Out of My Mind by Richard Bach
The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles A. Lindbergh
Starfire by Dale Brown
The Survivor by James Herbert
The Wright Brothers by David G. McCullough
Slipstream, or the “fiction of strangeness,” is a boundary-crossing genre that flows between science fiction, fantasy and literary fiction. Try one of the suggested titles below, or find another strange book to read.
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett
Among Others by Jo Walton
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Horrorstӧr by Grady Hendrix
In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell
London Falling by Paul Cornell
Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner
Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Night Film by Marisha Pessl
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
Time and Again by Jack Finney
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
Word Exchange by Alena Graedon
3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
Consider Phlebus by Iain Banks
For Us, the Living by Robert A. Heinlein
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swith
Island by Aldous Huxley
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy
Lost Horizon by James Hilton
New Atlantis by Francis Bacon
The Republic by Plato
Utopia by Sir Thomas More
Walden Two by B.F. Skinner
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World by Elif Shafak
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby
Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
Conjure Women by Afia Atakora
The Deep by Alma Katsu
The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay
Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Harley in the Sky by Akemi Dawn Bowman
If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know by Samira Ahmed
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
Polite Society by Mahesh Rao
Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan
The Silence of Bones by June Hur
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
The Wife by Alafair Burke