Book Club Suggestions: 29 of the Best Book Club Books
Whether you’re picking your book club suggestions as a group or looking for the best book club books to choose from for an individual choice, these 29 options will have you covered! From chick-lit to historical fiction to non-fiction that reads like a novel, there’s a book here for every book club!
Is there anything that puts fear into your heart like having to choose a book for book club? I think not.
Of course, maybe you are braver than I am. Nothing puts fear into MY heart like that annual sign-up sheet asking for my best book club suggestions.
Here are 29 book club suggestions that I think most people will enjoy reading, ones that will spark interesting discussions, and ones that you’ll feel good about having forced other people to read.
Some of these are the best book club books from my own book clubs over the years and others are ones I WISH my book club had read.
This list of book club books has non-fiction, chick-lit, young adult and middle grade titles, history books and parenting books. There are new titles and ones that are bit older.
Whatever you’re looking for, I hope you’ll find a few perfect book club suggestions on this list for your group.
If you’d like to start your own book club, pop in your email address and I’ll send you my best tips for getting one started!
My favorite book club suggestions
- When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi – This memoir published after the author’s early death from lung cancer will basically rip your heart out, but also make you so glad to be alive. In the past, we’ve done family reunion book clubs and if we did another one, this would be in my top three book club suggestions for sure. (Full review here)
- I’ve Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella – If you’re looking for funny and fluffy book club books, it’s hard to beat Sophie Kinsella. I laughed my head off reading this book about a woman who loses her cell phone and finds another one in a garbage can, accidentally taking on the role of secretary for the businessman who owns the phone (Be warned that there is some swearing). (Full review here)
- The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin – This is one of those book club suggestions that was just MADE for book lovers and while I usually shy away from books described that way (they always seem so pandering), this one is just spot-on. I couldn’t love this story of a grumpy old book shop owner who finds himself the caretaker of a little baby who is left in his store. (Full review here)
- Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson – When I shared this book on Instagram, SO many people responded telling me that their book clubs had read this title and had amazing discussions. It’s all about the American justice system, especially how the racial bias in it. I wished on every page that I had a book club to discuss it with. (Full review here)
- Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese – A quick read with all sorts of funny stories about food, cooking, and raising animals sprinkled with lots of recipes. Bonus, it’ll be easy to pick refreshments to go along with this book! (Full review here)
- The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak – A really elegantly written young adult book about an orphan girl in Germany during WWII and the family that takes her in. One of the best books I’ve read. (Full review here)
- Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies by J.B. West – I read this more than three years ago and I still think about it ALL the time. It’s chatty and easy to read without being gossipy. (Full review here)
- How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids by Jancee Dunn – Despite the click-bait title, this book is SO good. I felt like it was packed with helpful ideas and research, and it was super fun to read. If you invite me to join your book club this year, odds are good that I’ll choose this one. (Full review here)
- The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan – This one is pretty hefty, but it’s so interesting that no one in our group seemed to have too much trouble getting through it. And wow, did we have a fascinating discussion about the food sources in our country, the organic industry, and a multitude of other topics.
- Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport – This book is one that I kind of need to go back and read about every six months to help me refocus. I’d love this as a book club pick and then to come back and revisit it a few months later to see how everyone was doing.
- Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool – One of my favorite Newbery winners in recent years, this story is told by two different voices – a young girl during the Great Depression and a young boy just before WWI breaks out. (Full review here)
- This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live by Melody Warnick – This book would be an especially good book club suggestion if you were in a book club with mostly transitory people, say students or expats. (Full review here)
- Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey – This book about a family of twelve children, being raised in a home with an efficiency-expert father is sweet, hilarious, and just plain interesting. The sequel, Belles on Their Toes, is just as good. Nothing to do with the embarrassingly bad Steve Martin movie. (Full review here)
- These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine by Nancy E. Turner – The first thirty pages are a bit slow, but after that this diary-style novel really gets going about Sarah, a teenager growing up in the West, trying to educate herself, and, of course, falling in love. This book is deeply romantic, but to call it only a romance would be to sell it far too short. (Full review here)
- What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty – My favorite chick-lit book of all-time, about a woman who wakes up after a fall at the gym to discover that, instead of being pregnant, twenty-nine, and deeply in love with her husband, is thirty-nine, the mother of three and on the verge of divorce. As she tries to get back her memories of the past ten years, she also struggles to figure out what has changed her life (and marriage) so drastically. And, more importantly, can that marriage be saved? (Full review here)
- Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chau – This is my pick for my bookclub this year (I’m leading the discussion in December) and I am just really excited to see how everyone feels about this book about Chinese parenting – or at least one woman’s take on it – and how it works in America (Full review here)
- Nutureshock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman – One of my book clubs picked this a few years ago and I loved the amazing discussion about sleep, racism, praising children, and a whole slew of other parenting topics. (Full review here)
- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand – This book is non-fiction but it’s so amazing, it’s hard to believe someone didn’t make it up. Olympic runner Louis Zamperini’s plane is shot down in the Pacific during WWII and after surviving on a tiny inflatable raft for 47 days, he’s taken prisoner by the Japanese. And compared to being a POW, the raft time looks like vacation. Probably the best WWII book I’ve read. (Full review here)
- Wonder by R.J Palacio – A remarkably done middle-grade novel about a boy with severe facial abnormalities who begins attending public school for the first time in middle school. Moving, well-written, and full of things to talk about, which is why it’s one of my favorite book club suggestions.
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier – This book would be especially fun if you were choosing for October – kind of a gothic thriller/romance. The first chapter (about 30 pages) is a smidge slow, but after that, it is hard to put down! It ollows a young woman who marries a very rich widow and feels like she can’t escape the shadow cast by his larger-than-life first wife who died in a boating accident.
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely – Along the same lines as Malcolm Gladwell’s books, but Ariely is a professor and runs his own research studies. You could talk about this book all night long – it’s one of the best book club books I can think of!
- The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had by Kristin Levine – This middle-grade historical fiction title is set in Alabama during WWI. Dit is anxious for the new post master to arrive, since rumor is that he has a son Dit’s age, but when the post master’s family arrives, Dit can’t decide whether he’s more surprised that the family is black or that the promised friend is a girl. (Full review here)
- If I Stay by Gayle Forman – This is YA fiction at its best. After a horrible car accident, the course of Mia’s life is drastically changed and all the plans she’s had for her future are called into question. It’s not a very long book, but it is beautifully written. I cried both times I read it. (Full review here)
- The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls – One of the best book club books that makes your own childhood look really really easy, this is a memoir about growing up in a completely dysfunctional family, where the family keeps moving in the middle of the night and the children eventually realize that the parents are never going to pull themselves together. (Full review here)
- Red China Blues by Jan Wong – In college, I read this memoir about a Canadian girl (of Chinese descent) who goes over to China during the Cultural Revolution, on fire with Mao’s vision. During the years she spends there, she comes to realize that Mao’s ideas for China might not be all that she’s hoped. This book is absolutely fascinating – I even sent my mom a copy for her birthday a couple of years ago (she loved it too).
- Room by Emma Donoghue – Horrifying, but ultimately full of hope, this book about a little boy raised by his mother in a single room where she is kept by her kidnapper and their eventual escape, explores what happens when the whole world opens up before you. (Full review here)
- The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart – One of my very favorite YA books of all time about a very smart girl at a boarding school who discovers her boyfriend belongs to a secret boys-only society and is determined to get in. This is one of those book club suggestions that is easy to read but has TONS to chat about when you meet. (Full review here)
- Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance – I basically made Bart have our own little book club for this one, since I read it on a long car trip and then proceeded to read huge sections aloud to him and discuss each chapter, while he probably wondered how many more miles until we got home. (Full review here)
- All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know about Getting and Spending by Laura Vanderkam – This book was just MADE for reading in a book club. It’s broken up into short, readable chapters and each one is full of interesting conversations all about how we choose to spend our money and what actually makes us happy. (Full review here)
By the way, our book club has tossed around the idea of doing a theme for the year, whether it was books written by women, fiction only, children’s lit, etc. I think that might be a fun idea, since it’d make it at least slightly easier to choose a book. But I think other people might find that too restrictive.
