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Welcome back to In The Club, a newsletter of resources to keep your book group well-met and well-read. Let’s dive right in.

Kim Kardashian and (my beloved) Chrissy Teigen have started a book club! Vulture had some suggestions for them. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to round up other high-profile book groups and what they’re reading. I’m pretty fascinated by this phenomenon; celebrities who publicly read are (happily) becoming more common, but to declare it a book club takes it to the next level. That being said, only some of these actually involve the celebrities in question while others are more “inspired by.”
– Oprah’s Book Club (the original!), currently reading Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton
– Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf, currently reading The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler
– Lena Dunham (kind of), Lit Thursday recommendations on Lenny
– Florence Welch (also kind of), Between Two Books, currently reading Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.
– Reese Witherspoon, currently reading The Wonder by Emma Donoghue and The Dry by Jane Harper
– Andrew Luck, currently reading Number the Stars by Lois Lowry and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanathi
– Sarah Jessica Parker will be teaming up with the ALA to create Book Club Central, launching in June

Mark Zuckerberg had one, but it only ran for one year. How many of these will last? As anyone who has tried to run a book group knows it can be tricky to maintain momentum, especially when you don’t have regularly engaged members. The Internet allows anyone to join, but how many people will show up and talk?

It’s also worth noting that the current picks skew heavily white (surprise!), although individually some of have a better track record of picking authors of color. Perhaps it’s time for a celebrity Read Harder?

Get contextual: Want to tie your picks to a literary event? Flavorwire’s got an evergreen Literary Calendar that offers an event from literary history for each day of each month! Having a historical tie-in can get you beyond “So, did everyone like this book?” and deep into its context. You could read Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and then discuss their infamous fisticuffs. You could follow up a reading of The Importance of Being Earnest with a discussion of Oscar Wilde’s arrest and imprisonment. You could read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and discuss the award-distribution history of the Booker Prize. So many possibilities!

Today I give you two picks for one Read Harder Challenge task: Read a fantasy novel.

For many readers, this task is an easy one. But for those who don’t normally read fantasy, it can be a tricky genre to get into. Readers of primarily literary fiction tend to be more interested in prose than swash-buckling hijinks; others may just struggle with suspension of disbelief. I personally am very interested in what I like to call “dragon problems” (i.e. anything to do with unrealistic situations), but I hear you. So for this task, I’ve picked two books: the first for the lit-fic aficionados, and the second for those who want more “realistic” problems in their novels.

Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly

Here is a fantasy without a drop of magic in it. The publisher has been billing it as “Cabaret meets Le Carre” (presumably for its pleasing rhyme); I’ve been going with “It’s like if The Great Gatsby and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy went through a wormhole and then had a baby.”

Cyril dePaul is a spy, and a louche one at that. His lover Aristide Makricosta is a smuggler, dealer, and cabaret emcee. Their arrangement involves them pretending they know nothing about each other’s real jobs while half-heartedly spying on each other, and also definitely not falling in love, not even a little. They live in Amberlough City, center of graft, whimsy, and liberalism. When Cyril falls into the hands of the conservative neighboring province’s spy forces, their relationship has to come to an end — but neither wants to let go. In the meantime, streetwise singer and small-time dealer Cordelia is just looking to keep herself in rent and food, but finds herself sucked into the darkest side of politics as the encroaching One State Party makes its move.

It’s well-plotted and Donnelly’s prose is great. The parallels to historical and current politics are obvious, yet another discussion bonus. And the character arcs! Cyril’s cynicism and self-interest; Aristide’s savvy and force of character; Cordelia’s political awakening; their interactions with the richly imagined and portrayed supporting cast, all held me from the first to the last page. So there you have it: a beautifully written fantasy that has no magic, just an alternate world to explore. Voila!

Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge by Ben Krueger

Bailey Chen is whip-smart and has the college degree, the steel-trap mind, and the ambition to prove it. What she doesn’t have is a job. Or rather, a “real” job — currently, she’s the barback at her high school friend’s bar, living with her parents, and failing at networking her way into a better gig. This is her biggest concern until the day she discovers that not only are monsters real, but that an elite cadre of bartenders fights them with magical booze.

Krueger’s got a sometimes wry, sometimes slapstick sense of humor and a knack for creating entertaining characters who eat clichés for breakfast. Indeed, every time I expected the plot to go one way it turned another. And Chen attempts to balance her supernatural discoveries with being a functional member of the “real world” — the overlap creates some of the best scenes in the novel. Who wouldn’t use magic to try to ace a job interview, I ask you?  And as a bonus, recipes are interspersed between chapters. Perhaps a boozy book club is in order?

More Resources: 
– Our Book Group In A Box guide
– List your group on the Book Group Resources page

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