One of my goals this year is to diversify my reading. I have always been pretty good at reading across a range of genders and identities, both author-wise and character-wise, so I do want to keep that up, but obviously that isn’t all there is to diversity. I have found I am still tending to pick Western-centric authors and settings, and though I did start reading more Asian literature towards the end of the year, I know that I still have a ways to go.

So enter, The Diverse Baseline Challenge.

The Diverse Baseline is an Instagram challenge (there is also a Discord), run by Brittany @bookish.millennial and Margherita @themargherita.s. Their challenge goal description is as follows:

Read 1 book by a racialized author every month, for the entirety of 2025, for a total of 12 books. This challenge is meant to encourage readers to try genres they historically don’t reach for, find new-to-them racialized authors, and to encourage reflection on our reading habits. We want to read inclusively across genres and identities.

There is a huge list of 90 prompts (!!), so the goal is to make sure your one book per month fits one of the prompts and is written by a racialized author. There’s a huge range of prompts, from author countries, genres, character identities and some specific themes. You can read more than one book per month too, but the challenge is to read at least one.

As of now (halfway through February), I have read 3 books for the challenge:

• Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao (Surrealism, Magical Realism, or Fabulism by a racialized author)
• The Battle Drum by Saara El-Arifi (West African author)
• The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri (Hindu representation, written by a racialized author)

Below are some books on my tbr that will fit various prompts. I don’t know if I’ll get to all of them, but I do own quite a few already so hopefully I’ll be able to check a good amount off by the end of the year. I am sure I have a lot more that will fit, but my books are still in boxes and I am going off memory (and Storygraph) here!

Is this challenge something you might consider doing yourself? Any book recommendations for me?