Read Harder
Read Harder is Book Riot’s annual reading challenge, where we design 24 tasks to help you read outside your comfort zone and find your next favorite read!
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Read Harder is Book Riot’s annual reading challenge, where we design 24 tasks to help you read outside your comfort zone and find your next favorite read!
Welcome to The Best of Book Riot. Here’s your weekend highlight reel of the week’s most popular stories.
This year’s tasks are a mix of fun topics to spice up your reading life, like Task #20: Read a book set in space, as well as timely topics relevant to navigating our world in 2026, like Task #18: Read a nonfiction book about AI or social media. We also have tasks to encourage you to check out buzzy subgenres of the moment, like romantasy and gothic novels. And yes, gothic novels are buzzy right now!
Given how many “best of 2025 so far” book lists have dropped, what books are emerging as among the most popular books picked for these lists? Are these titles different from or aligned with the “best books of 2025 so far” lists? Are they titles which got plenty of splashy promotion and thus, were most likely to rise to the top of TBRs from editors? Are these just damn good books that more people need to pick up? What the hell does “best” even mean, anyway? The only way to really know is to take an inventory of as many as possible.
Most of the books that have cracked into bestseller territory this year have done so with the help of massive marketing budgets. But as “Best Books of 2025” lists roll out, I find them lacking many of the books I’ve loved this year. It turns out some of the books that have made the biggest impact on me in 2025 have been criminally underappreciated. This list contains ten books that blew me away yet, as of this writing, have fewer than 500 ratings on Goodreads. (Goodreads is a complicated place, but I still find it helpful for gauging books’ popularity and visibility.) All of these books deserve to be on best-of-the-year lists. Some of them came from smaller publishers. Some were released late enough in the year that they got lost in the shuffle. If you’re looking to dig deeper into books that deserved more praise this year, check out these best books of 2025 that you (probably) haven’t read.
Of course, this list is just a sample of the many great books published by BIPOC authors this year, and spans across genres, fiction, and nonfiction, even including a couple poetry titles. The books on this list, assembled with the help of Editor Kelly Jensen, were on many of the biggest Best of the Year books lists, including NPR’s, Barnes & Noble’s, Bookshop.org’s, and Electric Literature’s. There are also some from our own list and a few that have won book awards this year.
December’s selections offer plenty of interesting choices, from a narrative nonfiction book that had a super popular adaptation to a romance with rich family history. There’s also a contemporary novel about obsession, a multi-generational family novel chosen by many book clubs this year, a fascinating historical novel based on the real Tipu’s Tiger, a novella/short story collection centering transness, a Jane Austen novel, and more! It’s a great time to settle in with a good read.