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To celebrate being halfway through 2025, I sent out a survey to see how you’re all doing in the Read Harder Challenge so far. I already shared some of the results about how many books you’ve all read on average, how many tasks you’ve finished, and which tasks you found the most difficult and the easiest. Now, I’m here to let you know about the new favorite books you’ve all read so far this year that check off tasks!
Almost all the titles you shared were unique, but there were ten books mentioned by multiple people. Here are the most popular responses, organized by the tasks you read them to complete. The first two also made it onto Book Riot’s list of the Best Books of 2025 (So Far)!
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
#1: Read a 2025 release by a BIPOC author.
Zelu is a disabled Nigerian American professor and novelist. The novel shows how her disability, ethnicity, and family shape her personality. After her sci-fi novel, Rusted Robots, makes her famous, strangers judge her personal choices, including walking with bionic legs. She’s disappointed with Rusted Robots’ film adaptation, which Americanizes the robot characters’ Nigerian names. Okorafor’s novel is metafictional, and Zelu’s narrative is intertwined with Rusted Robots in surprising ways. Death of the Author explores its themes in depth, from creativity to bodily autonomy. —Grace Lapointe
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
#1: Read a 2025 release by a BIPOC author.
This Indigenous horror story literally gave me a nightmare, but it might not be why you think. Yes, it has vampires, but the true monsters in it are those who slaughtered around 200 Blackfeet in the early 1900s. The story of the Blackfeet gets told to a Lutheran pastor in 1912 through a series of confessions by a man named Good Stab, who seems to have had a supernaturally long life. He also has a curious appetite and strange reflexes…and revenge on his mind. —Erica Ezeifedi
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
#4: Read a book about obsession.
Cyrus is a twentysomething queer poet who has been numbing his pain with drugs and alcohol. His mother was killed when her plane was shot down over Tehran in a senseless act of violence by the U.S. military. His father recently died of a heart attack. As he becomes sober, Cyrus goes looking for meaning, and he finds it by obsessively researching martyrs. When he hears about an artist dying of cancer in an exhibition at a museum, he is determined to meet her.
Babel by R.F. Kuang
#6: Read a standalone fantasy book.
In the late 1820s, Robin, a Cantonese orphan, finds himself deposited in London. There, he trains as a translator, studying Chinese as well as the ancient languages. He’s spent his whole life preparing for his inevitable entry into the Royal Institute of Translation: London’s magical epicenter and the key to Britain’s dominion over the world. Once Robin gets there, however, he realizes that his adopted homeland’s colonization of his birthplace has come at a price. Where will his loyalties eventually lie? —K.W. Colyard
James by Percival Everett
#8: Read literary fiction by a BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled author.
This retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain from Jim’s perspective won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. It was the biggest book of 2024, coming at the same time as Everett won the Oscar award for best adapted screenplay for American Fiction.
True Biz by Sara Nović
#8: Read literary fiction by a BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled author.
Set in a boarding school for Deaf students, this novel’s characters include Charlie, a new student, and February, an alumna and headmistress trying to save the school. It also contains lots of background on Deaf culture and illustrations of American Sign Language. Some of the students, like Austin, come from Deaf, signing families, while Charlie comes from a hearing family. Growing up without access to sign language was socially isolating for Charlie. Her story also shows that many Deaf people don’t want cochlear implants. In Charlie’s case, her implants are dangerous. She crews for a school production of Peter Pan and joins a diverse, rebellious group of friends. —Grace Lapointe
We Do Not Part by Han Kang
#17: Read a book about little-known history.
When Kyungha’s friend Inseon injures herself in an accident, she begs Kyungha to go to her home in Jeju Island and rescue her pet bird Ama. But when she makes her way to the island, she is bombarded with ice and snow. What awaits her at Inseon’s home is nothing Kyungha could have anticipated, and she finds herself uncovering ghosts of South Korea’s past. — Emily Martin
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna
#18: Read a “cozy” book by a BIPOC author.
A magical coastal estate in England. A slow-burn romance between a grumpgrump librarian and a kindhearted witch in search of found family. All things cottagecore. Come on! What more could you want from a beach read? Sangu Mandanna’s sweet romance hits the molten hot core of cozy and my personal witchy wheelhouse. This is the book you’ll want to grab when you’re looking for a summer read to help you unwind and capture those carefree vibes. Yes, it has stakes and some racist, xenophobic antagonists, but the strife is soft. You can bet that it delivers the HEA and a houseful of human-shaped cinnamon rolls (even if in the making). —S. Zainab Williams
We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida
#18: Read a “cozy” book by a BIPOC author.
The title of this one isn’t a metaphor. Ishida’s novel is essentially a story cycle: the lost characters in this novel each stumble across the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul, where Dr. Nikké and Chitose, the nurse, prescribe cats to help address their various issues. The cats aren’t magical—as a cat owner myself, I found them delightfully cat-like. They have their idiosyncrasies and do all the things real-life cats do, but their presence in their temporary owners’ lives is transformative. Whether it’s the cat itself or caring for and playing with it, the characters get what they need from their feline medicine. —Anne Mai Yee Jansen
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
#19: Read a queernorm book.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is set in a far-off, lovingly detailed future so different from ours that it feels a bit weird to label the relationships and sexuality at all. But it’s also hard to deny many of the characters are queer and poly, as they embark on same-sex inter-species relationships. Let’s just say the entire understanding of sexuality in this book is queer, in all senses of the word. This is character-driven science fiction at its best, which just happens to feature polyamorous species and characters. —Casey Stepaniuk
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