The Best Book Club Books of 2023

As Southern and pecan pie-loving as I am, I’m surprised I’ve never had a pecan pie cheesecake. Which may be just as well because it sounds like it might be habit-forming for me.

You’ll need the usual cheesecake things, like cream cheese, sugar, butter, eggs, sour cream, and graham cracker crust, as well as butter, brown sugar, heavy cream, bourbon, vanilla extract, and more for the pecan portion.

For a full list of ingredients, visit Natalie’s site or watch the Instagram post.

Book Clubs: Audacious, Jenna Bush

This National Book Award finalist comes from the author of Friday Black, and tells the bloody story of Loretta Thurwar and “Hurricane Staxxx,” two women who are friends, lovers, and popular Chain-Gang All-Stars. As All-Stars, they’ve fought against other prisoners in lethal battles to win shortened sentences through a highly contested program that’s run through the controversial Criminal Action Penal Entertainment organization in a (not so) alternative United States. Loretta nears the day she’ll finally be free, but the burden of all she’s done — and still has to do — weighs heavily on her in this damning look at America’s prison industrial complex and culture of violence.

Book Clubs: Audacious,Vibe Check

Desmond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist and author of Evicted, and with his latest, he asks why the U.S. is the richest country on earth with more poverty than any other democratic nation. Through research and original reporting, Desmond shows how the financially secure leech off the poor, securing their own comfort through the sacrifice of those in lower socioeconomic classes. He also gives ways for us to change — by becoming poverty abolitionists, we can make it so that everyone has the chance to have their basic necessities met.

Book Clubs: Sapph-Lit and the Audacious Book Club

Lamya, like so many people who have marginalized identities, grew up feeling on the outside of everything. When, as a young teen, she develops a crush on a female teacher, she at first tries to hide it. But then, as she reads the Quran, she finds familiarity — the characters she reads about don’t seem to fit within the heteronormative boundaries that have been making her feel ill at ease. As she grows up, eventually moving to New York City in early adulthood, her faith, along with her sense of self as a queer Muslim woman, grows. I’ve never read the Quran, but I love reading about different interpretations of religious texts.

Book Clubs: NYPL and WNYC

After having risked so much for her children — including illegally entering them into a wealthy public school — Diane Aziz’s last act as a parent is to drive her son Walter to college at UC Berkeley. Then, she falls into a deep depression and enters into a state hospital. Diane’s best friend tries to keep things together for her other children, but it’s tough going — Walter may not be able to continue with school because of finances, his sister Lina risks it all in order to keep up with her wealthy classmates, and Donny, the little brother, is slowly drifting into a life of drugs and listless days at the beach.

Book Clubs: Oprah

The bestselling author of Cutting for Stone pens a family saga spanning more than 70 years. The story of a girl who would come to be known as Big Ammachi — which essentially translates to “Big Momma” — twists and turns, intertwining as the waterways do that her and her would-be family live in Southern India. Big Ammachi’s family, part of a Christian community with a long history, will be as gifted as they are cursed, with the curious incidence of drowning being a common theme reoccurring through the generations. Starting in 1900, we experience the change and advancements time brings as Big Ammachi experiences them.

Book Clubs: Marie Claire, Reese, and Audacious

I’m sure y’all have been seeing this one everywhere. It’s definitely one of the It Books of the year, which I love for several reasons. One being its unflinching look at race within the publishing industry. When June Hayward’s peer Athena Liu dies in an accident, she impulsively takes the literary star’s unfinished manuscript as her own. As the book catapults her into literary relevance — a marked difference from her previous status — her image as a writer becomes more and more racially ambiguous. But Athena isn’t so easily forgotten, and June — now Juniper Song — sees the dead woman’s shadow wherever she goes.

Book Clubs: Amor en Páginas

This sapphic 19th-century romance follows Manuela del Carmen Caceres Galvan, who is living it up one last summer in Paris with her two best friends before she becomes trapped in a future loveless marriage. It’s during this time in Paris that she meets the business-savvy Duchess of Sundridge, Cora Kempf Bristol, who tries to tempt her to sell a piece of land she said she’d never part with. But Manuela agrees to sell on the condition that the duchess spend the summer with her. What follows are nights of reawakened passions and days full of art admiration. Cora is the happiest she’s ever been, but is she happy enough to cause one of the biggest scandals in Paris is the question.

Book Clubs: Today Book Club

Memoirs and other writings by poets are some of my favorite books to read, and in How to Say Babylon, Sinclair lends her poet’s voice to the story of her upbringing. In it, she recounts life as a child reared by a militant Rastafarian father, who projected his oppressive patriarchal views on the women and girls in his household. In an effort to avoid Western influences, her and her sisters’ clothing is restricted, as is the scope of their education and who they can socialize with. But through her mother, Sinclair, and her sisters learned through books and poetry, which helped her to develop her own singular voice.

Book Clubs: Marie Claire

The horrors of capitalism are on full display in Ripe. Cassie has gotten her dream job at a Silicon Valley startup but is also seriously regretting it. The people she works with are toxic, entitled, and downright criminal — and once her bosses start requiring she engage in illegal activity, too, the black hole that’s always been with her, that gets stronger through her depression and anxiety, feels closer than ever.

Book Clubs: Good Morning America, Eclectix

Here, the author of the award-winning Miracle Creek writes a mystery that asks some interesting questions. When the father and son of a biracial Korean and white family don’t come home on time from a walk, the rest of the family doesn’t immediately call the police. But when Mia’s 20-year-old brother, Eugene, comes through the door bloody and without their father, they know that something’s wrong. Eugene is a witness to what happened but is unable to speak. As time passes and the window for finding their father alive shrinks, we learn of the intricacies of the Parksons’ lives, including the secrets that may be connected to the father’s disappearance.

Book Clubs: Subtle Asian Book Club

(Content warning)

This award-winning novel takes place in the summer of 1949, a year after 700,000 Palestinians were displaced. A young Palestinian woman is captured by Israeli soldiers, assaulted, and buried in the sand. Years later, a woman becomes transfixed on this piece of history — this “minor detail” that has been forgotten by everyone else.