The first book in #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson’s action-packed middle-grade fantasy—now in paperback with an all-new cover! | On my thirteenth birthday, I, Alcatraz Smedry, received my inheritance: a bag of sand. I thought the sand was a joke until Evil Librarians came to steal it. It turns out they’re actually a secret cult keeping the truth from you—a hidden world filled with magical eyeglasses, talking dinosaurs, and knights with crystal swords! Now, Grandpa Smedry and I must invade the local library and get that sand back before it’s used to conquer the world. For the folks who are potentially new here, the Read Harder Challenge is a 24-task challenge designed to broaden your horizons and pull you out of your comfort zone. The goal is to inspire you to read beyond what you might usually read, whether it’s a specific genre or type of book. But if, say, you wanted to try reading on a theme, there’s nothing in the rules (hah, rules) that say you can’t do that. So I’m here to offer you some potential books to pick up that would fit within the parameters of some of the tasks in Read Harder. You’ll still be on your own for a good number of them — I don’t know what year you were born, for instance — but you’ll have a nice place to start from when it comes to Read Harder. And if you want to know a little more about the challenge, you can always read up on the 2022 challenge and get your printable and editable PDF. Here are some books you can check out that will help you not just Read Harder, but discover more about libraries and librarians of all kinds! So there you have it! A few books to try in order to fulfill a good number of Read Harder tasks and read about librarians. Want to read more by and/or about libraries and library workers? Check out our Library archives! If you’re looking for a more “journey” type adventure, try: (Also if you want something else time travel and library related, there’s A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, which doesn’t feature a librarian but will make you want to look up the Selden End of the Bodleian Library…and then move there.) So really, you can also think of this as a queer retelling, because everything Katee Robert writes is inherently queer. If you’d rather read a true history book, try The Library Book by Susan Orlean or Dear Miss Breed: True Stories of the Japanese American Incarceration During World War II and a Librarian Who Made a Difference by Joanne Oppenheim
