The Diverse Baseline 2025 (Official Challenge) #TheDiverseBaseline & #TheDiverseBaseline2025

408 participants (1,692 books)

01 Jan 202531 Dec 2025

Overview

Goal: Read 1 book by a racialized author per month, for the entirety of 2025 (a total of 12 books).

You can choose which book to read each month, as long as it fits one of the prompts below. 

You’re welcome to read more books fitting additional prompts.

All books need to be written by racialized authors. Books with racialized main characters written by white authors do NOT fit the brief. Make sure you double check with at least a web search to make sure that the authors and books you’ve chosen fit the challenge.

Research your authors/books before adding them to the prompts, as we can only “hide” books that don’t fit and don’t actually have the ability to take them off the lists for everyone (we have asked StoryGraph for this ability and it has been denied).

What does "racialized" mean?
Racialized means folks who are racialized under a U.S. lens, as we are creating this challenge from a U.S. lens, with alarmingly white lists like Goodreads and NYT in mind. We want to focus on authors who descend from the global majority: Black, Indigenous, Brown, Latinx, Pacific Islander, Arab, West Asian, North African, Southeast Asian, South Asian, East Asian, African, biracial, and multiracial people who are mixed with one or more of the above, and other people and groups who cannot access white privilege.

The term "global majority" refers to the ethnic groups that make up the majority of the world's population, which is approximately 80%. The term "global majority" was coined by educator and activist Rosemary Campbell-Stephens. It's intended to disrupt white supremacy culture and ideology.

Check out the carrd to read all the rules and guides. Subscribe to the newsletterto stay updated with announcements. Join our Discord to share book recommendations and updates with other participants and the challenge co-creators!

Challenge by @bookish.millennial & @themargherita.s (on instagram)

Last year's version of the challenge.

Challenge Prompts

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