And if you’d like a printable copy of this list that you can take to your library or screenshot on your phone for easy access, just pop in your email address below and it’ll come right to your inbox!
And please tell me your best book club books that have been big hits in YOUR book clubs! I’m always looking for more book club recommendations.
There's a bunch of overlap between your list and the ones I recommend the most often for book clubs (alphabetical by author):
Most heated discussions:
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert
Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
Working Days, by John Steinbeck
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin
Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton
Universally loved:
March, by Geraldine Brooks
Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
My Life in France, by Julia Child
Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger
Everything on a Waffle, by Polly Horvath
Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Honk and Holler Opening Soon, by Billie Letts
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Of these, my very tippy top recommendation is Peace Like a River!
More book club nerdery here. 🙂
I love reading this list because it shows 1) that we have similarly stellar taste in books and 2) how many book recs I get from you. Jefferson's Son and The Best Bad Luck I've Ever Had were some of my favorite books I've ever read. Kindred by Octavia Butler is another fantastic race-relations novel. It's adult fiction and a little bit sci-fi (a black woman gets pulled back in time to the antebellum South to save her white ancestor when his life is in peril), but I think (hope?) you would like it.
Ooooohhhh! I love this post, and I love so many of your books and have added a half-dozen more to my wish list! I think our best book club discussion this year was "My Name is Asher Lev" by Chaim Potok, followed by "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara and "The Winter of our Discontent" by Steinbeck. Up next is "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" by Michael Chabon, and I sense it will be loved as well.
Yay books! Yay reading! Yay friends who also love books and reading!
xox
I read Bringing up Bebe per your recommendation this past week. It was a fun read. I thought that her insight into French parenting was interesting, although I thought that she acted like it was the correct way in all ways. They definitely do some things right, but I will not stop nursing at 3 months or distance myself from my children. She did make some great points and I will implement some of them in my parenting style. Thank you for the book recommendations. I love to get new ideas.
Well now I have a whole bunch more books to add to my own reading list!
Am I awful for not liking The Book Thief? I read it, as everyone raved, but for some reason, there was something about it that bothered me. I don't know what it was.
I recently read Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal and really loved it. WWII during the London Blitz, and the sequel just came out last week, with a third in the works!
I just read "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern. BEST BOOK I've read since high school. I captured me and captivated me and I never wanted it to end. As a matter of fact, I was disappointed by the ending just because I didn't want it to end.
We have very similar tastes in books! Before I moved six years ago, one of the book groups I belonged to picked a theme every year. I liked it. They might choose an area (Asia, Africa, South America, etc) or a topic, or even a range (youth fiction for example). There was usually one book about mid-year that was completely off theme, just for a break. It worked well with that group. If you change to going with a theme, be flexible and be willing to change back if it doesn't work for your group. But give it a couple of years.
I'm going to echo Erica here, so many of my favorite reads come from you. Thanks for this post, I can't wait to head over to the library.
Thanks for the great list! Ironically enough, we chose the same book for book club this year! Ha 🙂
This is such an incredible source!! Thanks for going to all of the work to put it together. I live in a small town (luckily, we have a library but it is tiny!) but I'd love to start up a book club. Any tips/suggestions on how to start??? ps. I absolutely LOVE love your blog.
You've got some good book club picks on this list! Lots that my book club has read and a couple that were my pick (Okay for Now, The Book Thief). Some of my favorite book club books that aren't on your list:
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale (crazy heated discussion)
Awesome list! I have been looking for a new book but totally stumped on what to read. Problem solved. 🙂
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was a great discussion book for our group. Totally agree about Wonder. Simply awe-inspiring. Have you read The Age of Miracles? I think that would make a good discussion book as well. Thanks for your list.
