(Tara Jacoby / For The Times)
101 best book club picks for every type of reader
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Dishing about what you’re reading is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Even better if your audience has read the same book. Reading with others also provides space to deepen community, ignite conversations and share moments of joy. Los Angeles needs that more than ever right now as we continue to shoulder a heavy 2025 marked by fires and ICE raids. But how to choose a book to get started? The best books to read in groups inspire a dialogue. They have sparkling prose and unshakable narratives. These were the guiding factors for compiling our recommendations for all kinds of readers.
We surveyed 200-plus luminaries in the book and journalism worlds to make this in-depth list. The voters included prizewinning authors, indie bookstore owners, a Man Booker Prize judge, Ivy League professors, literary agents, lauded journalists and several zealous book club members. To ensure an especially varied selection, the editors gave a final curatorial pass.
The list includes 10 categories for every type of reader, whether you reach for literary fiction or romance. We also crowned an “Ultimate Book Club Pick,” which is the title that received the most votes out of all the books by a landslide, and happens to be eerily prophetic (find it among the “Make-Believers” selections). Of course, we couldn’t include every worthy book. Let us know your picks and pull up a chair next to us. Why not read together?
— Sophia Kercher
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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The Literati
Page-turning, highly acclaimed fiction
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‘Martyr!’ by Kaveh Akbar (2024)
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(Vintage)
Akbar’s debut novel is a master class in tone and style: He writes as a poet, a historian, an imagined interlocutor with everyone from Lisa Simpson to Donald Trump, a motormouthed man in recovery. The kitchen-sink approach is to a purpose: Its main character, a former addict, is wrestling with big matters of family history and identity while wondering whether all this art-making matters. (Akbar himself is an acclaimed Iranian American poet.) The answer, of course, is a spirited yes. But the book’s power comes in the emotional intensity — and off-kilter humor — it delivers along the way, like the high he describes as sending him “close enough to God to bop him with an eyelash.”
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‘The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)’ by Rabih Alameddine (2025)
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(Grove)
The first joke in Alameddine’s National Book Award-winning novel is on the cover: The parenthetical “and His Mother” is set in a mischievously small font. It soon becomes clear that there’s nothing slight about her, or her impact on the life of her son, a gay high school teacher in Beirut. Raja is quiet and introspective, and his mother stomps his boundaries with the fervor of Godzilla. I love how effortlessly Alameddine blends tragedy and comedy, and the novel is sure to spark commiseration from anyone with a relentlessly nosy relative — in other words, everybody. Open a bottle (better yet, a box) of wine and get ready to hear some wild stories from your frustrated friends.
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‘Big Swiss’ by Jen Beagin (2023)
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(Scribner)
I often think about the miniature donkeys that show up in this novel. I spent many nights laughing while reading Beagin’s dark comedy set in upstate New York. The unhinged central character lives in a dilapidated Dutch farmhouse with bees in the walls where she becomes infatuated with a married female gynecologist who “had the kind of face that made you want to be a better person, or at least a person who owned a better vacuum cleaner.” Plenty of my colleagues did not vibe with Beagin’s absurdist response to trauma that dominates the book. I stand by the imaginative weirdness of both prose and plot, and those donkeys. HBO is adapting it into a TV series, so I’d love to meet with friends and duke it out before it hits the screen.
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‘2666’ by Roberto Bolaño (2008)
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(Picador)
Bolaño was dying as he was writing “2666,” his sprawling masterwork. It begins as a sexy academic novel in which four international academics go in search of a reclusive author and by the end has covered great geographical distances, following multiple characters whose lives have been shaped and distorted by state-sanctioned violence and/or femicide and the problem of evil. Bolaño died in 2003, and 20-plus years on, our current political situation will certainly influence a reading of “2666.” No magical solutions or tidy endings exist here, but Bolaño’s novel is a hell of a ride.
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‘Trust’ by Hernan Diaz (2022)
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(Riverhead)
Part puzzle, part capitalist critique, part old-fashioned historical fiction, Diaz’s second novel uses an unpromising premise — the hollow interior life of a stock-market investor in the early 20th century — to deliver a breathtaking feat of storytelling. The plot looks at the life of a financier through a series of literary lenses — magazine feature, novella, diary, his own frustrated memoir — to suggest that what we know about a person can get funhouse-mirrored by whoever is doing the talking, including the person themselves. “Trust” corralled a host of literary awards, including the Kirkus and Pulitzer prizes, honoring a prismatic yet approachable work.
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‘James’ by Percival Everett (2024)
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(Doubleday)
In “James,” Percival Everett brilliantly inverts an American classic — Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Huck’s Jim is now James, with a disciplined intelligence and massive vocabulary, hidden from the boy by his performance of the poorly spoken enslaved man in Twain’s book. James has friends, plans and a closely-held secret. It was a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Orwell Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Prize and won the Kirkus Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. There’s so much to talk about in how this book unfolds. What if, in 100 years, Everett’s book came to sit beside Twain’s on every classics shelf? What if it took its place?
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‘Sula’ by Toni Morrison (1973)
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(Vintage)
All of Toni Morrison’s layered, language-driven novels require attention and beg for spirited interpretation, but “Sula,” Morrison’s second, gets my pick, especially for women readers. The novel focuses on the rocky friendship between two very different girls growing up in a Black neighborhood in Ohio called the Bottom. As kids, they witness a traumatic event and negotiate adolescence; as women, they make different choices, come together, break apart. “Sula” conjures beauty and brutality simultaneously; it also showcases Morrison’s joyful ribaldry. It’s horny! Then there’s the mutability of its titular character. Who is Sula, and what does she represent to this community? There’s no juicier book club question than, “Is this person good or bad?” Boy, will this novel get you talking.
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‘The Sympathizer’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)
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(Grove)
The narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” has a strong, sharp voice, but no name. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” the book begins. “I am also a man of two minds.” This is true, but it is, obviously, not the whole story. During the American war in Vietnam, our cynical hero knows who his friends are, but after coming to Southern California as a refugee, his politics, ethics and belonging get ever harder to keep straight. That’s part of what would make this a terrific book club read — discussing his beliefs, when we see cracks or changes, and why he’s telling us what he does. It’s also wickedly funny.
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‘Afterparties’ by Anthony Veasna So (2021)
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(Ecco)
There’s a reason my copy of this collection of short stories is always out on loan. It captures the strip mall-laden Stockton — a place that feels forgotten by the rest of California — with such depth and humor. So’s characters are mostly immigrant kids dealing with the “hand-me-down trauma” of the Cambodian genocide while trying out queer dating or working at the family donut shop. I was devastated when I discovered So’s untimely death in 2020; his high-octane stories are so personal that the young writer felt like a friend. I like to pass his book along so he can stay with us longer.
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‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’ by Rufi Thorpe (2024)
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(William Morrow)
Never did being young, single and broke seem so seductive as in Rufi Thorpe’s “Margo’s Got Money Troubles.” (I should know.) The engaging novel follows the lovable Margo as she drops out of college to become a single mother, making ill-fated decisions along the way. Set in present-day Fullerton, Margo struggles to make ends meet, eventually dipping her toes into online sex work. Written without judgment or cynicism, Thorpe clearly loves her complicated, strange character, and readers will too. Sharp, witty and an endearing exploration of the compromises Margo makes, the novel offers keen insights into SoCal’s class divisions — and a complex portrait of being a young woman. No one wants to be broke in real life, but being bad with money makes for great literary fodder.
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Hopeless Romantics
Modern and classic swoon-worthy titles
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‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen (1813)
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(Penguin Classics)
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.” A variation of that has been repeated many, many times; it began as the first wry line in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” It’s the uber-romance novel, the blueprint for every enemies-to-lovers rom-com, enchanting readers for more than 200 years. Sharp tongues, dull marriage proposals — it packs witty feminist and class critique into each chapter, making it timeless. It’s funny, smart and delightful, delivering insights about family and romance as rich people luxuriate and squabble as they hunt birds. The clever heroine of the novel, Elizabeth Bennet, refuses to marry for money, instead choosing character. Poor thing!
