Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here’s-a-profound-thought tone of voice: “I’d rather be stupid than happy”.

In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason’s derr-brained secret sharer. As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it.

But then there’s the second problem: definitions. Is stupidity the same thing as ignorance? As foolishness? As the unwillingness to learn (AKA obtuseness, or what the Greeks called amathia)? As the inability to draw the right conclusions from what you have learned? Is it a quality of person or a quality of action? On and off, in ordinary usage, it’s all of these. It’s a know-it-when-you-see-it (except in yourself) thing.

Perhaps inescapably, therefore, Jeffries makes a number of nice philosophical distinctions about the meaning of the term – and then goes back to using it in the know-it-when-you-see-it sense, so his discussion wanders through whole fields of its meanings without ever quite erecting a boundary fence. In a way, you could see this book not as a history of stupidity but as a slant history of its various opposites. It’s an amiable and rambling tour through the history of philosophy, looking at the idea of rationality and its limitations.

If it’s stupid not to seek the truth, is it not even more stupid to suppose there’s a truth to be sought? The western ancients were in the first camp; and their special distinction – thank you, Socrates – was to see reason and virtue as being directly connected. It’s only with the Enlightenment that stupidity started to be seen as a cognitive rather than a moral failing. (Though when we later meet Hannah Arendt’s reflections on Eichmann, on the banality of mind that made Nazi evil possible, we perhaps return to the older view.)

There’s an interesting early chapter on the eastern traditions. Daoism and Confucianism and Buddhism see wisdom and virtue as linked, too; though wisdom in these cases is associated less with deductive rationality than with a submission to the natural order of things. Daoist “wu-wei”, or “effortless action” (going with the flow) is the key. Western individualism, according to a scholar Jeffries quotes, leaves us with selves resembling “a kind of avocado” with a nub of ego at its centre, whereas in the mysterious east there are to be found “flexi-selves” of the sort you can’t buy in the grocery aisle.

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Margaret Atwood has released a new short story critiquing elected officials for a wide-ranging book ban in the Canadian province of Alberta. The controversial decision to remove books purportedly containing “explicit sexual content” has seen numerous works of literature swept up in the dragnet, including Atwood’s, dystopian work The Handmaid‘s Tale.

In a social media post, Atwood wrote that since her famed work was no longer permissible in Alberta schools, she had written a “suitable” short work for teens, adding the work was necessary because the province’s minister of education thought students were “stupid babies”.

The extremely brief story traces the lives of John and Mary, two “very, very good” children.

“They never picked their noses or had bowel movements or zits,” she wrote in the opening lines, adding they were ardent Christians who “paid no attention to what Jesus actually said about the poor” and instead “practised selfish rapacious capitalism” in the vein of the conservative literary hero Ayn Rand.

“Oh, and they never died, because who wants to dwell on, you know, death and corpses and yuk?”

Atwood writes that while the pair “lived happily ever”, the ominous warnings in her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale – which describes a totalitarian fundamentalist regime in which enslaved women are forced to bear children – “came true came true and [Alberta premier] Danielle Smith found herself with a nice new blue dress but no job” – a reference to the novel’s elite wives who have power but are not permitted to work.

“The end.”

The Alberta ban emerged as a product of intense lobbying by socially conservative “parents’ rights” groups in the province and mirrors a trend in the United States.

Action4Canada and Parents for Choice in Education (PCE), have taken credit for the book ban and the latter sent an email to supporters after the ban was announced thanking them for their efforts in contacting government officials about “graphic” books.

The Alberta government defines “explicit sexual content” in its policy as “content containing a detailed and clear depiction of a sexual act”. Students from kindergarten to grade 12 cannot access any “content” in a school library that meets this definition.

Alberta’s public schools have until October to comply with the order, but some schools have already released their lists of banned books. The Edmonton school board said it would remove 200 books from school libraries, including The Handmaid’s Tale.

Other books to be pulled from shelves include George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, which officials say contains passages that discuss sexual intercourse and rape; Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Last week, Smith criticised officials for drawing up such a wide-ranging list of books to be removed, describing the move as “vicious compliance”.

Smith showed reporters excerpts from graphic novels– including Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe – that prompted the new rules in the first place for the explicit illustrations of sexual acts they contain. The book is a globally acclaimed coming-of-age story about teenage life and young adulthood. Critics of the ban say increasingly powerful lobby groups are targeting books that affirm LGBTQ+ identities.

Ahead of the ban, Atwood also posted on social media warning against reading The Handmaid’s Tale because “your hair will catch on fire!”

