The Best Read With Jenna Book Club Pick Of All Time, According To Readers

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All bibliophiles know the tragic conundrum: so many books, so little time. Fortunately, recommendations from other readers can help prioritize our to-read lists. For instance, TV personality and "Today with Jenna & Friends" host Jenna Bush Hager runs a monthly book club stacked with fan-favorite titles. She's hardly the first celeb to launch a reading group — Reese Witherspoon's is a known powerhouse, and even former "iCarly" star Jennette McCurdy has a book club now — but "Reading with Jenna" has carved out its own niche with a series of well-curated suggestions.

It should probably come as no surprise that Bush Hager is a voracious reader. She is, after all, the daughter of former librarian (and first lady) Laura Bush. "I love reading for so many reasons. It really is my escape from everyday life. It's how I calm down. It's how I detach. It's how I fall in love with other places that I will never go to. It's how I empathize with characters who are nothing like me. There's nothing like falling in love with a book," Bush Hager told Today in 2023. And it seems like Bush Hager may have good taste in reading materials. Her book group has been a big success, with the club's official Instagram account boasting more than 330,000 followers.

If you're late to the Read with Jenna party, though, where should you begin? Running since 2019, the club has so far selected more than 75 books worth diving into, and with new titles added every month, that list could keep some of us busy for years. To help narrow things down, Glam scoped out reader reviews and came to this conclusion: If you only ever pick up one title from Bush Hager's recommended list, it should be "Devotions" by poet Mary Oliver.

With all of the incredible novels in the Reading with Jenna catalog, it may seem surprising that the book club's top title is actually a poetry collection. However, Jenna Bush Hager is a long-time fan of the medium. "When I'm unsure of the world there are a few things I can do: I can go outside and be in nature. I can lean into my faith. Or something else really therapeutic is reading poetry. I am constantly sending poems to friends and family that describe how I'm feeling on certain days," the host told Today.

Mary Oliver has been a long-time favorite, even before Bush Hager tapped "Devotions" as her book-club selection for December 2024. "I find her poetry to be so cathartic and beautiful," she added to Today. "It's about nature and love and what it means to be human." Based on the collection's many rave reviews on Goodreads, where the book has a 4.57-star rating, other book lovers agree. "An absolute icon of modern poetry," wrote one user. "It's like the sky opening up and all of the cosmos raining down into my heart. ... Those looking for an in-depth and expansive look at [Oliver's] works should certainly turn to 'Devotions.'"

While Oliver penned many poetry collections — earning accolades like the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award — "Devotions" is among her most special. Not only was it Oliver's last collection before she passed in 2019, but the career-spanning retrospective was also selected by the poet herself. Most importantly, it's a book club pick that could speak to almost any reader. As Oliver described poetry on the "On Being with Krista Tippett" podcast in 2015, "It's very sacred. It wishes for a community — it's a community ritual, certainly. And that's why, when you write a poem, you write it for anybody and everybody."

Is there anything more subjective than someone's taste in literature? (Case in point, Aubrey Plaza's favorite books certainly fit her weird-girl vibes.) Calling one book "the best" is always going to spark debate, and the Read with Jenna book club offers up a lot of incredible tomes to choose between, from historical novels and brain-twisting mysteries to poetry collections. So, when it came to selecting a winner from this exalted collection, we had to rely on cold, hard numbers — namely, the books' Goodreads ratings.

A lot of Jenna Bush Hager's favorite reads are high-scorers on the literary review site, but "Devotions" leads the pack with its aspirational average of 4.57 stars from nearly 25,000 reviews. In fact, almost 17,000 readers — 67% of all reviewers — gave Mary Oliver's poetry collection a perfect 5-star rating. That certainly sets a high bar for Bush Hager's other selections.

For the record, though, a few other books were close on its heels. If you want a few more reads to sink your teeth into, take note: At the time of writing, the second-highest-rated book from the Read with Jenna book club is "Solito" by Javier Zamora, with its 4.48-star average on Goodreads, while "How to Say Babylon" by Safiya Sinclair sits in third place with a 4.44-star average. Now, for more good pages to escape into, here are a few underrated Kindle books you need to read.