Reese's Book Club: Statistics and Supplementary Information on the First 100 Selections

We have compiled a spreadsheet of all of Reese's Book Club's picks from 2017 to September 2024, adding a wealth of additional and adjacent information, drawn from publicly available sources.

The spreadsheet records the following categories: author details (name, gender, race); bibliographical details (title, genre, imprint, publisher, publication month/year); reception and adaptation details (awards; book club picks; existing film/TV adaptation or optioned/rights acquired/in development; involved production companies). For the complex category "race," we adapted the methodology and categorization proposed by Richard Jean So in his study Redlining Culture, using either self-identification (author websites, social media, interviews etc.) or explicit references to self-identification in news articles or scholarly publications; we broke down So's category "people of color" to differentiate the numbers for Asian American and Hispanic/Latino authors, following US census designations.

We recommend that you use this data in conjunction with the research essay "Genre, Diversity, and Metanarrative in Reese Witherspoon's Book Club" (Starre/Norrick-Rühl), forthcoming in the journal Contemporary Literature.

References
So, Richard Jean. Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction. Columbia University Press, 2021.