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‘Lord of Scoundrels’ by Loretta Chase (1995)
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(Avon (Regency))
I’m a happily married woman, but would risk it all for our heroine, Jessica Trent. “Lord of Scoundrels” is a Regency classic (think: compromising positions, duels, cravats), but a demure wallflower Jessica is not. So when she meets Sebastian Ballister (the Lord of Dain) — a walking red flag in pantaloons — she refuses to be charmed, intimidated or quietly ruined by, and I quote, “the greatest whore-monger in Christendom.” Miss Trent outwits and outmaneuvers the Lord in life and in the bedroom. Come for the master class in banter, stay for the shockingly sexy glove-removal scene (if you know, you know)
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‘Love Lettering’ by Kate Clayborn (2019)
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(Kensington)
Kate Clayborn writes intricate, ambitious books, and “Love Lettering” is one that would be nearly impossible to make an elevator pitch for. Still, I’ll try my best: Meg Mackworth is an NYC hand-letterer who is so burned out from life (relatable) that she starts adding subliminal breakup messages into wedding invitations. This really bites her in the ass when Reid Sutherland, a suit-wearing numbers guy, catches one of those messages in his wedding invite. What happens next is less meet-cute and more slow burn. This is a romance for anyone who loves books about New York, aggressively intellectualized flirting or has ever said, “I just need to circle back,” and meant emotionally.
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‘Outlander’ by Diana Gabaldon (1991)
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(Bantam (Regency))
“Outlander” asks the timeless question: Can a woman have one attractive husband per century, as a treat? Claire Randall, while on a second honeymoon in Scotland with her historian husband, Frank, accidentally stumbles through a magical portal that sends her 200 years back in time. Whoops! That’s where she meets her soon-to-be lover/husband, Jamie Fraser. Unlike Frank (who is described as “well put together”), Jamie is a rough, scarred, fiery-haired Scottish warrior, and he forms an unlikely bond with Claire as she tends to his wounds (her World War II nursing skills find quick use). Fair warning: There’s a good amount of violence and questionable lines of consent. What fans of the juggernaut series praise is the sweeping love story.
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‘Book Lovers’ by Emily Henry (2022)
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(Berkley)
As a writer, the publishing world will never cease to fascinate me — as finicky and moody as every man I’ve ever cared for. Emily Henry, one of the most beloved romance writers publishing today, seems to have the same idea. “Book Lovers” chronicles the romance between a literary agent and editor during a summer trip in an idyllic small town. Imagine slipping into a Norman Rockwell painting, infused with the sharp banter of every 2000s memorable rom-com. It’s a classic take on the enemies-to-lovers trope. (Although I personally only have experienced the reverse in my own life.)
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‘A Caribbean Heiress in Paris’ by Adriana Herrera (2022)
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(Harlequin)
The good news: Luz Alana is on a business trip in Paris with her besties. Fun! The bad news: The only way she’ll be taken seriously as an unmarried, Dominican rum heiress in 1889 is to get hitched. Fortunately for us readers, she finds a Scottish aristocrat named Evan Sinclair and he, my gentle readers, falls head over top hat with the fierce force that is Luz. What follows is a marriage of convenience, but with real chemistry. Sure, there’s business talk, but that highlights the realities of being a woman of color in the 1800s. Adriana Herrera masterfully crafts a historical romance with a modern edge and, honestly, it’s just nice to read a book where a man adores, respects and openly communicates with women.
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‘Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake’ by Sarah MacLean (2010)
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(Avon (Regency))
When we meet Lady Calpurnia Hartwell, she’s making the Regency-era equivalent of a bucket list. As an unmarried 28-year-old, she’s officially a spinster (ha!). But as we know from Taylor Swift, “failure” can bring you freedom. And so, with nothing to lose, she’s ready to do all the things a proper woman shouldn’t (think: smoking, drinking, smooching, the works!). Her new aptitude for living life helps her reconnect with a charming, handsome rake and the rest is, well … you’ll just have to read Sarah MacLean’s pleasure of a book to find out.
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‘The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo’ by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2017)
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(Atria)
Take your pick of Old Hollywood influences: Elizabeth Taylor’s many marriages, Rita Hayworth’s autobiography, Greta Garbo’s reclusive intimacies, “Sunset Boulevard’s” aging actress’ relationship with a writer. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s addictive tale of an actress, her seven ex-husbands and a tortured secret love affair with a fellow actress behind closed doors is enchanting. This story of a woman who Hollywood loved so much but wouldn’t let live freely has been translated into 23 languages. How can it not yet be adapted for the screen?
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‘Game Changer’ by Rachel Reid (2024)
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(Carina Press)
Fans of “Heated Rivalry” will rejoice: This is where the romance starts. In the first book in the series, Rachel Reid introduces a sexy romp between a hockey player and a smoothie bar employee, packed with the banter and playful tension found in the TV series. In the novel, Scott Hunter, the star hockey player, fears the scrutiny of being openly gay, while his lover craves a public relationship. If the drama isn’t appetizing enough for you, the steamy sex scenes will be enough to melt the ice.
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‘Normal People’ by Sally Rooney
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(Crown (Literary))
Those who are into the miscommunication trope will delight in reading “Normal People.” Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron’s canonical situationship, while certainly no enviable love story, is a shrewd commentary on interpersonal relationships and how social class dynamics bleed into them. The forces that motivate and imperil relationships — themes that span all of Rooney’s work — are on keen display as these two go from Irish secondary school to college, seesawing between lovers and near-strangers. Following these protagonists’ inner monologues, readers are bound to feel almost disturbingly understood. Read and watch along with the Hulu series, co-starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal.
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Wannabe Detectives
Essential mysteries and true-crime accounts
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‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote (1966)
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(Modern Library)
“In Cold Blood” is the true story of the senseless murder of a Midwestern family, told by Truman Capote at the top of his writerly powers. The Southerner-turned-New Yorker traveled to Kansas with, as two films have told, his friend Harper Lee. When it was published in 1966, Capote called it a “nonfiction novel,” trying to coin a term for true stories told with literary panache (a.k.a. New Journalism). He didn’t mean that he embroidered parts, but he did, prompting later researchers to fact-check him. What’s more, his sympathies for (crush on?) one of the murderers mean that the victims become shadows. Yet it is a terrific read. For good or ill, “In Cold Blood” catapulted true crime into the center of our culture. Discuss.
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‘Echo Park’ by Michael Connelly (2006)
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(Little, Brown)
The 12th book in Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, “Echo Park” feels like required reading for anyone who’s ever side-eyed the 101 Freeway at rush hour. Connelly — who cut his teeth on the crime beat at The Times — is L.A.’s high priest of detective fiction. Growing up, my family always looked forward to the latest Connelly, so I have a soft spot for the bard of Bosch. This novel opens at High Tower Court, the storied hillside complex near the Hollywood Bowl once home to Philip Marlowe (in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye”) and where Connelly himself eventually rented an apartment to write. For book clubs, it’s ideal: a cold case, moral gray zones and a ready-made reading guide on Connelly’s website.
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‘King of Ashes’ by S.A. Cosby (2025)
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(Flatiron / Pine & Cedar)
Something strange happened last year: I started taking book recommendations from Anthony Jeselnik. I almost broke my thumbs adding “King of Ashes” to my cart when the comedian-turned-bookfluencer listed it in his top 10 of 2025. “Absolute [expletive] banger of a novel,” Jeselnik wrote in Vulture. But all credit goes to the “new king of Southern noir,” S.A. Cosby, who crafts a blood-soaked Southern crime saga about the estranged Carruthers siblings. After his father’s suspicious car crash, Roman returns home to his corrupt hometown, where his brother is in trouble with drugs (and drug kingpins) and his sister is trying to run the family business, a crematorium.
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‘In the Woods’ by Tana French (2007)
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(Penguin)
French’s first installment in her Dublin Murder Squad series of crime novels follows Rob Ryan, a detective who underwent a serious trauma as a child and is now trying to find a murderer who killed a 12-year-old girl. This is one of my favorite contemporary thrillers, but less so to some of my friends, who weren’t as into French’s penchant for diving deep into her characters’ psyches. And then there’s the ending — no spoilers here, of course, but it has proved extremely divisive among mystery fans. Get ready to rumble.
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‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ by Patricia Highsmith (1955)
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(W. W. Norton)
Perhaps you’ve seen the recent television series “Ripley” starring Andrew Scott or the 1999 film adaptation of Highsmith’s thriller starring Matt Damon (or, better yet, “Purple Noon,” the 1960 movie adaptation with Alain Delon), but as good as they are, they don’t live up to the book. (Do movies ever?) Highsmith’s novel follows the titular character, an American scam artist who travels to Italy to persuade an acquaintance to return to the U.S.; Ripley ends up stealing the man’s identity. I’ve read this book three times and still can’t figure out what makes Ripley tick — his calculated deceit is sure to spark a discussion in your club.
