About Champaca: We are writing to you from Champaca Bookstore, an independent, women-run bookstore and children's library in Bangalore. At Champaca, we curate our books and events to enable the discovery of diverse narratives. We are a community of readers. We have experienced the world differently thanks to the stories we've read and shared—they enrich us like nothing else, and we’re excited to share that with you! Until you can make it to our much-loved, quiet, green space in Bangalore, we can bring the books to you—we ship across India.
Hello from our little indie bookstore! As we head into another year, we’re heartened by the support of our community, and finding joy in the books we’re reading. We hope that you and your loved ones are keeping safe.
This year, we launched something new and exciting: the Champaca Reading Challenge for 2022! We’ve put together a list of prompts—some fun, some unusual—designed to expand our reading this year. Let’s read together to discover new worlds, and read diverse! How it works is you pick a book (or two!) for each prompt. You don't have to read in order, and you don't have to finish the challenge—we're just excited to discover new books together! Find the prompts, and recommendations from our shelves, here. And we would love to see what you read through the year—use the tag #ChampacaReadingChallenge when you talk about it!
We've also made it easy for you to keep track of your progress with a new little notebook, featuring a painting of some of our favourite books on the cover! Get yourself a notebook here. There are limited copies available!
In case you’re new here, let us introduce you to the Champaca Book Subscription—a monthly book box delivered to your doorstep, that includes one or two curated books, a curation note written by our team, and assorted artwork through the year. This year, till June 2022, we’re reading books in the theme of travel: moving across time and space, journeys into food or natural history, internal journeys, and travel for necessity or migration. We also run a small book club for those of you who sign up for an advanced plan. In December, we sent out ‘Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul’ by Taran N. Khan, and were thrilled to have her join our book club meeting—it was wonderful to hear from her, and to ask her our questions about her lyrical book.
You can learn more about the Subscription and the book club here, and sign up to get your first box in February!
You can find us and our book recommendations on our website, Instagram, and Twitter.
Until next time, happy reading!
