Books Centered Around Book Clubs

Books Centered Around Book Clubs

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Erica Ezeifedi, Associate Editor, is a transplant from Nashville, TN that has settled in the North East. In addition to being a writer, she has worked as a victim advocate and in public libraries, where she has focused on creating safe spaces for queer teens, mentorship, and providing test prep instruction free to students. Outside of work, much of her free time is spent looking for her next great read and planning her next snack.

Find her on Twitter at @Erica_Eze_.

We love a bookish book ’round these parts and have quite a few lists dedicated to highlighting books about books. I wanted to get even more specific for the sake of this list, though, and shout out some books that are centered around book clubs.

One thing that will become apparent as you read through this list is how rebellious book clubs can be. There are underground book clubs dedicated to a local town’s actual interests, and even book clubs that serve to counter military regimes, for instance. No matter what their ultimate goal is, the book clubs in these books are epicenters of change, both personal and communal.

cover of The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks by Shauna Robinson

The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks by Shauna Robinson

Maggie goes to a town known as Bell River to help run her best friend’s bookstore, which isn’t doing so great. She soon learns why: the local literary society wants to keep the bookstore selling older books, as they think that would be more beneficial to the town’s rich literary history. Problem is, people aren’t trying to buy books like that often. So, Maggie starts selling and discussing books people actually want to read in an underground book club. But then she discovers a town secret that could really muck things up.

Banned Book Club cover

Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook, translated by Ryan Estrada, translated by Ko Hyung-Ju

When I first heard of this YA graphic memoir, I was a little shook to find out that South Korea’s military regime, the Fifth Republic, was in power as recently as the ’80s. Then again, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised since I haven’t been taught much about the somewhat recent history of other countries when I wasn’t taught about a lot of American history, but I digress.

It’s 1983 when Kim Hyun Sook starts college, ready to leave the doldrums of her family’s restaurant. The turbulence of the time leads Sook to bury her head in the safety of books, but then the handsome editor of the school newspaper invites her to his reading group, and everything changes. Turns out, the classics of Western literature she thought they’d be reading on sunlit lawns are actually banned books read in a basement in secret. As her time with the banned book club increases, Sook learns how violent the consequences of anti-intellectualism and censorship can be.

cover of The Modern Fairies by Clare Pollard

The Modern Fairies by Clare Pollard

The book club here is a bit different from some of the others mentioned. For one, it’s both fictional and based on real people, and secondly, it doesn’t have a book club in our modern sense but a salon where attendees tell fairy tales.

It’s during Louis XIV’s reign that this hostess, Baroness Marie D’Aulnoy, leads her literary salon in Paris. There, a group of mostly women—and the recently widowed Charles Perrault—gather to tell what the hostess D’Aulnoy calls “comtes de fees,” or fairy tales. Meanwhile, D’Aulnoy’s life is its own kind of fairy tale, full of cruel twists, and when it gets revealed that there is a spy among her salon’s members after people get arrested for poisonings at Versailles, it becomes clear that telling stories comes with its own particular danger.

Book cover of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

After sacrificing her career goals to be a wife and stay-at-home mother to ungrateful kids, just about the only thing Patricia looks forward to these days is going to her book club. It’s there that a group of South Carolinian mothers meet to discuss true crime and suspenseful fiction. One day, an artistic man shows up, and suddenly, it seems like he’s the only thing on everyone’s minds. He’s the only thing on Patricia’s mind, too, if you know what I mean, but things shift once children start going missing. Soon, she and her book club realize they may be the only ones keeping a monster at bay.

bromance book club cover

The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams

The premise of this romance gets a bit meta. By that, I mean that, within the romance-reading world, women sometimes say how they wished their real-life romantic prospects behaved more like the men in fiction. And here, professional Nashville baseball player Gavin Scott does exactly that. It starts with him being a little raggedy at first, though. When his wife Thea reveals that she’s been faking it when they do the deed, he’s upset, and how he responds pushes their already strained relationship over the edge. Thea asks for a divorce, and Gavin is desperate to fix things. So he does something a little funky. He decides to start attending and get advice from a secret romance book club made up of high-achieving Nashvillian men. Thing is, the new, flowery phrases he gets equipped with may not be enough to win back Thea.

Suggestion Section

Nibbles and Sips: Palestinian Musakhan Rolls

I’ve never had these Palestinian rolls, but they look and sound delicious. They’re also perfect finger foods. The Middle Eats channel on YouTube shows how to make them.

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