The Book Genre That Pops Up In The Read With Jenna Book Club The Most
By now, Jenna Bush Hager's Read With Jenna book club has settled into its role as one of publishing's most powerful forces. Beginning as a breezy "TODAY" show segment, the club has grown into a literary bellwether. The signature purple sticker affixed to a paperback all but guarantees a bump in sales.
That Jenna Bush Hager should blossom into a national book tastemaker perhaps shouldn't surprise us. Her mother, Laura Bush, championed literacy throughout her time as first lady, launching reading initiatives and helping usher in the era of large-scale book festivals. Jenna's Book Club — and now the accompanying festival, which had its inaugural meeting in May 2025 — feels like a continuation of that. Bush Hager casts her net wide: readers love the range of her book club picks, as she brings to the forefront both hidden gems and some of the most talked about books of the moment.
But there's one particular genre that floats to the top of Bush Hager's reading list time and time again: literary fiction. This, admittedly, is a slippery term that encompasses a lot. But generally, these are novels that are character-driven, stylistically measured, and emotionally taut. So, what does that tell us about the stories that speak to Jenna and the millions of readers she brings along each month? Maybe what our collective appetite is craving now is resonance — to see ourselves reflected in all our contradictions, rather than tucked neatly into tidy narrative arcs and genre formulas.
There's a pattern in Read With Jenna's selections
Literary fiction has emerged as the current beneath Read With Jenna — the genre that appears with the most regularity. It is, after all, the category most likely to deliver literature's most prestigious publications: winners of the Booker, Pulitzer, and Nobel Prize. Bush Hager's picks in this realm are varied but share a kinship. "This is a Love Story" by Jessica Soffer, "Groundskeeping" by Lee Cole, and "The Whalebone Theatre" by Joanna Quinn are some standout examples.
But her preferences don't exist in a vacuum. In 2024, publishers acquired literary fiction titles at a rate that surprised even the optimists — a rebuttal to the idea that fiction must be fast and flashy to be marketable. Even Reese Witherspoon, the reigning queen of commercial romantic reads and genre-branded thrillers, has veered toward the introspective. The best literary fiction picks from Reese's Book Club suggest a readership that is more willing to sit with the ambitious and ambiguous.
Overlapping her literary fiction picks, Bush Hager has an undeniable soft spot for the bildungsroman, often selecting elliptical coming-of-age stories. Historical fiction and narratives focused on family are also prevalent in the Read With Jenna book club. Bush Hager has dabbled in thrillers and the occasional breezy beach read for your summer reading list. And yet, the highest-rated Read With Jenna pick of all time isn't any of those. In fact, it isn't even a novel. It's "Devotions," a poetry collection by Mary Oliver. With all the talk of genre, this feels ironic. In a world addicted to plot, readers fell hardest for the pause.