“Get one now before they have public book burnings of it.”

In the world of literary enthusiasm, celebrity book clubs have become powerhouses of influence. Reese Witherspoon’s picks routinely top bestseller lists, Oprah Winfrey’s selections can catapult unknown authors to stardom, and Jenna Bush Hager’s “Read with Jenna” has become a fixture on the Today Show. These star-powered reading initiatives have unquestionably boosted book sales and reading visibility.

Yet for serious readers, these glittering book clubs often fall short of what we’re truly seeking: genuine literary community and thoughtful discussion.

The Missing Elements of Celebrity Book Clubs

After reviewing several major celebrity book clubs over the past few years, certain patterns emerge that explain why avid readers often feel dissatisfied with these platforms, particularly when it comes to online book clubs.

No Real Space for Conversation

The most glaring issue is the absence of dedicated discussion spaces. Despite their “book club” label, most celebrity reading initiatives operate primarily through one-way communication channels. Reese’s Book Club lives mainly on Instagram and through newsletters—to “join,” readers simply follow the account or subscribe to emails. What passes for discussion happens in Instagram comment threads, where meaningful exchange is nearly impossible.

Jenna Bush Hager’s “Read with Jenna” announces monthly picks on the Today show and social media, but provides no official forum for readers. Fans have had to create unofficial communities—one member-made club on Bookclubs.com explicitly notes it is “not affiliated with the actual Read with Jenna club” but exists to give readers the discussion space the official platform lacks.

Even Oprah’s legendary book club doesn’t offer a cohesive discussion forum led by her team. The conversations are scattered across social media platforms, creating an experience that feels more like consumption than participation. As The Guardian noted, today’s celebrity book clubs are generally “conducted via social media,” with minimal interactive elements.

Absent Moderation and Facilitation

A thriving book club needs active facilitation—someone posing thought-provoking questions, guiding the discussion, and ensuring all voices are heard. Celebrity book clubs typically abandon readers after the initial announcement.

While Reese’s team might post a few generic discussion questions each month on Goodreads, and Oprah occasionally drops video clips with the author, there’s little follow-up or active engagement. There’s no dedicated moderator responding to readers’ insights or prompting deeper analysis. The result? Hundreds of disconnected comments expressing basic reactions, with minimal back-and-forth dialogue.

Without moderation, discussions either fizzle out or go off-topic. The experience becomes passive—reading a book because a celebrity recommended it, rather than actively engaging with fellow readers about its ideas, themes, and execution.

No Reading Schedule or Structure

Anyone who’s participated in a successful book club knows that structure matters. A reading timeline helps everyone stay synchronized and prevents accidental spoilers. Most serious book clubs establish milestones or dates for the beginning of the discussion to create momentum and enable progressive conversation.

The celebrity clubs offer none of this guidance. They announce monthly selections but provide no reading schedule or intermediate checkpoints. There’s no coordinated discussion for “first impressions,” “halfway reflections,” or “final thoughts.” This absence of structure leaves readers disconnected from one another, unable to share reactions at similar points in their reading journey.

Plus, most celebrity book clubs push books that are newly published making it difficult for readers to find the books in libraries or other sources of affordable books prior to the discussion. Which brings us to our next point…

Commerce Over Community

Perhaps most tellingly, these celebrity platforms function primarily as promotional engines rather than reading communities. Oprah’s endorsement can drive millions in additional sales; Reese’s picks routinely become bestsellers and get optioned for screen adaptations; Jenna’s selections see massive sales boosts from their on-air exposure.

For the celebrities, these book clubs represent significant business ventures. Reese’s club is a cornerstone of her Hello Sunshine media company, which she reportedly sold for around $1 billion. Oprah’s club has partnered with major brands like Apple for filmed discussions. Jenna’s club, backed by NBC’s Today Show, has expanded to include book festivals with merchandise booths.

The emphasis is clearly on scale and sales rather than intimate discussion. It’s telling that on Reddit, one observer described Reese’s Book Club as “purely a marketing tool,” with selections chosen more for broad commercial appeal than to provoke challenging discussions.

What Serious Readers Actually Want

Research and conversations with avid readers in various online communities reveal that most bibliophiles join book clubs seeking these key elements:

1. A dedicated discussion space: A forum or platform specifically for members to exchange ideas—not just scattered social media comments.
2. Active moderation: Someone to facilitate conversations with thoughtful questions and maintain a respectful environment.
3. Reading guidance: A clear schedule or timeline so members can discuss progressively without spoilers.
4. Literary focus over hype: Emphasis on analysis of themes, characters, and writing style rather than celebrity endorsement.
5. Community continuity: Regular participants who recognize each other and build rapport over time.

