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As we continue the 2025 Read Harder Challenge, I like to feature other reading challenges happening across the internet. I know many of you have multiple reading goals and challenges this year, with Read Harder being just one of them. One I learned about recently is The Free Black Women’s Library Reading Challenge 2025. This is the sixth year of the challenge, which invites readers to finish at least 24 books by Black women and Black nonbinary folks by the end of the year, choosing from 40 different prompts.
If you’re attempting both of these challenges, I have six books that will check off at least one The Free Black Women’s Library Reading Challenge 2025 prompt and one 2025 Read Harder Challenge task at the same time. Some of these overlap neatly, like “A hybrid or genre blending text” and “Read a genre-blending book,” while others just happen to be both relevant to the same book. In this list, I’ve included the Free Black Women’s Library Reading Challenge prompt and then the Read Harder Challenge task for each book.
“A nonfiction book that features LGBTQIA characters or content or an exploration of gender and sexuality”
“Read a book about little-known history.”
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
In this illuminating history, Hartman explores the radical lives of young Black women in New York and Philadelphia during the early 20th century. She shares stories of women who broke away from expected racial and gender norms, creating queer and creative networks of kinship and support. It’s a hefty, thoughtfully researched, and moving work of scholarship that reexamines the prevalent, simple story about early 20th-century Black life and tells a much more nuanced and complicated one. —Laura Sackton
“A book that uses nature or the environment as theme or topic (fiction or nonfiction)”
“Read a nonfiction book about nature or the environment.”
Wild Life by Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant is a wildlife ecologist who has studied carnivores, including grizzly bears, African lions, and black bears. Wild Life is her memoir about her life, growing up in California and falling in love with the natural world. She decides to become a scientist in a field not known for its diversity. Tracking her adventures in her fieldwork and childhood, she makes the case that we are connected to everyone and everything and need to better care and share with the world. —Elisa Shoenberger
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