The Diverse Baseline: October 2025 Newsletter

We want to start by sharing some glimmers and gratitude:

Thank yall for being part of our #TheDiverseBaseline community (:

There is no *set* monthly prompt this year. This challenge is fully up to you :)

You can choose whichever book you want for each month, as long as it fits one of the ~90 prompts we’ve listed and is written by a racialized author.

We included a definition of this:

This book could fit the following prompts:

To purchase using Brittany’s affiliate links, you can do so here:

We are hosting our fifth synchronous virtual book club on Sunday, October 11th at 4pm Pacific Time.

If you’re purchasing & it is accessible to you, get your copy at the following places to support local, indie booksellers:

For full context on the state crackdown on writers of Haitang in China you should read this article.

Chinese authors are being arrested for writing gay novels on Haitang (a web novel platform belonging to a Taiwanese publisher), with the excuse of “combating online obscenity and pornography”.

Some ways you can help:

Thanks for sharing your reviews each month!

Remember to use #TheDiverseBaseline when posting your reviews, and/or tagging us (only if you want to/feel comfortable doing so), so we can find & spotlight them here.

The below photos are hyperlinked to take you to their social media pages :)

In the carrd, you will find links to Canva templates for your Instagram feed and Instagram stories, as well as some fun stickers you can use in your posts.

If you have any templates that you have made and would like us to spread the word about, please email us with links to your templates and we will share in the Discord and the next newsletter!

We have official recommendation lists, as well as general lists of books we’ve read for the challenge, on libro.fm and bookshop.org. If you would like highly recommended books from us, check out our links and support local/indie bookstores in the process (if it’s an accessible option for you).

Brittany is a reader from the San Francisco Bay Area. She can be found on substack, instagram, storygraph, bluesky, and has resources here. She also hosts the SF Bay Area chapter of Cassie’s Walking Club on Strava.

Margherita is a reader and indie author from Italy. Xe can be found on instagram, tiktok and substack. Xyr website with links to xyr books, author services, and more is linked here.