Are you wondering what your favourite Celebrity Book Club is reading this month? Do you enjoy book communities as a way to read along with others? If so, each of these celebrity book clubs is internet-based and open to all who follow. So if you’re like me and always on the lookout for the next great read, you will now find these picks all in one spot – That Happy Reader’s blog! Without further adieu, let me introduce you to Celebrity Book Club Picks for March 2023. Click on the book’s cover to add to your Goodreads shelf!
Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club (Hello Sunshine)’s pick for March 2023:
Founded in 2017, Hello Sunshine always chooses books with women at the centre of the story. Their website notes “We make our choices thoughtfully and look for ways to deepen our connection to books, authors and ourselves”. This book club chose “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah as their March 2023 pick.
From The Publisher:
In love we find out who we want to be.
In war we find out who we are.
FRANCE, 1939
In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says good-bye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France…but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.
Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gaëtan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can…completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.
Good Morning America’s Book Club’s pick:
The GMA Book Club is officially called “Cover to Cover” and was started in the Fall of 2019. Their selections highlight diversity and books are chosen from both fiction and non-fiction genres. The book club chose “Pineapple Street” by Jenny Jackson as their March 2023 pick.
From The Publisher:
Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected, carefully guarded, old-money Stockton family, followed her heart, trading her job and inheritance for motherhood, sacrificing more of herself than she ever intended. Sasha, middle-class and from New England, has married into the Brooklyn Heights family and finds herself cast as the arriviste outsider, wondering how she might ever understand their WASP-y ways. Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t (and really shouldn’t) have and must confront the kind of person she wants to be.
Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one-percenters, Pineapple Street is a smart escapist novel that sparkles with wit. It’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots and everything in between, and the insanity of first love.
Read With Jenna (Jenna Bush Hager)’s pick:
Starting in March 2019, the former First Daughter announced her book club on the Today show. Each month she chooses a book that is sure to generate discussion. Jenna chose “Black Candle Women” by Diane Marie Brown as her March 2023 selection.
From The Publisher:
Generations of Montrose women—Augusta, Victoria, Willow—have lived together in their quaint two-story bungalow in California for years. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between them.
But when seventeen-year-old Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, their quiet lives are thrown into disarray. For the other women have been withholding a secret from Nickie that will end her relationship before it’s even begun: the decades-old family curse that any person they fall in love with dies.
For each member of the household, revealing this truth to Nickie also means reckoning with their own past choices and mistakes. And as new questions about long-held family beliefs emerge, the women are set on a collision course dating back to a voodoo shop in 1950s New Orleans’s French Quarter—where a hidden story in a mysterious book may just hold the answers they seek in life and in love…
Oprah’s Book Club:
Oprah Winfrey started this book club in 1996 as a segment on her TV show. Many obscure titles have risen to bestseller status as a result of her picks. Her latest pick is “Bittersweet” by Susan Cain.
From The Publisher:
In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon Quiet reveals the power of a bittersweet outlook on life, and why we’ve been so blind to its value.
With Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality, and love.
Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. A song in a minor key, an elegiac poem, or even a touching television commercial all can bring us to this sublime, even holy, state of mind—and, ultimately, to greater kinship with our fellow humans.
But bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a way of being, a storied heritage. Our artistic and spiritual traditions—amplified by recent scientific and management research—teach us its power.
Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain. If we don’t acknowledge our own sorrows and longings, she says, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other. And we can learn to transform our own pain into creativity, transcendence, and connection.
At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.
That’s the Celebrity Book Club Picks for March 2023. Do any of these books appeal to you? Will your book club be selecting any of these books? Let me know in the comments. I hope you have an amazing day!
Amanda Kay Oaks-Christman
Really interesting varitey of picks this month!
thathappyreader
I think so too Amanda!
Emma @ Words And Peace
This is a fun idea of post!
I have heard a lot about the first one, but refrained from reading it: I’m French and have studied WWII so many years at school. Plus have read so so many novels on it, that I need to rest from this for a while.
But it’s supposed to be very good indeed
thathappyreader
Thanks Emma. I can certainly understand your need to take a rest from the subject.
Her Digital Coffee
It’s always lovely seeing these monthly book club picks. I have Pineapple Street on my list and I’m excited to read it. It’s nice to see Oprah has a pick this month too. Thanks for sharing Jodie!
thathappyreader
I’ll be reading Pineapple Street too! I hope that we both enjoy it.
Wendy
I just finished reading The Nightingale last month. It was excellent and very powerful. I like the look of BitterSweet
thathappyreader
The Bittersweet looks good to me as well Wendy. I will likely wait until The Nightingale film version comes out as my position on the library hold is months long.
I'm All Booked Up
We enjoy seeing the book club picks! We’re going o have to check them out.
thathappyreader
I hope that you find something you’d like to read!
GWT
These books spark interest. Though bittersweet garners the most of it.
thathappyreader
I hope that you enjoy it GWT!
Lanae Bond
I think all of your picks are intriguing. I think out of all of the books, I would love to read. With all of the mystery, tragedy, and family secrets, I think it hold my interest.
thathappyreader
Thanks for reading Lanae.
Christina Four Tickets
Great picks! Always looking for new reads!
thathappyreader
Thanks for reading Christina!
Raji
Some interesting picks this month! I’ve been meaning to read The Nightingale for a while, hopefully I can get to it this year. Thanks for sharing!
thathappyreader
Thanks for reading Raji!
Carla
Thanks for sharing these, Jody. Very interesting choices this month
thathappyreader
Thanks for reading Carla.
Sarah Collins
I like the sound of a lot of these, really good variation here. Thanks for sharing
thathappyreader
Thanks for reading Sarah!
Lisa Mandina (Lisa Loves Literature)
I don’t really pay a lot of attention to these types of picks, other than maybe a few of Reese Witherspoon’s. But the Black Candle Women book looks good. Thanks for sharing!
thathappyreader
Thanks for reading Lisa!