The Best Reese's Book Club Pick Of All Time, According To Readers

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With the advent of self-publishing, it seems like the literary market — and our to-read list — is more flooded than ever. Thank goodness we have a few well-read celebrities to guide us toward titles worth prioritizing. Oprah has been a long-standing pillar of book recommendations, of course, and Jennette McCurdy has book club now, too. But for our money, one of the best sources for reading inspo is the extensive list from A-lister Reese Witherspoon's monthly book club.

Reese's Book Club started in 2017 with a mission of elevating the "Big Little Lies" actor's favorite women-centric narratives. As Witherspoon explained to The New York Times in 2024, she was fed up with stories that cast women in the role of damsel in distress. ​​"You'd be shocked by how many books have women chained in basements. ... I know it happens in the world. I don't want to read a book about it." Rather, she has a few rules for her monthly picks: They need to have female authors, strong female leads, and a core of positivity, even if the overall vibe is bittersweet. "It needs to be optimistic," Witherspoon said. "It needs to be shareable. Do you close this book and say, 'I know exactly who I want to give it to?'"

It seems this standard has resonated with Witherspoon's audience. Years later, the group is still going strong and has collected nearly 100 titles in its catalog, offering a treasure trove of reading inspo. But where to begin? While there are plenty of worthwhile books in Witherspoon's hoard, one seems to stand above the rest: "The Nightingale" by Kristin Hannah.

Reese's Book Club covers a lot of ground, from contemporary fiction to memoirs. But its most well-received book to date at the time of writing is an award-winning historical novel set in France during World War II. "The Nightingale" by Kristin Hannah follows two sisters navigating the conflict in separate ways — one sister trying to raise and protect her child while her husband is away on the front lines, and the other a resistance spy trying to fight the Nazis on her own terms. "It's an often untold story of a woman's experience of war and the struggle to survive," Reese Witherspoon explained in a March 2023 Instagram post announcing the pick. "We get to see the beauty of the sisterhood between these two women, the resilience they have, and there's also a love story in there, too."

Hannah's work often focuses on similar themes — her wildly popular historical fiction book "The Women" blew up Kindle charts with its female perspective on the Vietnam War. But it seems that many readers were particularly moved by "The Nightingale" and its heartbreaking exploration of love, loss, and sisterhood. "Even just thinking about it now, I am fighting back tears because this was such a beautiful and vivid story," wrote one reviewer on Goodreads, where the novel has 4.64 stars. "The women in particular, the sisters, were absolutely inspirational. They showed incredible strength in this terrible time and I loved seeing how women contributed to the war. This was just a story that really resonated with me. It has a special place in my heart."

"Legally Blonde" star Reese Witherspoon seems to have a golden touch when it comes to selecting satisfying reads, so it'd be hard to go wrong with any title from her book club. But when it came to narrowing down the best of the best, Glam had one clear metric to judge by: the books' reader ratings on Goodreads. From the get-go, "The Nightingale" was one of the most popular Reese Book Club picks, and it's shown staying power amidst her other picks with its unbeaten Goodreads score of 4.64 stars — an average taken from a mind-boggling total of nearly 1.8 million ratings. Moreover, 72% of readers — that's more than 1.3 million people — even gave "The Nightingale" the full five stars, cementing its place in literary history.

Of course, many other books on Witherspoon's list have also broken the aspirational threshold of a 4-star average. So, after you've read "The Nightingale," you may want to check out the next-best titles from Reese's Book Club. In second place, recent entrant "Broken Country" by Clare Leslie Hall has earned a 4.43-star rating from readers. Meanwhile, third place is a tie between two books that currently share a 4.38-star average: the fan-favorite novel "Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens and the non-fiction title "I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness" by Austin Channing Brown.