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.
At one end is the monetized machine — Winfrey, or Jenna Hager’s Read With Jenna club and the growing production apparatus around them. Danielle Robay, host and an executive producer of the podcast Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club, says programs like Reese Witherspoon’s “made reading a team sport,” rather than a solo endeavor. “I used to sit on my couch with my book and read alone, and now there are hundreds of thousands of women who are connected to the same story,” she says. “The community aspect is completely globalized.”
In addition to sometimes chiming in on her company’s public WhatsApp group, which is so large and organized that it has local “ambassadors,” Robay regularly messages with an avid listener in London about her podcast interviews. They’ve never met in person.
At the other end are small, private clubs — some of them quite specific. A group run by jeweler Alissa Matkovich sometimes feels like a party; fittingly, it’s called Unhinged. Selina Ringel, a member who’s a filmmaker and author, described sex toys on the table at the meeting where the club discussed All Fours, Miranda July’s midlife sexual-awakening novel. There was grated Parmesan in small baggies to pair with the conversation on Lara Love Hardin’s opioid memoir The Many Lives of Mama Love and members dressing as 1950s housewives to read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s period horror novel Mexican Gothic. With all these distractions, it’s understandable that they have enlisted Rabin as a facilitator to keep the discussion on track.
A Reason to Show Up
What keeps the book clubs going varies as much as what they read. Rabin also facilitates a club whose members are women ranging in age from their late 50s to early 80s who have been meeting for around 40 years. Samantha Dockser and Morgan Messing run The Preoccupied, an author meet-and-greet that doubles as a group walk through Santa Monica and has drawn as many as 100 people. Reality-TV producer Nicolle Yaron mines multiple text chains for books to mention in Extremely Helpful, her pop-culture focused Substack. Author Jennifer Wright hosts one in her living room whose members include journalist and filmmaker Mary Pilon, actress Mara Wilson and Ponies co-creator David Iserson.
Wright says she considers book clubs to be an antidote to an AI-powered future where “you’ll never think deeply or be challenged or connect with another person.”
They also fill the current public need to be more politically and socially conscious. Alice Calamar, VP of creative production management at HBO Max, recently formed a book club with a group of her Laurel Canyon neighbors. The Hill Readers, as the club is known, represents Calamar’s first foray into the idea after bailing on one 20 years ago that was started by her then-colleagues at Los Angeles magazine. Foamers, a book club founded by former SpaceX engineer Brian Aggrey, is nominally for train enthusiasts but also runs on grievances about L.A.’s car dependency (the name reclaims a derogatory term for the kind of people who supposedly foam at the mouth when a train rolls by). Picks have ranged from urban-planning manuals the members had to bind themselves to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Jews Read Books! — founded in 2025 by writer/producer Keetgi Kogan Steinberg, author Stefanie Leder and literary manager Elizabeth Newman — arose from a conversation about the rise in antisemitic attacks after Oct. 7. It’s now a mix of about 10 people, Jews and non-Jews, and titles have included Sarah Hurwitz’s part-memoir, part-history lesson As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us and Rachel Kadish’s novel The Weight of Ink.
“We like to pick books that have elements of Jewish joy — not just Holocaust and trauma, although we read some of that too,” says Kogan Steinberg.
Scouting in Plain Sight
Even people who read all day for a living still want the camaraderie of talking about what they’re reading. Addy Perlman — who in April launched Stonewood Media, an IP-focused production company with an emphasis on working with first-time authors — belongs to a club called The Club Book, a mix of assistants, executives and writers where, she insists, the Hollywood hierarchy dissolves. “No one shows up to talk about work or pitch things to each other,” she says. “It’s really like, ‘we want to be friends, and, if it happens, that’s an added bonus.’”
But Kogan Steinberg and her group members admit that, because so many of them work in the industry, there’s inevitable discussion of things like a book’s adaptability. For people whose job success depends so heavily on finding source material, the reading can’t help but have an impact on the work.
“Since everything is IP adaptation these days, our book club gives me a window into what’s selling and what folks are reading beyond what my agents are sending me,” says screenwriter Dara Resnik, part of an unnamed club that has run for 19 years and also includes writers Gina Fattore, Dana Greenblatt and Jennifer Robinson. The group has read Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and Kemper Donovan’s romcom The Decent Proposal.
The reading can double as prospecting. “Some of our classic picks have had me thinking about how they could be updated as public-domain IP,” Resnik says. “And some new fiction has had me calling my agent to check availability. When it’s not available, I try to find out where it’s set up so I can take a meeting on it.”
Grace says Kloob’s film-industry membership pushes conversation past discussions about casting. “Sometimes we can see these books so clearly in moving picture form” that they spin up theoretical projects on the spot, he says. “I’ll storyboard it, you can write the screenplay, you can produce it.”
And a club can function as a straightforward networking floor: Chicago Med showrunners’ assistant Dylan Johnson says members of his book club of sci-fi loving gay writers are working to get his resume to Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions, which is developing a TV adaptation of a series Johnson is passionate about, Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, for NBCU’s Peacock. The club also gave encouragement to member Bayan Wolcott when he was preparing to pitch his TV adaptation of the Animorphs sci-fi book series (and were some of the first to know when it was a go at Disney+).
That professionalization is, increasingly, a business of its own. Rabin’s It’s Lit Books exists because enough people want the chatty-but-educational book-club experience of something like Witherspoon’s program but on an intimate scale.
Jordan Moblo — EVP of creative acquisitions and IP management at Universal Studio Group, and better known in some circles for his Jordy’s Book Club on Substack, Instagram and Threads — sits on both sides of that line. He optioned Dungeon Crawler Carl three years ago, when it was a self-published audiobook with a cult following; once it broke through, Universal fed development news to the trades and shared sales figures with buyers to build its value. More recently, he says, there was a bidding war for Theo of Golden. Allen Levi’s self-published novel took off through places like book clubs before Simon & Schuster picked it up and, this month, it landed atop Barnes & Noble’s best-seller list.
Could someone really stumble on an obscure title in a book club and find the rights conveniently unclaimed? It happens, Moblo says — but rarely. By the time a new book surfaces, studios are usually weighing it for adaptation in the same window publishers are weighing it for their slates. What buzz and word of mouth give him, he says, is a faster read on which under-the-radar titles are worth chasing — not a shortcut to rights no one else has spotted.
Which is how, just that morning, he’d caught wind of an obscure French sci-fi novel — I Who Have Never Known Men — and instructed his team to look into the rights.
Kloob could have told him about that one weeks ago.
