Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge 2026 - July Update: True Biz & A Fever In The Heartland

Happy Wednesday everyone!  I hope everyone's had a good July.  How are we already more than halfway through the year!  I've now completed 14 tasks for Book Riot's 2026 Read Harder Challenge.  The tasks I completed in July required me to read a book book by a d/Deaf author and a nonviolent true crime book.  I selected True Biz by Sara Nović and A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan respectively.  Read on to see my mini reviews and my plans for next month: 

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True Biz by Sara Nović is a great YA contemporary coming-of-age story.  The author does an outstanding job of settling the audience into Deaf culture.  I also appreciated the characters in that they all feel very fleshed out and are allowed to be messy - they feel like real people.  Anyway, this book also reminded me that it's been many years since I last studied ASL, but I wouldn't mind getting back into it.  It really reminded me of the similarities between ASL and spoken Japanese, that's for sure.  I'll have to catch up on more books by this author in the future.

My review is also on Goodreads and The StoryGraph.

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A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan is a powerful and unflinchingly brutal look at a dark part in our country's history. I'm glad that this piece of history was put on my radar by My Buckeye Lake Story: A Memorable History of "The Playground of Ohio" by Donna Fisher Braig.  Otherwise, I had no idea about any of this story, or its connection to my home state of Ohio.  Finally, it's depressing and genuinely made me angry reading this book about events that happened in the 1920s and seeing similarities to 2020s.  I don't know about you, but I'll definitely be looking into more books from Timothy Egan in the future.

My review is also on Goodreads and The StoryGraph.

Next Up For August:

Read/try a recipe from a cookbook about a culture whose food you’ve never eaten

My choice: FUSÃO: Untraditional recipes inspired by Brasil by Ixta Belfrage - I don't think I've ever had Brazilian food before.

Read a book by a librarian

My choice: A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff - This sounds like one I'll need, honestly.

Are you taking part in this challenge?  Have you read either of these books?  As always, thanks for visiting my blog and perhaps even commenting down below!