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‘I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer’ by Michelle McNamara (2018)
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(Harper Perennial)
It’s difficult to talk about Michelle McNamara’s feat of detective journalism without thinking about what writing it cost her. And yet, her devotion to investigating previously unconnected rapes and murders across California led to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator. McNamara, who dubbed him the “Golden State Killer,” traces his crimes from the 1970s and 1980s in this thrilling book. It’s one of the best examples of how an independent researcher telling a true-crime story can deliver justice. She had a “righteous fury” (according to her widower, Patton Oswalt), but sadly died of an accidental overdose before the book was published. Today, the Golden State Killer, who confessed to 161 crimes against at least 87 victims, is serving a life sentence in prison.
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‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ by Walter Mosley (1990)
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(Atria)
With all due respect to Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, there’s a good case to be made that Walter Mosley is the true king of Los Angeles crime fiction. His first novel introduces readers to Black detective Easy Rawlins as he goes in search of a missing woman who has absconded with money that doesn’t belong to her. I reread this novel before my first trip to L.A. and can attest that Mosley brings the city to life, despite it being set in 1948. With its sharp looks at race and class, there’s no chance it wouldn’t spark some interesting conversations, especially among longtime Angelenos who have witnessed the city’s changes.
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‘Sing Her Down’ by Ivy Pochoda (2023)
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(Picador)
Beginning in prison in Arizona and ending at Olympic and Western during the pandemic shutdown, “Sing Her Down” is a riveting cat-and-mouse game between two women. The book, which is part western and part psychological thriller, includes some bracingly violent scenes. The two adversaries — one a blond from Hancock Park and the other a Latina with smarts and ambition — push against what is expected of women. This vividly told novel won the L.A. Times Book Prize for mystery/thriller. We rarely talk about women’s rage; Pochoda’s novel opens the topic in a provocative way.
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‘Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice’ by Cristina Rivera Garza (2023)
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(Hogarth)
For too long, our true-crime stories were about the killers: serial killers, mad cult killers, obsessive stalkers, lone assassins. Recently the tide has begun to turn — more and more books are about the lives cut short by acts of violence. Few are as poetic and moving as “Liliana’s Invincible Summer” by Cristina Rivera Garza, a Mexican American writer and professor who writes in both English and Spanish and is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In the book, Rivera Garza revisits her younger sister’s life before her murder at age 20 in 1990 by an ex-boyfriend. The text includes notes and letters written by Liliana, a sassy college student. It is also a cry against the violence against her and other women.
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‘Harlem Shuffle’ by Colson Whitehead (2021)
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(Vintage)
A prickly love letter to Harlem in the 1960s, this novel will make you wish you grew up there. The plot unravels like a jazz band riffing into chaos. Told with wit, sharpness and affection, the novel follows a furniture store owner who is dragged into a heist by his cousin. I can easily imagine a film adaptation directed by Josh Safdie — a fever dream of big dreams, pettiness and hubris played out on brownstone stoops. Beyond being a rollicking and entertaining crime novel, the story offers an illuminating portrait of Black families in Harlem. Colson Whitehead is a once-in-a-generation talent who has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; this novel, the first in a series, shows he can have fun too.
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Memoir Lovers
Captivating real-life personal narratives
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‘Fun Home’ by Alison Bechdel (2006)
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(Mariner Books Classics)
Bechdel’s brilliant graphic memoir covers her complex upbringing in a Pennsylvania funeral home (hence the ironic title), managing her teenage coming-out while pondering her buttoned-up father’s suicide. Along with Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” “Fun Home” legitimized comics as high art, elevating Bechdel from the pages of alt-weeklies, where she created the popular strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” “Fun” is an LGBTQ+ classic — perennial ban attempts prove it — with plenty to dig into in terms of family, gender, queerness, literature and loss.
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‘Kitchen Confidential’ by Anthony Bourdain (2000)
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(Ecco)
The archetype of a tough-guy chef with a taste for bluntness and profanity is a cliche now, but it wasn’t when Anthony Bourdain published this memoir. It reveals the dirty truths about what really goes on in (and in the alleys behind) restaurant kitchens. This book was Bourdain’s breakthrough, propelling him to a place in the television spotlight, which for a while he turned into the best of food and adventure journalism. On a recent reread, I found that this one mostly holds up, despite the late Bourdain’s sometimes off-putting machismo. If you’re planning on serving snacks while discussing it, maybe stick to cheese and crackers. And for the love of God, don’t serve fish. (If you know, you know.)
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‘The Yellow House’ by Sarah Broom (2019)
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(Grove)
“The Yellow House” was the best book I read in 2019 — I was on the jury of the National Book Award the year we gave it the nonfiction prize. Broom writes with clarity and curiosity about her sprawling New Orleans East family and the home they grew up in. They’re so intergenerational that she has to interview her own relatives — charismatic, fascinating, imperfect. She also turns her journalism skills on her neighborhood and the history of environmental racism and isolation. Hurricane Katrina, one of America’s great modern tragedies, is on the horizon; Broom’s path takes her abroad to Africa. Told with heart and insight, “The Yellow House” is about how we make a home, with places and people.
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‘Stay True’ by Hua Hsu (2022)
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(Doubleday)
When Hua Hsu got to UC Berkeley in the mid-’90s, he’d already started a music zine; he was defining himself through his relationship to alternative culture. How disappointed he was when one of the lodestars of his new social group was Ken, an Abercrombie & Fitch-wearing frat boy. But Hsu soon realized that Ken was a genuinely great guy. The staples of a good coming-of-age story follow: Do they obsess over the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”? They do. Do they negotiate the merits of Pearl Jam? Often.Then tragedy strikes. This is a book about friendship, the cycles of grief and two lives. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for memoir in 2023, Hsu stays true to Ken with this full-fledged remembrance.
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‘Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story’ by Leslie Jamison (2024)
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(Little, Brown)
Some good advice: If a friend is going through a divorce, give them “Splinters.” In the golden era of the divorce memoir, Leslie Jamison stands out as a singular voice. Like many readers, over the years I found that Jamison’s work has made the world feel less lonely, less cold. In her illuminating nonfiction, the writer has offered up her pain as literary fodder in essay collections about marriage, eating disorders and addiction. (Friends of mine who struggled with addiction consider Jamison’s writing as a salve.) Now, in her raw and brilliant account of divorce and motherhood, Jamison makes sense of her new identities. The writing is compelling and bold, offering daring truths that complicate our idea of family and womanhood.
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‘In the Dream House’ by Carmen Maria Machado (2019)
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(Graywolf Press)
Carmen Maria Machado had a breakout hit with her 2017 short story collection “Her Body and Other Parties,” but her writing shines even brighter in this genre-bending, difficult memoir. “In the Dream House,” about her experience in an abusive relationship with a woman she met in graduate school, is not an easy read. It took me more than a week to get through its 272 pages because of the sheer emotional intensity. But it’s more than worth it, and Machado’s idiosyncratic style paired with the difficult subject matter will make for some fascinating, passionate discussions.
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‘Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood’ by Trevor Noah (2016)
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(One World)
It’s not uncommon for celebrity memoir authors to mine their childhood for stories that lay the foundation for the notable adult we’ve come to know well. Trevor Noah’s origin story is a doozy. In “Born a Crime,” the comedian and former host of “The Daily Show” details growing up as a biracial kid in the final years of apartheid South Africa, when interracial coupling could land you in prison. Noah shares the spotlight with his ultrareligious but free-spirited mother, and the two of them spend a lot of time staving off poverty and genuine danger. Thankfully, Noah is a deft comic writer, so his memoir doubles as an accessible primer on a profoundly racist political system. You won’t want to skip a word.
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‘I’m Glad My Mom Died’ by Jennette McCurdy (2022)
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(Simon & Schuster)
Admission: I was so put off by the title of Jennette McCurdy’s “I’m Glad My Mom Died” that it took me weeks to crack open the book. But I got over it — and it was worth it. McCurdy manages to infuse two popular memoir tropes — the “trauma-infused child star” story and the “fraught, mother-daughter relationship” narrative — with fresh perspective and surprising depth. She takes on early fame, eating disorders, addiction and parental abuse as well as first love and grief in a voice that is both childlike and wise. Her story is sad, uncomfortably honest and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. I called my own mom and cried.
