7 celebrities with their own book clubs: from Dua Lipa and Queen Camilla to Bridgerton creator Shonda Rhimes, Reese Witherspoon, Kaia Gerber and Oprah Winfrey – but why did Kim Kardashian’s fail?
- Oprah Winfrey first introduced a book club segment on her TV show in 1996, boosting book sales by 5 million copies in some cases – now she’s inspired other female stars to follow suit
- Reese Witherspoon and Bridgerton creator Shonda Rhimes started their book clubs while looking for stories to develop into scripts, while Dua Lipa gave a keynote speech at the Booker Prize
The popularity of celebrity-led book clubs has exploded in recent years. Oprah got the ball rolling in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until social media took off that other famous women followed suit.
And yes, we said women because, as of 2024, there don’t appear to be any male celebrity-led book clubs. As one Jezebel writer joked in an article last April, “Do famous men know how to read?”
The gender imbalance aside, starting and maintaining a book club is no mean feat. Even Kim Kardashian and Chrissy Teigen announced one in 2017, only to admit a year later that it never took off “because we were lazy”, per The Guardian.
So who has managed to garner – and keep – an impressive following of fellow bookworms?
1. Reese Witherspoon
After Oprah, the Legally Blonde star is credited as the figure who really helped the celebrity book club trend take off. After founding her own production company in 2012, per ABC, she began hunting for stories featuring women in lead roles to create more opportunities for herself. “I just started reading and reading and reading,” she told IndieWire.
In 2017, she created Reese’s Book Club, with the premise of choosing “a book with a woman at the centre of the story” each month. The club now has almost 3 million followers on Instagram. What’s more, the club’s pulling power regularly sends relatively unknown reads to the top of the bestseller list.