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This post is auto-generated from RSS feed BOOK RIOT. Source: These 2015 Books Aged Like Fine Wine

Can you believe the Read Harder Challenge is more than ten years old? That’s a century in internet time! For a little bit of nostalgia, we tied in the very first Read Harder Challenge to this year’s for task #24: Pick a 2015 Read Harder Challenge task to complete. This might be the easiest task of the year, because those first tasks were very broad, like “Read a romance novel” or “Read a book published this year.”

I don’t think anyone will struggle with recommendations for task #24, so I thought I’d give myself the extra challenge of only recommending books that came out in 2015! Some of them have become even more well known over the past ten years, while others have been forgotten, but they’re all worth a read in 2025.

A book by or about someone that identifies as LGBTQ

Nimona by ND Stevenson I had to start with this title, because I wrote a retrospective on Nimona earlier this year, and it may be my favourite thing I’ve written for Book Riot: 10 Years Later, We Need Nimona More Than Ever. In it, I compare the 2015 graphic novel to its 2023 movie adaptation. To spoil my own article, I recommend both versions of this story, because I think they’re so interesting in conversation. Stevenson also came out as trans between publishing the book and making the movie, and while the book has queer subtext, the movie has canon queer characters as well as a trans allegory.

A National Book Award, Man Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner from the last decade

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for his unforgettable novel, The Sympathizer. Experience this breathtaking story and you’ll see why. Nguyen’s book traces a group of refugees from the Vietnam War who flee to America in 1975, focusing in particular on a North Vietnamese general in the South Vietnamese army who operates as a spy in his home country and again as a CIA agent in a South Vietnamese community that has settled in Los Angeles. The Sympathizer is a beautifully written war novel about the consequences of war. —Sarah S. Davis

All Access members, read on for four more 2015 books that are still worth reading.

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And that’s it! Those are our recommendations for all the 2025 Read Harder Challenge tasks! Stay tuned for the announcement of the 2026 Read Harder Challenge tasks, coming in just a couple of weeks…

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