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How to Select Great Reads for Your Fall Book Club

Updated: Sep 04, 2024

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Author

Carrie Thornbrugh

🍂It’s that time of year...back to book club season! ⁠Many clubs are returning from a summer hiatus and selecting their books for the rest of the year. Whether your book club is picking up where you left off or kicking things off, here are Book Clubs' Top 10 titles to inspire your upcoming book club meetings and spark great discussions this fall. Learn everything you need to know to run a successful book club with our How to Book Club Series and Book Club Tips and Inspiration. Keep reading for more fall 2024 reading lists from Bookclubs.

 

women reading

 

Celebrity Book Club Picks

Attention pop culture queens! The Bookclubs team keeps tabs on the latest literary trends, including our favorite celebrities' recommendations. Here are the current must-reads that have caught the attention of Hollywood's most influential book club enthusiasts:

Reese’s Book Club: Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell + Discussion Guide

Oprah's Book Club: Familiaris by David Wroblewski + Discussion Guide

Read With Jenna: The Wedding People by Alison Espach + Discussion Guide

Good Morning America: The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia + Discussion Guide

Jimmy Fallon Summer Reads: The God of the Woods by Liz Moore + Discussion Guide

RuPaul: I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This (But I’m Going to Anyway) by Chelsea Devantez

Dakota Johnson: The Anthropologists by AyƟegĂŒl SavaƟ

Dua Lipa: Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

💡 Book Club Idea: Why not start a celebrity-inspired book club with friends and read along with your favorite star? Or mix and match these picks to create a diverse and exciting reading list for your existing book club. 

 

Trending Non-Fiction Titles and the Book Clubs Reading Them

Knowledge seekers, gather 'round–we’ve tracked the hottest book trends to keep our community in the know. Below is a list of trending non-fiction books on our platform this year, perfect for your next book club sesh or personal growth journey. If your book club typically reads fiction, consider switching things up this fall with one of these non-fiction titles offering something for everyone.

Remember, the best book club experiences come from diverse reading choices and open, engaging discussions. If you have a Bookclubs account, click on the book images below to recommend them to your club. If you don’t have a Bookclubs account yet, it’s easy and free to get started here! Download the Bookclubs app for free on the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.

 


Midnight in Chernobyl

Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham

 

The Morbidly Curious Book Club

Read by The Morbidly Curious Book Club

From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling “account that reads almost like the script for a movie” (The Wall Street Journal)—a powerful investigation into Chernobyl and how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the history’s worst nuclear disasters. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a “riveting, deeply reported reconstruction” (Los Angeles Times) and a definitive account of an event that changed history: a story more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth.

 


Doppleganger

Doppleganger by Naomi Klein

Arcadia Women's Book Club

Read by Arcadia 30/40s Women’s Book Club

"If I had to name a single book that makes sense of these last few dark years, it would be this one." --Katie Roiphe, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self--a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience--she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now--and an intellectual adventure story for our times.

 


The Age of Magical Overthinking

The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell

Feminist Reads Book Club

Read by Feminist Reads and Head Trip Book Club 

Utilizing the linguistic insights of her "witty and brilliant" first book Wordslut and the sociological explorations of her breakout hit Cultish, Amanda Montell now turns her erudite eye to the inner workings of the human mind and its biases in her most personal and electrifying work yet. "Magical thinking" can be broadly defined as the belief that one's internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external world: think of the conviction that one can manifest their way out of poverty, stave off cancer with positive vibes, thwart the apocalypse by learning to can their own peaches, or transform an unhealthy relationship to a glorious one with loyalty alone. In all its forms, magical thinking works in service of restoring agency amid chaos, but in The Age of Magical Overthinking, Montell argues that in the modern information age, our brain's coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our irrationality turned up to an eleven.

In a series of razor-sharp, deeply funny chapters, Montell delves into a cornucopia of the cognitive biases that run rampant in our brains, from how the "halo effect" cultivates worship (and hatred) of larger-than-life celebrities, to how the "sunk cost fallacy" can keep us in detrimental relationships long after we've realized they're not serving us. As she illuminates these concepts with her signature brilliance and wit, Montell's prevailing message is one of hope, empathy, and ultimately forgiveness for our anxiety-addled human selves. If you have all but lost faith in our ability to reason, Montell aims to make some sense of the senseless. To crack open a window in our minds, and let a warm breeze in. To help quiet the cacophony for a while, or even hear a melody in it.

 


Tired as F*ck

Tired As F*ck by Caroline Dooner

Obsessed Book Club

Read by Obsessed Book Club

Blending memoir and blistering social observations, the author of The F*ck It Diet looks back at her desperate attempts to heal her hunger, anxiety, and imperfections through extreme diets, culty self-help methods, and melodramatic bargains with the universe.

Offering a frank and funny critique of the cultural forces driving us mad, Caroline Dooner examines how treating ourselves like never-ending self-improvement projects is a recipe for burnout. We have become unknowingly complicit in perpetuating our own exhaustion because we are treating ourselves like machines. But even phones need to f*cking recharge. Caroline takes a good hard look at the dark side of self-help, and explains how she eventually used a radical period of rest to push back against cultural expectations and reclaim some peace.Tired As F*ck empowers us to say no to the things that exhaust us. It inspires us to carve out time to slow down, feel okay about doing less, and honor our humanity. This is not a self-help book, it's a cautionary tale. It's an honest look at the dogma of wellness and spiritual self-improvement culture and revels in the healing power of rest and letting shit go.

 


About Bookclubs

Bookclubs.com provides everything you need to organize your book club—all in one place, from planning the logistics of your next meeting to inspiring discussion guides. Download the free Bookclubs app (iOS and Android) to build community, engage in meaningful discussions, and discover what to read next. Say hello to a better book club experience today and create your free account to get started!

 

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