Whitney Friedlander is based in L.A. and writes about entertainment and culture. She wrote most recently for The Ankler about Hollywood’s panic over Gen Z TV.
The Ankler started summer by asking 100 notables for reading recommendations — leading to a list as lively and varied as the big names who contributed. Ankler deputy editor Christopher Rosen continued our series with a brave confession: Like many American men, he hasn’t finished a book in decades. Last week, Megan Vick revealed what BookTok trends can tell us about the small-screen romances we’ll be watching a year or more from now.
Today we wrap up our summer reading series with a tour of L.A. book clubs: who uses them to escape the Hollywood grind, who uses them to hunt for source material — and who just thinks books are a great excuse to connect with likeminded readers.
There’s a waitlist to get in. It only happens once a month. The location keeps changing. Entry also requires taking a monthly online survey and around 300 pages of reading.
Meet Bük Kloob: a gathering more exclusive than any fashionable nightclub, though one that won’t kick anybody out for showing up in sneakers.
Founded over a decade ago, it’s a monthly hang for about 20 dedicated Los Angeles bibliophiles who got together to meet new people, maybe have a drink or two and read something simply because everyone was interested in it. It is now co-run by Trish Smyth, a Pilates instructor, and Sina Grace, a graphic novelist who prefers to call it simply “Kloob” because he lost patience with finding the umlaut key. Kloob’s members include Lindsay Miller, who works in editorial at Apple TV, and production designer/art director Monica Sotto. Grace created an offshoot, Easy Street Book Club, for readers the Kloob can’t accommodate.
Kloob’s monthly reads have ranged from Françoise Sagan’s coming-of-age classic Bonjour Tristesse to J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, about fetishists whose kink is staging and participating in car accidents. That meeting was hosted by filmmaker Jessica Guerra, who set up fake body parts around her house and included menu items like a cheese board with olives as eyeballs and flesh-like pink pineapple. Inevitably, Grace says, the membership will include “the one straight guy who really just wants to read Russian literature” — which he says he’s fine with, since it’s how he came to read Mikhail Bulgakov’s supernatural-tinged satire The Master and Margarita.
Kloob meetings usually start with a half-hour of chit-chat. Then there’s an icebreaker question about the book that everyone answers before a largely unstructured discussion gets rolling. Meetings usually last about 90 minutes. The only real way to get banned from Kloob is to miss three meetings in a row.
Afterward, Grace sends out a SurveyMonkey poll where members vote on the next book. He says members will read current literature that’s popping on BookTok or that they know was fed to them by an algorithm. Sure, the online book world can feel like an echo chamber, but it’s not all bad. Grace says BookTok inspired Kloob to read Jacqueline Harpman’s 1995 feminist sci-fi novel I Who Have Never Known Men.
Kloob is far from unique. Across Los Angeles, book clubs are becoming something more than an incentive to finish a novel. They are dinner parties, social networks and increasingly coveted invitations — intimate, offline refuges from lives organized by algorithms, screens and AI.
Big Machine, Small Rooms
Book clubs, per se, are nothing new. In a 2021 piece for The Washington Post, journalist and researcher Jess McHugh chronicled the centuries-long history of female-focused “reading circles” as not just gathering places for literary discussion but for political and social progressions. Oprah’s Book Club, which Oprah Winfrey launched on her daytime talk show in 1996, has lasted through various iterations for 30 years. Celebrities like Dua Lipa, Natalie Portman and Kaia Gerber are the faces of public clubs that double as year-round engagement plays, or extensions of their lifestyle brands, and online personalities like BookToker Jack Edwards now run their own podcasts and clubs. What’s changed is the volume.
“The desire for book clubs has really grown significantly, especially in the last, like, four to five years,” says Nikki Rabin, whose job is, more or less literally, book club. A PhD in English literature, she runs It’s Lit Books, a Los Angeles service that facilitates private clubs by keeping members current on new titles and drafting discussion questions to keep everyone on track. She works with nine clubs full time, in addition to facilitating other activities, and charges a flat fee per discussion.
Rabin has never been a book-club member herself. But they endure, she says, because they’re “a way for you to have something with a group of your friends that’s not just talking about your kids or talking about everyday things.”
The clubs themselves run a wide spectrum: invitation-only circles of studio and streaming executives, showrunners, writers, filmmakers and actors; theme nights involving sex toys and costumes; author walks that draw 100 people through Santa Monica; and deeply specific groups organized around Jewish identity, or a shared obsession with science fiction. Some members come to escape Hollywood. Others inevitably end up scouting its next adaptation.
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