Substack Book Group Directory

Find a book group on Substack…

Footnotes and Tangents is part of a growing community of book groups, book clubs, readalongs and slow reads on Substack.

This directory lists active newsletters with current and upcoming reads. Titles include fiction, nonfiction, plays and poetry.

If you host a book group on Substack and would like to be included, message me with links to your most relevant posts/pages and start dates for current and upcoming reads.

This list is updated monthly and sent to all Footnotes and Tangents subscribers.

Substack Book Group Directory

For past books, explore the archive.

Key: 📞 video meetups 🎧 podcasts

Apocryphaa’s Short Story Club
Host:

M. E. Rothwell

• Last: The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Louis Borges • Now: The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

The Audacious Book Club 📞
Host:

Roxane Gay

• Last: We're Alone Now by Edwidge Danticat • Now: Women's Hotel by Danny Lavery

The Big Read
Host:

Jeremy Anderberg

• Now: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens & Go As A River by Shelley Read & Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (November) • City of Thieves by David Benioff & The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford

The Book Club for Busy Readers 📞
Host:

Jeannie Ewing

• Next: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Jan)

Cambridge Ladies' Dining Society
Host:

Ann Kennedy Smith

• Past: The Rector's Daughter by F. M. Mayor • Now: The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (Oct-Nov)

Cams Campbell Reads
Host:

Cams Campbell

• Now: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (May 2024 – Feb 2025)

The Classical Book Club
Host:

The Freelance Writing Network

• Last: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Oct) • Now: Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier (Nov)

Close Reads HQ 🎧
Hosts:

David Kern

,

Tim McIntosh

,

Heidi White

• Last: Jumping Jenny by Anthony Berkley & The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin • Now: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (Sept–Jan) & & Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Nov) • Next: The Great Passion by James Runcie (Dec) & The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (Jan)

Closely Reading
Host:

haley larsen, phd

• Last: The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Oct) • Now: Shirley Jackson • Next: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (2025)

Commonplace Philosophy
Host: Jared Henderson • Last: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Oct) • Now: The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt (Nov-Feb) • The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (Mar)

Creative, Inspired, Happy 📞
Host:

Evelyn Skye

• Last: Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman • Now: No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister (November) • Next: Deep Work by Cal Newport (Jan) & The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (Feb) & Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott Mar)

Deep Reads Book Club
Host:

Matthew Long

• Next: Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey (2025)

Dostoevsky book club «Theta-Delta»
Host:

Dana Oljós

• Now: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (July – Dec 2024)

Elizabeth Goudge Bookclub
Host:

Elizabeth Goudge Bookclub

• Last: The White Witch • Now: A City of Bells

Emily’s Walking Book Club 📞
Host:

Emily Rhodes

• Last: Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell (Oct) • Now: The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg (Nov) • Next: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Dec)

Everything is Amazing
Host:

Mike Sowden

• Now: On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz

Footnotes and Tangents 🎧
Host:

Simon Haisell

• Last: Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel • Now: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy & The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel • Next: The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell (Jan-Mar 2025) & A Place of Greater Safety (May-Sep 2025) & Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Sep-Oct 2025) & The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (Nov-Dec 2025)

FrizzLit
Host:

Christopher Frizzelle

• Last: Flannery O'Connor • Now: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë • Now: Dune by Frank Herbert (Jan–Feb)

The Ladybird Purse
Host:

Keris Fox

• Now: The Financial Anxiety Solution by Lindsay Bryan-Podvin

Melanie’s Frontal Lobe
Host:

Mel Tan Uy

• Now: Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Notes from the Town Hermit
Host:

Tiffany Chu

• Next: Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (September–December)

Paper Knife
Host:

Leonard Gaya

• Now: A Year of Reading Kafka

The Paulo Coelho Read Along
Host:

Colm Holland

• Last: Eleven Minutes & The Zahir • Now: The Witch of Portobello

Peak Notions 📞
Host:

Laura Kennedy

• Last: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (April) • Now: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (July)