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‘Men We Reaped’ by Jesmyn Ward (2013)
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(Bloomsbury USA)
To read a book by Jesmyn Ward is to feel the presence of greatness. Her prose is beautiful without being ornate; her works are often heartrending. So it is with “Men We Reaped,” the story of five young Black men close to her in DeLisle, Miss., who died in just four years. The most devastating loss was her brother. Ward, who has twice won the National Book Award for fiction, is an equally brilliant a nonfiction storyteller. This book serves as witness to the brutality of chronic poverty and systemic racism in Mississippi and her beloved coastal town. Pair this indelible memoir with her new essay collection, “On Witness and Respair,” coming in May, and have your hearts broken twice over.
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‘Educated’ by Tara Westover (2018)
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(Random House)
If Joan Didion claimed California, Tara Westover owns survivalist rural Idaho — and it will be impossible to take it from her. Westover offers an unnerving, intimate portrait of family life in rural Idaho in her memoir, “Educated.” She writes about her family’s strange proclivities — guns, abuse and paranoid convictions — with wisdom. May we all recount our childhoods with such poetry and insight. Despite never being sent to school, Westover eventually enrolls in college and earns a PhD at the University of Cambridge in England. Her journey offers a rare and remarkable account of an indomitable young woman and her escape.
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Die-Hard Angelenos
Quintessential Los Angeles literature
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‘Eve’s Hollywood’ by Eve Babitz (1974)
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(NYRB Classics)
There will never be another Eve Babitz — although generations of writers have tried. The ultimate party girl-turned-literary icon has become a symbol of California cool and effortless style. If she were alive today, we might see her behind a turntable with Charli XCX — or maybe she’d be too cool for that? She was the last to leave the party, often leaving with someone else’s husband, but she narrated her indiscretion with poetry and sentimentality for the city that raised her. “Eve’s Hollywood” shows Babitz at the full wild scope of her literary talent, rhapsodizing 1960s Los Angeles with such beauty, you’ll never want to leave. Plus, no one flirts for sport the way Eve did.
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‘The Big Sleep’ by Raymond Chandler (1939)
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(Vintage Crime)
Raymond Chandler is one of the patron saints of Los Angeles literature. “The blonde was strong with the madness of love or fear, or a mixture of both, or maybe she was just strong.” (Page 87 in my 1959 Penguin UK paperback.) That’s during a tussle for a gun in “The Big Sleep,” Chandler’s first novel. Published in 1939, it features now-immortal (I hope) detective Philip Marlowe traveling from high-class mansions to flop hotels throughout Los Angeles. A book club could discuss the city’s geography, scandals or the messy plot. But I’d rather talk about how he gets Los Angeles so right, its gloss and corruption, its dark heart. And his language! Those sentences! Elegant and abrupt side by side. Like Marlowe. Long may he go down those mean streets, neither tarnished nor afraid.
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‘City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles’ by Mike Davis (1990)
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(Verso)
My friends and I used to joke that “City of Quartz” was the most-discussed-at-parties book that no one had actually read. True fact: The book is dense. But it’s also a great read. It exploded across the cultural landscape when it came out, a dizzying history of the forces that have shaped Los Angeles, from its rancho days through the divided centers of capital that pit downtown WASPs against Westside Jewish movie executives. It changed not only the way people understood L.A. but the way people wrote history, tout court. It’s a virtuoso performance, written by a visionary ex-truck driver and meatcutter who took his anticapitalist rage and transformed it into urban theory and prophecy. He would appreciate the book’s afterlife, orienting new generations to deal with the darkness he saw coming.
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‘Play It As It Lays’ by Joan Didion (1970)
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(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Real ones in L.A. are familiar with the opening line of Didion’s acidic 1970 novel: “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.” And so we meet the cool and smart Shakespeare-fluent heroine Maria. An actor whose career, and much of her life, is in freefall. It’s deeply relatable for Angelenos who have stuck it out in the Hollywood mirage collecting bruises, empty relationships and freeway fables along the way. You love Maria; she handles the highway “without once braking or losing the beat on the radio.” You also hate Maria; her taste for caviar and wavering morals can get under your skin. It’s this tension that makes the slim volume compulsively readable, debatable and very L.A.
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‘L.A. Confidential’ by James Ellroy (1990)
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(Vintage)
What’s more L.A. than a nepo baby, a Hollywood wannabe and a loose cannon being tempted by the corruption they’re supposedly fighting? Author James Ellroy (“The Black Dahlia”) always finds the dirt under the glitter, and he really went digging in “L.A. Confidential,” uncovering corruption in Hollywood, the police force and the high-end sex work industry. This 1990 novel is a seething, retro noir that sprawls like its namesake city while moving faster than the 10 Freeway at night. Your book club might also screen Curtis Hanson’s Oscar-winning 1997 adaptation, which features a top-notch turn from Danny DeVito as a tabloid journalist and the best thrown cocktail ever caught on film.
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‘The Sons of El Rey’ by Alex Espinoza (2025)
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(Simon & Shuster)
“The Sons of El Rey” is the Great Mexican American Lucha Libre novel. It begins with aged patriarch Ernesto dying in Los Angeles. The book moves back and forth between East L.A. and Mexico, through three generations of a luchador family. The vivid scenes of young Ernesto becoming wrestler El Rey Coyote in Mexico are matched by the no-holds-barred anonymous trysts his professor son has with men across Los Angeles. The story doesn’t need to inflate successes to try to give it weight; the father founded a small gym in East L.A. and was, to some, a beloved character. It’s enough. This is a Los Angeles novel that isn’t about seeking fame; it’s about how people come to terms with their secrets.
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‘Postcards From the Edge’ by Carrie Fisher (1987)
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(Simon & Schuster)
Nearly every page is underlined in my tattered copy of Carrie Fisher’s semiautobiographical novel. In this razor-sharp roman à clef — which today reads like God’s answer to Bret Easton Ellis — the cocaine is plentiful, the rehab scenes are savage and the mother-daughter dynamic is deliciously mucky. Fisher’s zingers alone could fuel a book club for weeks. “I don’t mean to quote myself, but if I don’t, maybe no one else will.” “I have anorexic thinking but I can’t seem to muster the behavior.” She was fearless about vanity, ego and humiliation — especially her own. Can you imagine if this national treasure had a TikTok? Ugh. Pair it with the HBO documentary “Bright Lights,” then chase it down with a good cry from daughter Billie Lourd’s Instagram.
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‘Inherent Vice’ by Thomas Pynchon (2009)
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(Penguin)
When it first came out, “Inherent Vice” was dismissed by some critics as a lesser work. Set in the late 1960s, the novel follows a private investigator named Doc Sportello and is relatively easy to follow. Now, not only has “Inherent Vice” surpassed “The Crying of Lot 49” as an entry point for Pynchon beginners, it’s regarded by many as the richest of his three California novels. With its focus on drugs, music, wellness and real estate, I’ll go even further and suggest it’s one of the best books about L.A. set during the dawning of post-Manson America.
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‘Colored Television’ by Danzy Senna (2024)
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(Riverhead)
“Colored Television” is a wryly hilarious of-the-moment novel that illustrates the precarity of being creative in Los Angeles. Jane, its underemployed professor/flailing novelist narrator, captures the absurdities of living in proximity to the excesses of celebrity culture and wealth while frequently falling just short. She hasn’t been able to buy a house, keep her kids in the same school or convince her idealistic husband to want those things too. The mixed-race couple moves into a friend’s luxury hillside mansion while he’s away for a year, and she gets a job in a television writers room. Compromises, lies and failures pile up; comic complications ensue.
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‘Sidewalking: Coming to Terms With Los Angeles’ by David L. Ulin (2015)
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(University of California Press)
Usually, I can’t abide a New Yorker explaining my beloved Los Angeles to me. I make an exception for critic David L. Ulin, who moved to L.A. in 1991 and has been interrogating our confounding city with such charm ever since. These essays are self-contained yet overlapping — like L.A. neighborhoods, maybe. Each nimbly skips between memoir, history and literary and cinematic references to understand the ways L.A., makes and remakes itself. Gather a group of Angelenos to read this together and let it inspire conversations about the city’s past, present and future. Who was born here and stayed? Who came from far away, and why? How has this place shaped us? Better yet, pair these essays with a walking tour. As you wind through L.A. on foot, debate and commune over this mythic, mischievous city.