Unfortunately, the major celebrity clubs deliver minimally on these points. They generate enthusiasm and exposure for books (which is valuable), but the structured, communal experience serious readers crave is largely absent.

A Better Alternative: BookBrowse’s Online Book Club

For readers seeking substance over celebrity, alternatives exist that emphasize real discussions and reader engagement. BookBrowse’s Online Book Club stands out as an ideal model for serious readers.

Unlike celebrity platforms, BookBrowse’s club makes discussion the central focus. Each month, they host multiple book discussions on their forum—spanning both fiction and nonfiction. Every conversation is actively moderated by BookBrowse staff who pose engaging questions and maintain a thoughtful dialogue.

What truly sets BookBrowse apart is its structured approach. They provide clear reading schedules for each book, with discussions scheduled to open at specific times—typically 4-6 weeks after announcement, giving everyone time to read. Their calendar approach ensures members know exactly when conversations will begin, allowing readers to prepare and participate during peak discussion periods.

The quality of conversation is noticeably deeper thanks to this foundation. BookBrowse provides reading guides and curated discussion questions that encourage readers to explore themes they might otherwise miss. In this well-moderated environment, members share substantive analyses of symbolism, character motivations, and thematic elements—a far cry from the surface-level comments typical of celebrity club platforms.

Perhaps most importantly, BookBrowse fosters genuine community. Because the club is more focused on books than personalities, a tight-knit group has developed where regular participants recognize one another. The atmosphere is welcoming to newcomers while maintaining the comfortable familiarity of a neighborhood book club.

Their book selections are refreshingly varied—mixing new releases with classics and hidden gems—and their discussions remain available online for weeks, allowing late finishers to still contribute. Best of all, participation in BookBrowse’s discussions are free to join, underscoring that their priority is building community, not customers.

Finding Your Literary Community

None of this means celebrity book clubs don’t have value. They’ve introduced millions to wonderful books and boosted reading visibility in our digital age. For casual readers seeking recommendations, they can be perfect.

But for bibliophiles hungry for substantive literary engagement, these high-profile clubs often leave readers finishing books with thoughts swirling and nowhere to share them—no forum to dissect that ambiguous ending or challenge another reader’s interpretation.

As Italic Type noted in their examination of reading communities, “avid readers are far from passive consumers.” They don’t just want to be handed book recommendations—they want to actively engage with the text and fellow readers. 

The popularity of reader-focused communities like BookBrowse shows that demand for meaningful book discussion remains strong. People want to talk about books, not just hear about them. They crave the camaraderie and insight that comes from thoughtful literary conversation.

Think of it as the difference between attending a book lecture versus joining a round-table discussion. The lecture might be informative and entertaining, but the round-table is where participants actually get to contribute and grow. For serious readers, that distinction makes all the difference.

In the end, the most fulfilling book club is one that treats readers as active participants rather than just followers. If the celebrities won’t provide that experience, passionate reading communities are stepping up to fill the void—creating the kind of thoughtful, structured, and engaging literary spaces that bibliophiles truly deserve.

 

This year, we have decided to launch the annual Faber/Observer/Comica graphic short story prize with an event as well as an announcement: an evening that will hopefully be highly enjoyable for anyone who has followed the progress of the award, as well as helpful to those who might be thinking of entering this time around. On 9 April, then, come along to the Bindery in Hatton Garden, London, where a panel will discuss graphic novels in general and our prize in particular – tickets are still available. On stage will be last year’s brilliant judges, Luke Healy and Posy Simmonds, as well as Lesley Imgart, who won the 2024 prize for her charming, funny comic Witch Way?. The event will be chaired by me, and I hope to see you there.

But back to the details of 2025. As ever, the winner of the prize will receive a cheque for £1,000 and his or her work will appear in the New Review in print and online (the award for the runner-up is £250, and their story will also be published online). Perhaps the bigger thing, however, is that both will know that their work was admired by our two guest judges: Aimée de Jongh, whose graphic adaptation of William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies was published to such acclaim last year; and Jonathan Coe, whose wonderful novels include What a Carve Up!, The Rotters’ Club and The Proof of My Innocence. This is the 18th year of the prize, and we’re so happy to have them.

