What Are Celebrity Book Clubs For?
Dua Lipa is a star. She’s won three Grammys, scored four number one hits in the UK, and recorded the 11th most popular album of all time on Spotify. And in recent years, she’s become one of the most influential players in modern publishing. Through her Service95 Book Club, she recommends titles, interviews authors, and shapes the literary landscape.
Dua has taste. This July, she told her Service95 followers to read Lea Ypi’s Free, a memoir about coming of age under communist Albania. Ten months earlier, her pick was Percival Everett’s The Trees, published in 2021 by Graywolf. These aren’t your average beach read— they’re serious, prize-caliber literary books, chosen by a singer with nearly 90 million followers and delivered with the confident and casual voice of someone recommending a favorite book to a friend.
Book clubs like Dua’s, Oprah’s, or Reese Witherspoon’s are good for the publishing industry, mostly because they sell books. Sales of Hanya Yanaghira’s A Little Life (2015) quadrupled when Dua recommended it in 2020, for example. It’s even better when, like Dua, celebs recommend quality books. But are they actually “book clubs,” or just a very convincing performance of one?
In Reading Together (2025), author Katarzyna Bartoszyńska offers a definition worth measuring celebrity book clubs against. She describes a book club as “the rare space where people come together to discuss shared readings in a totally voluntary way, driven by a desire for community and shared learning.” What makes it distinct from the classroom, in her account, is not the absence of expertise but the absence of hierarchy. A book club’s message is not delivered by an authority figure but rather produced collaboratively through shared dialogue and interpretation. According to Bartoszyńska, the value of reading is, of course, in the text, but its potential for developing social and emotional relationships is too often overlooked. Do celebrity book clubs deliver on that potential?
Celebrity book clubs appear to get a lot right. At their best, they have advanced visibility and opportunities for women in literature and entertainment. Women in Hollywood have historically been granted fewer routes into public authority than men, and book clubs offer one way to convert visibility into intellectual legitimacy. Hosting a book club allows women celebrities to become curators, critics, and cultural gatekeepers — roles that are not only more serious than the usual assumptions about celebrity femininity, but also more politically meaningful in a media landscape still dominated by male prestige. The clubs often amplify women authors and women-centered stories, helping move so-called “women’s fiction” and genre books toward respectability.
But if you take a closer look at how these clubs actually operated, the resemblance to Bartoszyńska’s model starts to crumble.
The first crack lies in hierarchy, the thing that Bartoszyńska says defines a book club by its absence. Readers gather around a celebrity’s brand and interests, and a celebrity book club is built around a singular interpretive authority whose endorsement confers meaning, value, and attention. The community is vertical rather than the horizontal model Bartoszyńska describes.
The “Oprah effect” is really just a demand shock triggered by one person’s word. Witherspoon’s club makes the hierarchy especially explicit by producing a commercial pipeline. Her media company, Hello Sunshine, has adapted several of her book club picks into film, including Little Fires Everywhere, in which she starred,and Where the Crawdads Sing, in which she served as executive producer. Reading, in this structure, is not collaborative or meaningful because it funnels readers toward a product in which Witherspoon already has a stake. The book club can and has converted attention into clicks, sales, and screen adaptations, but it has reduced reading to another form of celebrity-driven consumption. Bartoszyńska shows how book clubs can produce new kinds of knowledge. Celebrity book clubs show how easily that knowledge can be monetized.
“Humility is supposed to be a byproduct of shared vulnerability among equals, not a branding choice. ”
Beyond commercial influence, celebrity book clubs also raise questions about whether reading itself becomes a performance for cultural sophistication. Bartoszyńska describes herself as “the tourist” in a book club, someone who arrives uncertain and lacks “a need to show off how much they know.” Celebrity book clubs have learned to mimic this humility: the casual caption, the candid paparazzi shot of Kendall Jenner or Kaia Gerber with a “serious” novel, the sense of a celebrity reading just for herself. But this performance falters because humility is supposed to be a byproduct of shared vulnerability among equals, not a branding choice.
Celebrity book clubs can borrow the vocabulary of communal reading: vulnerability, curiosity, not needing to be the expert in the room. But it will never reproduce the conditions that make a real book club. Bartoszyńska shows that book clubs work best when no one enters trying to dominate the conversation or extract something from it. The value of the book club depends on the possibility of being changed by others. Celebrity book clubs, by contrast, are built by definition around one person’s authority, and increasingly around adaptation deals, brand partnerships, and sales spikes. Of course, genuine reading communities can and do form in their orbit, whether it’s readers talking to each other in the comments section, in Goodreads threads, or at their own kitchen tables, but this is despite the celebrity structure, not because of it.
Don’t get me wrong — celebrity book clubs aren’t a bad thing. With reading rates in decline, anything that sells books and gets people reading is a net positive. But it’s not a substitute for what Bartoszyńska describes: a round table, a bottle of wine, and the great risk of being changed by people who have zero stake in your image.