Celebrity book clubs spark passion for reading

Emily St. Martin, Tribune News Service

Film and music stars peddle style, beauty, and everything in between. But the hottest status symbol touted (and toted) by the modern-day it girl? A book. It all started with Oprah Winfrey, the OG of the buzzy celebrity book club. She launched Oprah’s Book Club on her eponymous talk show in 1996 and has since inspired a movement of celebrities sharing their love of reading with fans. Long gone are the days of zooming in on a paparazzi photo to discover what your favourite star is reading. Just check their Instagram! While naysayers might roll their eyes at another celebrity hopping on the book club bandwagon, a recent study conducted by iScience found that the proportion of the US population who read for pleasure on an average day declined over the last 20 years. From highs of 28% in 2004 to lows of 16% in 2023, the study indicates a relative decrease of 3% per year.

For bibliophiles, these numbers are alarming. For avid readers with serious social capital? It’s a call to action. Case in point: Reese Witherspoon was sick of the lack of female representation in stories that got the book-to-screen treatment. Natalie Portman believes becoming immersed in a story is a clear path toward empathy. Dua Lipa noticed the dwindling interest in libraries and wanted to reinvigorate discussions around reading. And Winfrey may have captured the collective intention of these celebrity book clubs best when she launched her own, saying, “I want to get the whole country reading again.”

From Oscar-winning actors to morning news hosts and Grammy-winning pop stars, here are the celebrity book clubs that are inspiring their fans to read.

Oprah’s Book Club: You get a book! You get a book. You get a book! “The Oprah Show” garnered around 48 million viewers weekly in the height of its popularity, and since Winfrey launched her groundbreaking book club in 1996, books selected for the monthly club have sold a combined 55 million copies. Winfrey called the moment she launched her book club one of her all-time favourite moments on television. “When I was growing up, books were my friends. When I didn’t have friends, I had books,” she said on the episode that unleashed a movement. “I think that books open windows to the world for all of us.”

Winfrey explained that she read “Deep End of the Ocean” by first-time novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard, and she loved it so much that she wanted to share it with her millions of viewers. “Those of you who haven’t been reading, I think books are important. So this is what we’re going to do: Y’all are going to have to buy it ... you get one month, then we’ll meet back here in a month and we’ll talk about the book, just like they do in the reading clubs. Isn’t that exciting? I love it!”

As of September, Winfrey has featured 118 monthly picks across nearly three decades and the vast majority of her picks shoot to best-seller status. Some of the books have stirred up headline-making controversies and scandals (Remember “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey?) and some have been adapted into Oscar-winning films. Not only has Oprah’s Book Club inspired millions to rush out to their local bookshops, it’s giving readers plenty of juicy book gossip to discuss. (Remember “The Corrections” contretemps with Jonathan Franzen?)

Reese’s Book Club: Reese Witherspoon is another top tastemaker with an immensely wide-reaching influence. In June 2017, she launched her book club, Reese’s Book Club, in conjunction with her production company, Hello Sunshine. She selects a book each month that centers on stories about women, and she takes approximately 2-3 of those books to the screen each year. The catalyst for launching such a venture? She said she was sick of getting lousy scripts. She told Graham Norton earlier this year that a script came across her desk around 2013 that was especially negative toward women. “I called my agent, and I said, ‘This is the worst script I’ve ever read, and I’m not doing it.’ And she said, ‘Every actress in Hollywood wants to do this part.’ And I thought, OK, well, if this is how bad the parts are for people who are really thriving in an industry, I gotta do better.”

“I complained about it for a long time, and then I realised complaining doesn’t help. And then I was like, ‘What am I gonna do about it?’ So I put my own money into a company, and I bought the first three books.” The books: “Gone Girl,” by Gillian Flynn, “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed and “Big Little Lies” by Liane Moriarty. The venture has nabbed multiple Oscar nominations and eight Emmy Awards, launched many of the buzziest, yellow-sticker-donning bestsellers, and brought numerous stories about the female experience to the forefront of popular culture.

Belletrist: Emma Roberts and her bestie, Karah Preiss, launched Belletrist in 2017 after years of exchanging book recommendations via text and phone chats. “We bonded over a shared love of books and dark jokes,” Roberts told BookClub in 2021. “What are other ways we can reclaim our power that don’t involve murder?”

“What is Belletrist? In French, the rough translation is somebody who writes beautiful letters or words,” Preiss added. “In English, it’s our book club.”

Roberts told Vogue in 2020 that Joan Didion agreed to be the Book Club’s first author interview. “It made us feel special, for her to support two young women who are just trying to share stories with the world, and it gave us a solid foundation to start our community with.” Belletrist shares monthly book club picks, offers a subscription service through a collaboration with online bookseller Tertulia, and hosts online discussions with members, as well as author interviews. Recent book club picks include “Finding Grace” by Loretta Rothschild, “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir,” by Molly Jong-Fast and “Notes on Infinity: A Novel,” by Austin Taylor.

Service95 Book Club by Dua Lipa: “If you’re anything like me, books aren’t just something that you read and put down. They stay with you. They’re passports, mirrors, escape routes, secret maps for finding yourself or getting completely lost in the best way,” Dua Lipa said in a YouTube video introducing her Service95 book club podcast. Every month since the Service95 book club’s inception in June 2023, Lipa has introduced members to a hand-selected book that made the pop star “laugh out loud, cry in public, rethink something that I thought I knew or just stayed with me long after the last page.” She hosts the authors on her video podcast to discuss their work, and the guests have included National Book Award winner Patti Smith, “On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous” author Ocean Vuong, Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett, and more. Lipa’s admiration for storytellers is clearly mutual: celebrated authors Min Jin Lee, Hernan Diaz, Emma Cline, Douglas Stuart and Jennifer Clement showed up to dance the night away at Lipa’s Radical Optimism tour stop at Madison Square Garden recently. The “Levitating” hitmaker recently visited a reading group at HMP Downview, a women’s prison in Surrey, England, as part of the Booker Prize Foundation’s Books Unlocked programme.