Angie
Wonderful recommendations! I added a bunch to my never ending to-read list. I've never been in a book club, but would love to try one because I'm always talking about the books I'm reading to whoever will listen anyway!
oh my, what great suggestions!! (both in your post and in these comments!) i've only read about 10 of those listed. i can't wait to add the others to our book club list for next year. my recent faves have been:
Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
True Women by Janice Woods Windle
Iron Fey series by Julie Kagawa
What's Eating Your Child? by Kelly Dorfman
The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma
Flavia DeLuce series by Alan Bradley (hilarious!!)
A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz
and WAY too many others… 🙂
Seriously, you have a great list here. Some of my favorite made the list. The only one I would add is The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams. Great discussion on this one.
Thank you for the great list of books! There are a few that I've been meaning to read on it and it was great to go back and read your reviews.
I liked when my bookclub read Daddy Long Legs and Dear Enemy. They aren't very long and it's best to read them together. It created a lot of interesting discussion on raising children and women's roles in society, but they were written in the early 1900's. I would considered it Chick-lit YA.
Besides you can watch the movie with Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron afterwards which is never a bad thing!
I just love your book recommendations! I just read Moon over Manifest and loved it! I'm also working my way through Warmth of Other Suns which you were right, does read more like a novel than a non fiction. Thanks!
I listened to How Not to Hate Your Husband on audio and it was so spot on! Would be a fantastic book club discussion for 30+ year old women.
Oh, I should have listened to the audio!
The only two books that have been universally loved in our book club over the last two years were Moonglow by Michael Chabon and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante was also quite popular, although there were one or two people who thought it overly violent and/or precious (not me! – I think the whole Neopolitan series is powerful and worth reading).
A few books that were polarizing but led to good discussions were Some Luck by Jane Smiley; Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank; Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (I personally despised this book, but there were lots of interesting things to talk about, particularly why we had such strong reactions to it); and A Good Country by Laleh Khadevi.
Happy to see we’ve read A TON of these in our book club the last few years. Make the Bread, Buy the Butter was such a fun one because everyone who came brought something they made from the book- it was a great one! 🙂
That is SO fun.
My book club loved News of the World by Paulette Jiles (and the audio is great) and We are the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter. These are the only 2 books we’ve read that everyone rated a 10!
My book club I was in fell apart a few years ago, and I’ve missed that! I’ve looked into other ones, but no one is consistent…. I’ll join yours! You just moved to Utah, right?? 🙂
Our book club loved “Evicted” and “The Road Back to You.” We also did a cookbook/biography and cooked meals from it for our final meeting of the year—which was fitting since it was between Thanksgiving and New Years. Thanks for your great suggestions!
Love, Norm by Barbara Fintel Collins is available on Amazon. This book is truly life altering to read. There are questions at the end of chapters to really get your mind thinking and the book looks at life in such a different way that we should really strive to alter our own realities.
THE BEST BOOKS OUR BOOK CLUB READ WITH GREAT DISCUSSIONS TO FOLLOW:
THE SHADOW OF THE WIND BY CARLOS RUIZ ZAFRON
BLIND YOUR PONIES AND AMOS; TO RIDE A DEAD HORSE BY STANELY GORDON WEST
THE ELEPHANT COMPANY BY VICKI CONSTANTINE CROKE
THE BOYS IN THE BOAT BY DANIEL JAMES BROWN
A MAN CALLED OVE BY FREDRIK BACKMAN
THE DOUBLE BIND BY CHRIS BOHJALIAN
MOST OF THE BOOKS WERE NOT BEST SELLERS BUT SUPER READS.
I recently published a book and, wow, is it hard work to get it promoted! I’ve been having book signings/presentations all over OH (where I live) but being a new kid on the block means that I have a lot of ground to cover. This might be a dumb question, but I wonder if there is a way to get a book into a “book club.” Any suggestion?