Are book clubs on the rise?

This is what got me started: Blair Sobol, No Holds Barred: Booked and Hooked on Families, New York Social Diary, June 21, 2024.

The other side of the book story is how aware I am of the book club explosion. After all, that is what put Oprah on the map. Though book clubs have been baked into our historical culture forever.

Now we have over 5 million book clubs in America. Celebrity book clubs are everywhere; Reese Witherspoon, Emma Watson, Emma Roberts, Jenna Bush, Florence Welch and Sarah Michelle Gellar have all added books to their brand. TikTok and Pornhub now offer book lists for followers. Pick your interest — romance, gay romance, household plumbing — Bookstagram offers “Loc’d and Lit.”

I'd like to know where that 5 million number is from, and what the number was 5, 10, 20, 50 years ago. 

Anyhow, I went looking for more and found a bunch of articles. I've appended quotes from some of them after the asterisks:

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Tatum Hunter, Online book clubs are exploding. Let’s find the right one for you. The Washington Post, July 31, 2024.

On the social network Reddit, for instance, tens of thousands of bookworms flock to the forum r/BookClub to discuss their latest reads. Every month, forum members vote on a slate of books, and moderators create a calendar for online discussions.

Social isolation during the pandemic pushed many to look for community online, a pattern that repeats in accounts from children, the elderly and everyone in between. Book clubs — unlike live shows or pickleball — lend themselves especially well to digital gatherings, participants say. And with bookish communities popping up everywhere from TikTok to Craigslist, joining one from your home is easier than ever.

Shelbi Polk, The Long Legacy of Book Clubs, Shondaland, Oct. 23, 2023. [Shondaland is the TV production company founded by Shonda Rimes.]

According to BookBrowse, in 2015 five million Americans were involved in a book club of some kind. In 2023, it would be no surprise if this number has only grown with the rise of BookTok and Bookstagram, where creating a community with fellow readers is easier than ever. Subsequent BookBrowse research found that the majority of participants in private book clubs were women (88 percent of private book clubs were made up of all women), but at least half of public clubs tended to include men. [...]

Let’s take things back to the first verified book club in North America. As the first printed books in Europe and China were religious texts, the earliest recorded North American book club was more or less a Bible study group. Anne Hutchinson began a scripture reading circle in 1634 during her boat ride from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When her club became more popular than the official local church services, she was exiled from the colony entirely.

Over the next century, book clubs grew increasingly common among middle- and upper-class Europeans, and wealthy colonists adopted the trend in North America. There were as many as a thousand private book clubs in 18th-century England, where people drank, gossiped, and/or discussed radical politics, in addition to the infamous French salons. The French salons were decidedly upper-class gatherings, usually organized by prominent society women, where writers, aristocrats, and artists gathered to talk literature, politics, and philosophy.

Plenty of early American book clubs, like Benjamin Franklin’s Junto club, formed around the same time. Franklin’s club was much more formal than most of today’s book clubs. Members elected officers, were required to write essays on serious topics, and answered a strict set of preestablished questions (though they did eat and drink at the local pub during meetings). [...]

Even though 19th-century book clubs allowed women to take one another seriously in a society that devalued their intellectual contributions, some people still write off today’s book clubs as groups of gossipy women drinking rather than instilling real change or becoming a space for challenging conversations. When the Book of the Month Club was founded in 1926, some people were convinced it would unforgivably “dumb down” American reading. Infamously, Jonathan Franzen got flack for worrying that having one of his books in Oprah’s Book Club would make him seem middlebrow. When one 19th-century woman told her father that she and some friends were starting a literary club to discuss Milton and Shakespeare, he called it “harmless,” dismissing her circle’s potential to do much at all. Her mother noted that it sounded like “women’s rights.” At times, people can be dismissive of any interest deemed too feminine, and women make up 80 percent of fiction buyers. So, while it’s true that book clubs are about community building and socializing as much as anything else, they aren’t classes. And they aren’t meant to be. It’s even okay that some book clubs value entertaining books over literary or nonfiction works, but that doesn’t mean women are reading frivolously. As writer and editor Lucy Shoals notes in a review of English professor Helen Taylor’s work Why Women Read Fiction, not only are women buying more books, but “more women than men are members of libraries and book clubs. Women make up the majority of the audiences at literary festivals and bookshop events. They listen to more audiobooks and attend more literary evening classes. Most literary bloggers are women.”

There's much more at that link.

Erica Ezeifedi, Book Clubs Are Having a Moment, Book Riot, Apr. 16, 2024.

While they’re certainly nowhere near being a new thing — Mikkaka Overstreet gave a nice, brief overview of the history of book clubs, which includes some ancient Greek circles — they are definitely having a moment in pop culture. It feels like everyone and their (famous) momma is starting or restarting a book club. Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager, Emma Robert, Amerie, Dua Lipa, Emma Watson, Florence Welch, and Kaia Gerber all have book clubs. Jimmy Fallon just restarted his book club, and Dakota Johnson introduced the TeaTime Book Club this March.

But, why are book clubs so trendy within the entertainment industry?

My initial instincts point me to TikTok, with its more than 200 billion views, but some of these book clubs predate BookTok’s ascension, like Witherspoon’s, Jenna Bush Hager’s, Amerie’s, and, technically, Jimmy Fallon’s.

So then, what is it?

There are some who say that these entertainment industry book clubs are trying to fill the void left by Oprah’s book club, which, in its heyday, sold 20 million books. Jenna Bush Hager’s and Reese Witherspoon’s respective clubs seem to be most comparable to Oprah’s in terms of influencing book sales, but there’s a slight difference.

For one, Witherspoon’s club seems to be the first step through a pipeline that leads to a movie adaptation — she recently sold her production company, Hello Sunshine, for $900 million. Through the company, Reese has purchased the rights to some of the books chosen as her book club’s monthly selection, and then gone on to sell those rights to companies like Netflix, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, and others.

Another way these present-day celebrity book clubs differ from Oprah’s — a part from the fact that most of them are run by thin and rich cis white women — is what feels like an obvious quest for clout.

There's more.

Olivia Allen, Why are we all so obsessed with book clubs now? Dazed, February 2024.

Book clubs are currently having a revival, with young people driving their renaissance. Gen-Z-friendly book clubs are popping up all over the world, while celebs like Kaia Gerber and Dua Lipa have jumped on the bandwagon and formed book clubs of their own too.

Young people famously love books: on TikTok, #BookTok has racked up over 220 billion views and there have been many recent reports of us flocking to libraries in search of a third space. Plus, in our increasingly isolating and online world, we’re all in desperate need of a little tangible human connection. It’s no secret we are online too much, spending an average nine hours a day looking at a screen. In addition, research published by the Prince’s Trust in 2022 found that one-third of young people say they don’t know how to make new friends while 35 per cent say they’ve never felt more alone. With this in mind, it tracks that we’re feeling drawn to in-person meet ups such as book clubs which offer us a chance to share our love of books and foster genuine connections offline.

Final paragraph:

As literary clubs like these gain popularity, they reflect a broader societal shift towards intentional and meaningful socialising. The chance to chit-chat about Britney’s biopic or some esoteric Russian prose offers us a welcome respite from another evening of being sucked into the TikTok algorithm or, God forbid, Instagram reels. Although books and topics of discussion may vary from group to group, all these book clubs share a sense of community – and don’t we all need a little more connection in this cold and lonely world?