Personal Canon Formation
Host:

John Halbrooks

• Last: Emma by Jane Austen • Now: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift • Next: Chaucer & Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Pomus Aureus
Host:

Ellie

• Now: The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Poetry & Process
Host:

Brian Funke

• Last: Already the ripening barberries are red by Rainer Maria Rilke • Now: Last Night As I Was Sleeping by Antonio Machado

Read the Classics
Host:

Henry Eliot

• Last: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry • Now: Next: The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (Dec) • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy & Persuasion by Jane Austen

Reading Revisited
Host:

Jessica Risma

&

Kelsie Hartley

&

Hannah Suire

• Last: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë • Now: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry • Next year: 2025 list

Rebel Readers Book Club
Host:

Charlene Storey

• Now: Cassandra Speaks by Elizabeth Lesser (November)

Receipt from the Bookshop
Host:

Katie Clapham

• Last: The Mission House by Carys Davies • Now: White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

The Recovering Academic
Host:

Joshua Doležal

• Last: My Ántonia by Willa Cather

The Selfish Bookclub
Host:

Sarah Raad

• Last: Big Magic by

Elizabeth Gilbert

• Now: Playing Big by Tara Mohr

The Story Social 🎧
Hosts:

Jodie Melissa Rogers

&

Mollie Carberry

• Last: Good Material by Dolly Alderton & To The The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf • Now: Carrie by Stephen King

Teacups & Tomes Book Club
Hosts:

Mariella Hunt 🦋

&

Hannah Elizabeth

• Now: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Oct)

Telling Their Tales
Host:

Holly A Brown

• Now: Storyland by Amy Jeffs (Oct – Jan)

True Stories Book Club 🎧
Host:

Katherine May

• Last: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman & Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel • Now: On Sycamore Gap by

KateFox

• Next: Bright Shining by Julia Baird

Katherine May

is also running a read-along of The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston in December.

Virginia Woolf Reading Group
Host:

Tash

• Last: Mrs Dalloway • Next: To the Lighthouse (next year)

Well-Read Weekend
Host:

Taylor D'Amico

• Last: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (Oct) • Now: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (Nov) • Next: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Archive

Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James: Giovanni’s Room
Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
Brooks, Sarah: The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wasteland
Coelho, Paulo: The Fifth Mountain, Manual of The Warrior of Light, Veronika Decides To Die
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment (The Big Read),
Espinoza, Alex: The Sons of El Rey
Felker-Martin, Gretchen: Cuckoo
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: The Sorrows of Young Werther
Goudge, Elizabeth: The Scent of Water, The Little White Horse, Linnets & Valerians, Island Magic, Green Dolphin Street,
Hammett, Dashiell: The Maltese Falcon
Harrison, Jim: The Creek
Ishiguro, Kazuo: The Remains of the Day
Jackson, Shirley: The Haunting of Hill House
Jones, Lucy: Matrescence
Kafka, Franz: Before The Law
Kearns Goodwin, Doris: Team of Rivals
Lacy, Tim: Dream of a Democratic Culture
Larsen, Nella: Passing
Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird
Mantel, Hilary: Wolf Hall
Mattei, Clara E: Capital Order
Mauriac, Francois: Vipers’ Tangle
Melville, Herman: Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, Billy Budd
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee: Bite by Bite
Nolan, Megan: Ordinary Human Failings
Oliver, Mary: The Journey
Porter, Regina: The Rich People Have Gone Away
Patchett, Ann: Tom Lake
Shakespeare, William: As You Like It
Steinbeck, John: East of Eden
Ryan, Kay: A Hundred Bolts of Satin
Taylor, Elizabeth: Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
Thomas, Kai: In the Upper Country
Tolkien, JRR: Lord of the Rings
Undset, Sigrid: Kristin Lavransdatter
Walcott, Derek: Love after Love
Ward, Jesmyn: Sing, Unburied, Sing
Wharton, Edith: The Age of Innocence
Yeats, William Butler: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Photo by Mari Potter on Unsplash