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Politicos
Incisive reads on politics and power
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‘The Fire Next Time’ by James Baldwin (1963)
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(Vintage)
Because Baldwin takes on such heady topics with such moral clarity in these letters — one to a nephew and another “from a region in my mind”— it’s easy to forget what an incredible writer he is. The direct address is at once familiar and powerful, and Baldwin’s take on race, religion and the responsibility of white Christians to atone for the sins of the past are more relevant now than ever. Make no mistake: Baldwin’s prose sings. “The Fire Next Time” was meant to be highlighted, shared, discussed and debated.
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‘The Message’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2024)
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(One World)
MacArthur Foundation Fellow Ta-Nehisi Coates returns to nonfiction with a collection of heartfelt travel writing that ruminates on storytelling’s power and a writer’s duty to the world and their readers. In “The Message,” Coates visits West Africa seeking connection to his ancestral land, joins a South Carolina teacher in fighting a ban of his 2015 book “Between the World and Me,” and journeys through the West Bank meeting with Palestinians in search of perspective on the Israeli occupation. Coates is arguably the preeminent Black voice of his literary generation and, throughout this book, he reckons with his place in the predominantly white legacy media space. Always erudite and approachable, Coates speaks with emotion and veracity about his experiences, showing how forms of oppression are linked throughout the world.
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‘Women, Race & Class’ by Angela Davis (1981)
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(Vintage)
Revolutionary, brilliant and utterly uncompromising, Angela Davis has never looked away and never backed down. Now in her 80s, she was labeled a “terrorist” for her open support of the Black Panthers and communism in the 1960s. For that, she was famously pushed out of her post at UCLA (at Ronald Reagan’s behest). This book is about the feminist movement and its shortcomings when it came to race, intersectional before that term was a buzzword. It’s also a manifesto, guided by the wish for liberation and “stimulating, creative and productive” work for all. She continues to write, teach, lecture and rack up honors. Read this book for the history, the critique and for a dose of Davis’ resilience and spirit.
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‘Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It’ by Cory Doctorow (2025)
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(MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A fun icebreaker question: When did you realize that [insert platform name here] had started to suck? Given the number of humans on Amazon, Facebook or TikTok, it’s easy to locate our lived experiences within Cory Doctorow’s kind-of-a-cussword concept. The book explains how these platforms seduce us, then abuse us — we the users, content producers, buyers and sellers. It’s a snappy explanation of the process, which locks in different groups, and then, when those groups have nowhere else to go, redirects value to the shareholders at the top. A handful of tech billionaires get obscenely rich while the platform goes to s—. Doctorow is an insightful thinker about technology, capitalism and society; in “Enshittification,” he has defined a historic moment.
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‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ by Omar El Akkad (2025)
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(Knopf)
A book rarely becomes as urgent and poignant as “One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” has in recent years. Part memoir and part scathing history of the West, the book offers a damning and melancholic portrayal of the Gaza conflict, implicating Western imperialism. The book forces Americans to face uncomfortable truths about our own complicity in violence. While it packs a political punch, the memoir is also masterful on a prose level. El Akkad is an accomplished journalist who chronicles the events of our time with vulnerability and pathos. Despite its damning and harrowing accounts of violence, readers will find hope and clarity in El Akkad’s rendering of our time.
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‘America, América: A New History of the New World’ by Greg Grandin (2025)
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(Penguin)
I just started “America, América” and can’t wait to read more. Historian Greg Grandin is one of the best writers today ready to tell America’s history as it should be taught. In “The End of the Myth,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, he elegantly dissected Manifest Destiny. “America, América” tells the story of the United States’ engagement with Central and South America, and of how those nations emerged alongside the U.S. Grandin begins his tale with the observations of Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, centering him against his contemporary, George Washington. And so the book promises to go, positioning the thinkers, politicians and people of the rest of the Americas in conversation with this nation. Early blurber Naomi Klein says it is, “Dazzling. Sweeping. Mind-altering.” Let’s go.
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‘Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World’ by Naomi Klein (2023)
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(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Naomi Klein, best known for her critiques of capitalism (“The Shock Doctrine”), became famous around the same time as another critic, Naomi Wolf, a former feminist who has taken her thinking to the far fringe. (You may have heard the rhyme about how to tell them apart.) This is her starting point in “Doppleganger,” which examines how social media has become such an effective and far-reaching medium for disseminating bizzaro conspiracy theories. Klein reflects on the ways in which social media encourages the performance of mirror selves, presenting idealized images of the self that may bear little reality to the facts. Things to talk about at book club: how we post on Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, doomscrolling and where weird rabbit holes have taken us.
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‘Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America’ by Heather Cox Richardson (2023)
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(Penguin)
Maybe you don’t follow historian Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Substack distilling the current state of American politics, but you probably know at least a few people who do. More than 2.8 million subscribe to her even-keeled commentary and guidance as news headlines become ever more bleak. In “Democracy Awakening,” Richardson writes about the perennial threats to our democratic ideals across history that ultimately led us into the chaos of our current authoritarian moment. A history professor, Richardson writes with a signature combination of comprehensive research, blunt assessment and a steady voice. Take comfort that it’s not all doom and gloom; she fills the final third of her book with uplifting stories and tools for change.
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‘On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century’ by Timothy Snyder (2017)
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(Crown)
If you’re unsure how to process living under a government that is subverting the will of the people, there may be no better book to turn to than Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny.” It includes 20 short lessons on how to resist authoritarian rule based on historical precedent. As a group activity, it could be fun to draw parallels between current events and those in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Well, maybe “fun” is the wrong word, but tyranny has a playbook and Snyder outlines our best defenses. Pocket-sized and concise, this is the kind of book you could finish in a single afternoon, but it’s better to savor each chapter, reread it regularly and lend to your most disagreeable uncles.
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‘Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”’ by Héctor Tobar (2023)
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(Picador)
Inspired by what was being said (and not) about race following the murder of George Floyd, and by James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” Héctor Tobar wrote the award-winning “Our Migrant Souls.” Addressed to his college students, it examines being “Latino” — how that designation has been shaped by empire, capitalism and popular culture. When I worked with Tobar at The Times, I knew he was the son of Guatemalan immigrants, but we never had these discussions. Framed as a direct address to other Latinos, some might think this book is not for them. But that’s exactly what makes it a great book club book for all groups — it’s a window into the lived experiences, mythologies and conversations of our wildly diverse Latino community.
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Armchair Travelers
Riveting escapist and adventure narratives
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‘Desert Solitaire’ by Edward Abbey (1968)
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(Ballantine)
Naturalists, environmentalists, desert dwellers and fans of cantankerous op-ed writing have all been drawn to Abbey’s classic memoir of his time as a ranger at Utah’s Arches National Park. It works — and gives book clubs much to discuss — because it succeeds on two tracks. First, it’s a vivid, gorgeous account of Abbey’s solo adventure in the park, punishing weather and all, evoking the human desire for escape into nature. Second, it remains one of the most effective, prescient and (alas) relevant studies of how nature gets trampled on and exploited all too easily by reckless humans.
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‘In Patagonia’ by Bruce Chatwin (1977)
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(Penguin Classics)
A classic of travel writing, “In Patagonia” changed the way British writers and readers approached the words of the world. By using the literary techniques of fiction — dramatic structure, flashes of inner thoughts and artful prose — the book elevated the form and put Chatwin on the literary map. The former Sotheby’s art expert was fascinated by nomads and the idea of being in motion. This book isn’t reporting; it’s storytelling. His editor wrote, “The voice you hear is elliptical, pungent; and the eye is that of someone clearly drawn to the unexpected, the contradictory, the sharp-edged.” If only he were still writing — as impossibly handsome as he was talented, Chatwin died of AIDS-related causes in 1989.
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‘The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey’ by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (2021)
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(Seven Stories Press)
My father is from Cuba, and though I’ve never been (and likely won’t soon), I’m reading what I can about the island’s history and signifiers. This South American travelogue — “On the Road” for Democratic Socialists — traces the formative, nine-month journey of 23-year-old medical student Ernesto “Che” Guevara, years before he joined Fidel Castro as a guerrilla leader and became a global symbol of rebellion. The memoir invites readers to separate the man from the myth and to consider how experience, privilege and history inform ideology. Fitting, as bloody struggles over inequality and state power continue today, and where economic turmoil and political polarization echo many of the injustices that moved the young traveler. For a book club, the tension is irresistible.
