Noticed a shift in book club picks over the last 5 years

I have been in the same book club in Portland for about 7 years now. Back in 2019 we mostly picked bestsellers or literary fiction. Sometime around 2021 that flipped hard toward nonfiction. Now the last 4 picks have been self help books or memoirs. I think people got tired of made up stories during lockdown and never switched back. Has anyone else seen their club drift away from fiction like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_tara15d ago

oh my friend jenna had the exact same thing happen in her portland book club, lol. they used to do all those buzzy fiction picks like the martian and gone girl and then during lockdown they switched to nothing but memoirs about people surviving weird cults and that one book about how to organize your closet better. last i heard they were reading atomic habits and someone actually cried because they missed reading just a simple novel about like a dog or whatever. i guess we all just wanted to fix our lives instead of escaping them for a bit there haha.

the_robin15d ago

Maybe people just need to chill and read a dumb book sometimes.