I am working on putting up a page that will contain links to books and authors that can serve as suggestions for anyone looking to diversify their reading stacks this year. I was just going through my BookBub emails from the weekend and I googled all of the authors of books that interested me and noticed that they were not all that diverse. So, I went to check what my preferences were set to. There are categories that are just LGBT and African-American interest. I just changed my settings today, so hopefully this will bring a little diversity to the subjects and authors in my daily emails.

It does, however, raise a really obvious question: If LGBT and African-American interest are separate categories, then who is served by all of the other categories (which are subject based and not demographic based)? This is why diverse reading challenges are important. Books with African-American characters aren’t only of interest to African-Americans and until readers start demanding diversity in the genres they read, this kind of categorizing won’t change.

(That being said, since African-American and LGBT voices aren’t well represented in broader categories, I think this kind of categorization is needed and important.)