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‘Down & Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century’ by Daniel Hernandez (2011)
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(Scribner)
When I was a child, I lived in Mexico City for many years. Still, the city remains a beguiling stranger to me. You can spend lifetimes in Mexico City and never comprehend its vastness. Strange, beautiful and complex, Daniel Hernandez’s book is as unique as the city he writes about. Allow “Down & Delirious in Mexico City” to be your witty and all-knowing tour guide through the metropolis. While living there Hernandez, Food editor of The Times, is swallowed by surprising subcultures, scenes and drug-fueled parties. Like Hunter S. Thompson, only more thoughtful and tender, Hernandez delivers a rollicking and compelling portrait of a city with a haunting past.
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‘The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise’ by Pico Iyer (2023)
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(Riverhead)
Before he shared a few scenes with Timothée Chalamet in “Marty Supreme,” Pico Iyer spent the greater part of the last half-century as an introspective travel writer. Though he was born in England, he was raised partly in California and the loss of his family’s idyllic home in the 1990 Santa Barbara wildfires was a pivotal moment in his life, a paradise lost. In “The Half-Known Life,” he explores what paradise means in a world that can sometimes seem determined to destroy itself, even voyaging to North Korea, where the idea of utopia may seem elusive. Iyer has the grace of a Zen koan as he crosses cultures and religions to explore the idea of paradise, beautifully grounded in the places he visits.
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‘On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac (1957)
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(Penguin)
When I first read “On the Road,” I loved it with the fervor of a true convert. The freedom! Rejecting society’s rules! I too drove across the country, again and again. But revisiting the text now, and knowing about sundown laws and the Green Book, I can’t unsee the characters’ white privilege. And women can’t find a foothold in the narrative. The backstory is fascinating — Kerouac created a continuous scroll of tracing paper to feed into his typewriter so he didn’t have to stop writing. He had complicated feelings about Neal Cassady. The book was an enormous success, but the fame devastatingly unwelcome. In addition to America’s many faults, let’s talk about all those complications. And the transcendent writing.
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‘On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome, With Love and Pasta’ by Jen Lin-Liu (2013)
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(Riverhead)
While honeymooning and eating in Italy, writer Jen Lin-Liu started thinking about pasta. Raised in Southern California and then living in China, she wanted to discover how noodles had traveled from Asia to Europe (it wasn’t Marco Polo). She travels, cooks and eats her way along the Silk Road, beginning in Beijing. Her path takes her across China and into places not frequented by culinary tourists, such as Urumqi, Kashgar, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. She is keen to the continuities between food cultures, making connections that could only be seen on the ground. Luckily, Los Angeles is home to restaurants from many places she visits — after reading “On the Noodle Road,” I was obsessed with trying Uyghur food. It was delicious.
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‘My Kind of Place: Travel Stories From a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere’ by Susan Orlean (2005)
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(Random House)
I mean, the cover alone … Susan Orlean in stilettos and a Sinatra-style fedora! This is vintage Orlean, doing capital-J Journalism we’ve likely seen gone the way of the dodo. Her collection of 33 essays — many published in the New Yorker from 1992 to 2003 — shares a single, shape-shifting protagonist: place. Settle into Orlean’s detail-laden sketches of fascinating cultural phenomena and characters, rendered in her signature ultrafine prose. A travelogue a la Twain, Orlean climbs Mt. Fuji, plays catch with Little Leaguers in Havana, attends the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Ill., and investigates Manhattan’s suspicious abundance of royally named papaya shops — all through the lens of one of our greatest living essayists who calls L.A. home.
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‘On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer’ by Rick Steves (2025)
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(Rick Steves)
In the 1970s, tie-dyed vagabonds and stoney American expats loaded up in dusty vans in Europe and took off for Nepal. They’d roll through Turkey, snake up dirt roads to then-peaceful Iran and a welcoming Afghanistan; trek through Pakistan to India and head all the way up to happening Kathmandu. Folks called the route the Hippie Trail. I know because my mom was one of them — and turns out she may have been lighting up with Rick Steves during his first-ever toke in Herat, Afghanistan. Steves unfolds stories from the trail that widened his view of the world and drove him to become a beloved PBS personality in his resurfaced travel/photo journal meets memoir. Read it when you’re longing for an epic trip.
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‘Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail’ by Cheryl Strayed (2012)
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(Vintage)
“Wild” has so many resonances for readers, it’s a great read for book clubbers at any life stage. Cheryl Strayed’s 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail is a story of folly, determination and how far we may have to go to reckon with heartbreaking loss. Luckily, Strayed is a writer of tremendous skill and also humor, finding comic fodder in her overpacking and initial unsuitability as a long-distance hiker. Her adventures include moments of harrowing danger and the tedious days of slogging the miles just to get somewhere else. But I read it while grieving the loss of a parent and Strayed’s memoir resonated in detailing just how harrowing and tedious it is to get through deep grief.
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Outdoor Enthusiasts
Absorbing nature-filled titles
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‘The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times’ by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams (2021)
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(Celadon)
Primatologist, anthropologist and naturalist Jane Goodall taught generations to look and think differently about this world and the creatures we share it with. This 2021 book arranges conversations between Goodall and Douglas Abrams, who asks her the questions we would ask if we were lucky enough to have been sitting across from her. Hope, Goodall tells him, is “an aspect of our survival.” If you are burned out on dystopias; if you need something bright and generous to focus on; if you need hope, plain and simple, you couldn’t ask for a better guide.
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‘The ABCs of California’s Native Bees’ by Krystle Hickman (2025)
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(Heyday)
I recently snapped a photo of a bee in my front yard and uploaded it to iNaturalist, a citizen science app that contributes to real-life research. My phone started blowing up: I’d photographed an endangered native bumblebee. I have since gotten obsessive about documenting bees on hikes — the rush of discovering something rare! — and was delighted to read “The ABCs of California’s Native Bees.” Krystle Hickman takes readers on her adventures across California in search of native bees. “We, meaning scientists who study them, farmers who use them and gardeners who enjoy them, still have much to learn about these prolific pollinators,” Hickman writes, calling for greater public awareness of these bees. Sounds like a great mission for a book club.
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‘Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2015)
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(Milkweed Editions)
“Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “extending to them self and intention and compassion — until we teach them not to.” In the bestselling “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Kimmerer shows readers how to step back into natural compassion. She practices “two-eyed seeing,” where one position is the knowledge she carries as a trained Western microbiologist and the other is her traditional ecological insight as a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation. Many describe her work as sacred. Her writing feels like the teachings of plants — as if the lichens and the mayflowers were speaking through the author. Despite the extinction of so much life all around us, the wonder and respect in Kimmerer’s way of knowing feels hopeful and gentle.
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‘Desert Oracle: Strange True Tales From the American Southwest’ by Ken Layne (2020)
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(Picador)
If you have an abiding interest in all things paranormal, take this pocket-sized guide with you next time you go to the Mojave Desert. It contains Joshua Tree-based radio show host and magazine publisher Ken Layne’s observations on a variety of odd and unexplained phenomena and stories from the Southwest — and it made my recent trip to the desert a lot more memorable (and spooky). It’s also a perfect book club pick, especially if you have a mix of skeptics and believers in the metaphysical — you’ll have fun arguing about, say, whether the Sierra Highway Devil is really stalking around Twentynine Palms. (I, like Fox Mulder, want to believe.)
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‘Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization’ by Bill McKibben (2025)
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(W. W. Norton)
No matter what some people claim, climate change is real. One of our most respected environmental writers, Bill McKibben, continues to tell that story in “Here Comes the Sun.” The book explains how our energy landscape became so dominated by coal, gas and oil — not good. But he has a truly optimistic take on moving forward. Use the sun! Talking to environmental journalist Emily Atkin last year, McKibben discussed California’s impressive move away from natural gas in energy production. “If you wanna know why the fossil fuel industry is freaking out and sponsoring every bad politician on Earth, that’s why,” McKibben said. Are you in a book club with someone who wants to drill, baby, drill? This might have the evidence to turn them around.
