Celebrity Book Club Picks for September 2021

Hi everyone!  Today I’m starting a new monthly feature on my blog that highlights the Celebrity Book Club Picks for the month.  These book clubs are 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!

So without further adieu, let me introduce you to four book clubs and reveal their picks for September 2021.

Good Morning America’s Book Club (GMA)

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 Calvin Kasulke’s “Several People Are Typing” as their September 2021 pick.

The Publisher’s Notes:

Told entirely through clever and captivating Slack messages, this irresistible, relatable satire of both virtual work and contemporary life is The Office for a new world. Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York–based public relations firm has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels—at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from-home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from . . . wherever he says he is.
Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his co-worker Pradeep to help him escape and to find out what happened to his body. But the longer Gerald stays in the void, the more alluring and absurd his reality becomes…

Published: August 31, 2021, by Doubleday Books, 256 pages.

You can read more about this book on GMA 

Add Several People Are Typing to your Goodreads shelf

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.  The book club chose “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers as their September 2021 selection.

The Publisher’s Notes:

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well…
Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.
To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story—and the song—of America itself.

Published August 24, 2021, by Harper, 816 pages.

Add The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois to your Goodreads shelf

Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club (Hello Sunshine)

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”. For September 2021, the book club chose “L.A. Weather” by Maria Escandon.

The Publisher’s Notes:

L.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He’s harbouring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughters—Claudia, a television chef with a hard-hearted attitude; Olivia, a successful architect who suffers from gentrification guilt; and Patricia, a social media wizard who has an uncanny knack for connecting with audiences but not with her lovers—are blindsided and left questioning everything they know. Each will have to take a critical look at her own relationships and make some tough decisions along the way.
With quick wit and humour, Maria Amparo Escandón follows the Alvarado family as they wrestle with impending evacuations, secrets, deception, and betrayal, and their toughest decision yet: whether to stick together or burn it all down.

Published: September 7, 2021, by Flatiron Books, 336 pages

Add L.A.Weather to your Goodreads shelf

Read With Jenna (Jenna Bush Hager)

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.  Her September 2021 pick is “Beautiful Country: A Memoir” by Qian Julie Wang.

The Publisher’s Notes:

In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to “beautiful country.” Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian’s parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive.
In Chinatown, Qian’s parents labour in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is a delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly “shopping days,” when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn’s streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center—confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all.
But then Qian’s headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor’s visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you’ve always lived here.

Published: September 7, 2021, by Doubleday Books, 320 pages

You can read more about this book Here

Add Beautiful Country: A Memoir to your Goodreads Shelf

So that’s what Celebrity Book Clubs are reading in September 2021.  Do any of these books appeal to you?  Will your book club be selecting any of these books? Let me know in the comments.  As for me, you may just find me reviewing 1 or 2 of these books soon.

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