Books Centered Around Book Clubs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.