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‘Love Letter to a Garden’ by Debbie Millman with Recipes by Roxane Gay (2025)
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(Timber Press)
I have a backyard for the first time in my life, and, it turns out, a black thumb. Still, I regard my weeds with a misplaced sense of stewardship and moral prospect. “Love Letter to a Garden” follows designer Debbie Millman’s tender metamorphosis from “houseplant-killer” to devoted gardener. Teach me your ways, Millman! Her wife, author Roxane Gay, calls the project a “visual memoir” and contributes her own recipes drawn from their garden. Pair it with a potluck straight from the pages, no backyard required.
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‘Wild LA: Explore the Amazing Nature in and Around Los Angeles’ by the Natural History Museum, Lila M. Higgins, Gregory B. Pauly, Jason G. Goldman, Charles Hood (2019)
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(Timber Press)
Get off the book club couch and into nature for a literal moving discussion. We live in one of the most ecologically improbable corners of the world, where mountains crash into coastline, chaparral bleeds into desert and the freeway exit can double as a trailhead. From the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, this field guide reads like having the region’s nerdiest, pumped-up naturalist in your back pocket. It offers profiles of local flora and fauna, curated field trips and practical tips for navigating your next adventure on foot.
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‘The High Sierra: A Love Story’ by Kim Stanley Robinson (2022)
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(Little, Brown)
If you’re dating and looking for the one, find someone who talks about you the way Kim Stanley Robinson talks about the Sierra Nevada: “If you see a pretty photo from the Sierras,” Robinson writes, “you always have to remember, it was a zillion times more beautiful than that.” Settle down, lover boy! Robinson is best known for science fiction, and ecological preservation is a common theme across his literary oeuvre. Robinson’s tender valentine to the mountain range, standing tall along California’s eastern border, is part memoir, part history and all adoration. He’s visited the Sierra over 100 times and he just wants everyone to join his lovefest. He’s a bit of a kinkster that way.
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‘The Backyard Bird Chronicles’ by Amy Tan (2024)
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(Knopf)
I never got the hang of baking bread, and my attempt to learn French was un fiasco, but of all the hobbies I pursued during the COVID-19 lockdown, birdwatching stuck with me. (Just ask the northern cardinals stuffing themselves with birdseed in my backyard.) Tan, however, has been at it since the before times, and her book — which contains her own illustrations — is a love letter to all things avian. (Don’t get her started on outdoor cats, though.) This would be a great pick for an outside book club session, especially in a place where you might get sideswiped by a hummingbird or two.
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Long-Haulers
Treasured heavyweight selections
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‘Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes (1605-1615)
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(Ecco)
If you manage to persuade your book club to tackle Cervantes’ classic novel, tell them to start now and schedule the meeting for 2027. This massive book — considered the first novel of the modern era — tells the story of a delusional knight and his skeptical but loyal squire. I read “Don Quixote” in high school and loved it, though not many of my classmates felt the same way. (None of us expected the toilet humor, and opinions on that varied.) Despite the novel’s age and length, I sailed through it; it’s remarkable how well it’s held up. If any among your ranks tries to dodge the tome and just listen to the cast recording of “Man of La Mancha” instead, feel free to withhold the tapas and tempranillo.
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‘Underworld’ by Don DeLillo (1997)
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2026 FOB special section ONLY; UNDERWORLD by Don DeLillo (Scribner; spot illustration by Tara Jacoby / For The Times)
(Scribner)
I have to admit: I would be super annoying at a book club. As a huge fan of Don DeLillo, I couldn’t resist talking about the time I got to interview him. DeLillo’s prose is razor-sharp and uniquely rhythmic, a pure joy for the 848 pages of “Underworld,” which I bought and read when it came out in 1997. There is no better writer to fully understand America in its Cold War 20th century, and “Underworld” captures its hopeful, ridiculous, unfulfilled glory. Do I remember the details now? No, which is why I’d love to reread it in a book club, if you’d have me. Inside scoop: In 2016, DeLillo told me he still only writes with a typewriter. Me: Was “Underworld” a big stack of typed pages? DeLillo: “It was enormous.”
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‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot (1871-1872)
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(Penguin Classics)
In these outraged, internet-addled times, there’s perhaps nothing more noble and community affirming than discussing a thick 19th century novel about rural England with a group of fellow readers. Originally published serially as eight volumes over the course of one year, “Middlemarch” would be the perfect pick for a slow-reading book club. For one, it’s long (my Penguin Classic clocks in at 800 pages), and you’ll want to take your time dissecting its fascinating cast of characters: the sincere and the bitter, the blowhards and the tenderhearted. By the sage grace of her omniscient narrator, Eliot depicts the full complexity of these lives — and, by the magic of fiction, our own. Trust me: There’s a wisdom bomb on nearly every page.
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‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce (1922)
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(Vintage)
The best book club experience I ever had was reading “Ulysses” with a bunch of working-class guys in L.A. We read a chapter a week and met at a different Irish pub to discuss. There’s a cottage industry built around reading “Ulysses” “correctly,” but we discovered that unpacking Joyce’s epic day-in-the-life of two ordinary Dubliners was a lot more fulfilling over pints than monkish scholarly analysis. Caveat emptor: One member of the group met his future wife during one of our meetings and another ended up getting divorced.
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‘The Stand’ by Stephen King (1978)
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(Vintage)
One of the horror master’s best-regarded novels, “The Stand” is set in a postapocalyptic world ravaged by a super-flu that has wiped out almost all of humanity. Survivors are forced to choose whether to follow the peace-loving Mother Abagail or the bone-chillingly evil Randall Flagg. I first read this while recovering from a (non-super) flu, a rookie mistake if there ever was one. Do not do that. From the first biological accident through the collapse of society, King’s futuristic epic can be as terrifying as his horror novels — especially one infamous scene where two characters escape New York through the Lincoln Tunnel, which is filled with rotting corpses. Discuss King’s good-versus-evil meditation with your friends with the doors locked. And maybe wear masks.
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‘In Search of Lost Time’ by Marcel Proust (1913-1927)
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(Penguin Classics Deluxe)
Yes, it’s long. Yes, little “happens” in the conventional sense. Yes, you’ll probably need to bone up on the Dreyfus affair. But as anybody who’s immersed themselves in Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece knows, “Time” is a deeply rewarding experience, putting the reader in the company of an author unusually attuned to the fine-grain details of class, attraction, love, art, politics and the simple fact of living. The Penguin Classics series of translations is the most welcoming — Lydia Davis’ warm treatment of the first volume, “Swann’s Way,” is girded with notes that capture Proust’s time, intellect and humor. So, yes, it’s long, but it delivers the heady feeling that you’re breathing in the whole of existence.
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‘The Tale of Genji’ by Murasaki Shikibu (early 11th century)
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(Penguin Classics Deluxe)
Generally known as the world’s first novel, “The Tale of Genji” was written in the first decades of the 11th century by Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu. It is an intimate portrait of the inner workings of Japanese court society — think “Bridgerton” in Heian-era Japan. Subtly satiric, the massive novel follows the dizzyingly handsome Prince Genji and his many lusty adventures. While he is seemingly an exemplar of masculinity, the book also reveals how his actions affect the women and (content warning) adolescent girls who are his romantic conquests. From our era, it provides a window into an elite culture of a millennium ago and can be addictive in its tales of jealousies, loves and jostling for power.
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‘The Books of Jacob’ by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft (2022)
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(Riverhead)
Where to start with Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2018? Her previous novel, “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” is a tightly packaged whodunit and a ride of the highest manic order. Loving it helped me prepare for the sumptuous slow burn of “The Books of Jacob,” a seven-part beast of an epic that follows a rogue sect of 18th century Jews devoutly following a self-proclaimed messiah through multiple religious conversions, identity changes and nomadic travel in and out of the Pale of Settlement. Let Tokarczuk lure you in with one of the most beautiful and enchanting long-form title pages to exist in modern literature.
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‘Anna Karenina’ by Leo Tolstoy (1878)
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(Penguin Classics)
Come for the tragic romance, stay for the deep dive into God and human nature.The most accessible of the big classic Russian novels turns on Anna’s effort to escape a loveless marriage and pursue an affair with a dashing military officer, but Tolstoy embroiders that story with rich observations about Russian social and courtly life, and in its closing chapters, one of the most powerful meditations on family, altruism and faith. Its treatment of suicide was a scandal in its time, but today it reads as a penetrating study of despair.
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‘Infinite Jest’ by David Foster Wallace (1996)
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(Back Bay Books)
Today, David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus may function as a prop for performative male contests or laptop risers, but what if there were a secret third: us reading it. The 1,075-ish-page doorstopper imagines a near-future America sponsored by corporations and anesthetized by entertainment, where tennis prodigies, recovering addicts and the rest of us orbit a lethally pleasurable film that makes desire itself collapse. Sound familiar? Folklore says to get past the first 100 pages, then you’re hooked. Personally, I have tried and failed to hit that benchmark three separate times. Consider this an open call for accomplices to read it with me. We can even rip off the front cover together, if you like.
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The Make-Believers
Enthralling fantasy and fantastical tales
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‘Oryx and Crake’ by Margaret Atwood (2003)
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(Vintage)
In an unspecified future where things are Pretty Darn Bad, “Oryx and Crake” follows a man, his memories and the story of his best friend who’s got a bit of a god complex. While the world they inhabit has been vastly altered by genetic engineering, it has ties to the present — evil billionaires, icky fast food, strip clubs, fringe cults. This is Margaret Atwood, a master of speculative fiction, and every weird or creepy detail has roots in reality. “Oryx and Crake” is the first in a trilogy — followed by “The Year of the Flood” and “MaddAddam” — that was published from 2003 to 2013, overshadowed by the success of “The Handmaid’s Tale” series. This world is as fully realized, but more wild and expansive. It’s even bizarrely hopeful.
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‘We Love You, Bunny’ by Mona Awad (2025)
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(Scribner)
Your book club will either love this gothic pick or be totally freaked out. It’s a follow-up to Awad’s cult, BookTok-famous “Bunny,” but you don’t have to have read the original. The genre-bending dark academia satire features magical realism, a light smattering of smut and ax-wielding MFA fiction grad girls who kill rabbits and conjure them into swoon-worthy (but broken) boys. Some describe it as “Heathers” meets “Frankenstein.” Awad, whom Margaret Atwood called her “literary heir apparent,” gets away with this with stunning, mind-expanding prose. Maybe have your guests wear rabbit ears and bring the book’s signature creepy-cute Bunny treats.
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‘A Discovery of Witches’ by Deborah Harkness (2011)
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(Penguin)
We all have literary weaknesses; one of mine is books about books. Add in witches, libraries, and vampires, and you’ve got an irresistible alchemical combination. Say hello to “A Discovery of Witches,” in which a scholar turns up a very old, very odd manuscript and unwittingly draws the attention of a whole host of underworld beings. Naturally, one of them is very attractive. Harkness’ novel is the first in her (still running!) All Souls series, and it is such a mashup of genres that there is something for every passionate reader to latch on to and argue about. If a cross between A.S. Byatt’s “Possession” and Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” sounds like bookish magic, this one’s for you.
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‘Nettle & Bone’ by T. Kingfisher (2022)
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(Tor)
The prolific T. Kingfisher won the Hugo Award for best novel for this story of Marra, a princess who sets out to rescue her elder sister from an untenable marriage. Working with the raw material of fairy tales — princesses, fairy godmothers, evil rulers, witches, curses — rather than one tale in particular, Kingfisher subverts well-known tropes, weaving them into new forms. (Sometimes there’s literal weaving into new forms, as when Marra creates a bone-dog companion.) Kingfisher has a knack for compellingly practical heroines (see also: “Thornhedge”) and a rich ear for humor; this won’t be too cozy and it won’t be too grim. It’ll be smart, bighearted and just right.
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‘Katabasis’ by R.F. Kuang (2025)
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(Harper Voyager)
“Katabasis” means a descent to the underworld. But when your protagonist is an ambitious student of Magick, you can’t just say “descent to the underworld.” You have to use the more esoteric term. Alice Law has done everything in her power to study with Jacob Grimes, a great magician and Cambridge professor. When he dies, and goes to hell, and it’s maybe her fault, things go a little haywire. But the important thing is that if Alice and her colleague Peter find him, maybe he’ll still write them letters of recommendation. Like Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” and Leigh Bardugo’s “Ninth House,” “Katabasis” is the latest in a grand tradition of novels exploring questionable academic choices.
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‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)
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(Penguin Classics)
I’ve been reading Le Guin since I was 9 years old; it is no stretch to say there is something in her oeuvre for every reader. Her children’s book series “Catwings” is delightful. An adult reader might begin by diving into “The Left Hand of Darkness,” her Hugo Award-winning novel in which a human envoy lands on a planet where gender is not fixed. Challenging, elegant and imperfect — in essays, Le Guin later revisited her own work and her approach to gender — “Left Hand” is a quintessential book group pick. It opens doors to rich discussions about love, alienness, politics and more. I have friends whose book group is reading this as I type.
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‘Severance’ by Ling Ma (2018)
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(Picador)
Author Ling Ma couldn’t have known what was to come when releasing her debut novel, “Severance,” about a woman in New York City surviving a deadly pandemic from China. That was 2018; “Severance” soon found its audience. In the novel — fiction, after all — victims of the disease become zombified and repeat the motions of menial tasks as their bodies waste away. Our hero, Candace, makes the best of this bad situation by embedding herself at her office in exchange for sizable hazard pay. Later, she joins a ragtag band of survivors through the Midwest in search of a promised safe haven. More than just a satire on late-stage capitalism, “Severance” weaves in aspects of the American immigrant experience and enough chilling sequences to keep the pages turning.
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‘A Court of Thorns and Roses’ by Sarah J. Maas (2020)
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(Bloomsbury)
If you’ve scrolled through BookTok in recent months, you’ve likely come across “A Court of Thorns and Roses” — actually, anyone with a pulse has likely heard of this bestselling novel. It’s become a juggernaut of the fantasy genre, leading to something of a renaissance in the mystical smut novel genre. Last year, I went to a bachelorette party where women were skipping out on weekend high jinks to blow through the page-turners in the series. The sex scenes will make even the most well-versed romance readers blush with passionate affairs involving fairies. The book scratches an itch for fans of “Games of Thrones” who are looking for fantasy with a risqué edge. It’s the first in a series of five novels, with a sixth confirmed by author Sarah J. Maas, so it’s OK to get addicted.
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‘The Hobbit’ by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)
Fantasy Buy Borrow
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(William Morrow Paperbacks)
“The Hobbit” is the bran muffin of fantasy novels. It’s dense, heavy and takes a while to chew.
But unlike the breakfast brick of dubious nutritional value, Tolkien’s adventure tale is actually good for you. Because it was published in 1937, before blockbuster movies and merchandising deals, it has a slower pace, and Tolkien was fond of addressing his readers directly. The richness of the lore not only makes for great book club discussion but prepares the reader for “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and, if you’re one of the chosen ones, a lifetime of engaging with complex narratives.
But unlike the breakfast brick of dubious nutritional value, Tolkien’s adventure tale is actually good for you. Because it was published in 1937, before blockbuster movies and merchandising deals, it has a slower pace, and Tolkien was fond of addressing his readers directly. The richness of the lore not only makes for great book club discussion but prepares the reader for “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and, if you’re one of the chosen ones, a lifetime of engaging with complex narratives.
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‘Fourth Wing’ by Rebecca Yarros (2023)
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(Entangled / Red Tower Books)
This last fall, Rebecca Yarros appeared at my local book festival, and you could tell — not just because her books were everywhere, but because every third person had a Basgiath War College sweatshirt or a tote bag with dragons, or their hair in elaborate braids. To know exactly what all those things mean, one simply has to read “Fourth Wing.” Yarros’ massive bestseller, BookTok sensation and future TV series is about a girl who becomes an unlikely dragon rider. There’s war college drama, dragon bonding, fraught politics, an enemies-to-lovers romance — everything you want in a romantasy smash hit.
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‘Parable of the Sower’ by Octavia E. Butler (1993)
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(Grand Central)
The future Octavia E. Butler foretold is here. Published in 1993, “Parable of the Sower” is set in a dystopian 2024. Now that we have lived through it, it is clear the novelist predicted our times with unsettling accuracy. The speculative novel follows a teenage girl, Lauren Olamina, as she traverses the apocalypse. (Picture the spunk and fearlessness of Olympic gold medalist Alysa Liu that captured the world’s heart, this time in a barren postapocalypse.) It is easy to imagine her in the present, protesting ICE raids and advocating for her community, which may be why Butler’s novel received the top votes from our survey. Check out here why it’s our Ultimate Book Club Pick.
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