Winning is often the beginning of something. For some, it has meant a book deal. Among past winners and runners-up are Isabel Greenberg, whose graphic novels include Glass Town, the best book about the lives of the young Brontës you’ll ever read; Matthew Dooley, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize-winning author of Flake (I hear he has a new book on the way); and Joff Winterhart, whose graphic novel Days of the Bagnold Summer began its life as his entry in the 2009 competition, and later became a film starring Monica Dolan. To enter, you must simply create a four-page comic designed to run over a double-page spread in the Observer New Review – a story that will ideally have a beginning, a middle and an end, and deploy original illustrations in its telling. After this, we do the hard work. So, to your drawing boards. For more details, including the deadline, click here.

• To book tickets for Celebrating the Graphic Novel at the Bindery, London EC1, click here

David Szalay, 51, grew up in London and now lives in Vienna with his wife, having previously moved in 2009 to Hungary, his father’s birthplace. In 2016 he was shortlisted for the Booker prize with his fourth novel, All That Man Is, nine separate stories “self-assembled in the reader’s mind into a sort of collage-novel” (London Review of Books). His new novel, Flesh, follows the fluctuating fortunes of a young Hungarian ex-convict who makes his life in the UK after serving in Iraq.

Tell us how Flesh came to be.
I decided to abandon a book I’d started in 2017. It just wasn’t working, so it felt like a weight off my shoulders; nevertheless, I was under contract and had to come up with something. Literally nothing in Flesh is directly autobiographical, but it started with my underlying experience of being poised between two places and feeling not 100% at home in either of them. I no longer really feel like a native of London, but nor do I feel entirely Hungarian. Even for the decades I lived in London, just by virtue of the name that I have, there was always a sense of being… outsider is too strong a word; I was more of an outsider in Hungary, certainly, but a kind of insider-outsider, because I come from a Hungarian background but don’t speak Hungarian very well. That sort of grey zone interests me.

The novel implies that all the tumult of the protagonist’s life begins with the shock of puberty. What made you want to dramatise that idea?
My aim was to try to be as honest as possible about what it’s actually like to be a male body in the world – to be a body that has its own demands, and how you manage, accommodate, satisfy and fail to satisfy those demands, and what experiences that leads you into.

Money is pivotal to the story, as it tends to be in your work.
It structures our society in a deep way. I say that as someone who’s not Marxist or anything like that; anyone can see that money exists as a way of distributing power. The need for money, or wanting more money, or just sort of having to have money, is central in all our lives. Often it’s underplayed in the same way as physical experience – a bigger part of our existence than you’d think from reading fiction.

In form and style, Flesh resembles Turbulence [2018] and All That Man Is, which seemed to mark a break from your first three novels.
With my earlier books, I was doing something completely different after each one. Looking back, that was born out of not yet having found what really works for me. I enjoy books made of free-standing units of writing that are somehow in dialogue with one another, where what happens in the gaps is as important as the chapters themselves. The way that the reader has to do their own imaginative work means they might come away with a sense of having read a book that covers a large amount of human experience, without having to plough through a 1,000-page 19th-century novel. I don’t think anyone’s seriously going to deny that we live in an era of short attention spans, which probably isn’t good, but we’re going to have to work with it the best we can.

Where do you write?
For various family reasons I go back very frequently to Hungary, so I have to be pragmatic – it’s not like I have some holy desk that’s the only place where I can do anything. One challenge is always to hold on to the reality of the fictional world for it not to seem like a silly story I’m making up. The hour immediately after waking, with the phone still switched off, is when that world can seem most real.

How come you left London?
I didn’t know I was leaving! I went to Hungary planning to spend a few months and ended up there for more than 10 years. One of the things that kept me in Hungary, unquestionably, was that I could afford to live on my income from writing, which was then very meagre indeed, in a way that I simply wouldn’t have been able to in England.

What first led you to write fiction?
I genuinely don’t know [laughs]. I’ve been writing for pleasure since I was very young; I stopped in my 20s but came back to it. The thing that got me hooked at the age of 10 or something was probably the game of it – to master the way a book manipulates the reader. I don’t mean it to sound sinister; it’s just the game that’s going on all the time between writer and reader in every context. As a child I enjoyed that and quite unselfconsciously wanted to try doing it as a writer.

Is there anything you recall reading at that time?
I enjoyed The Hobbit but found The Lord of the Rings very boring. I remember reading books that were slightly unexpected: at 12, I read the complete works of Frederick Forsyth and really enjoyed them, probably much more than I would now. It’s interesting [thinking back] – they work very much on close control of the reader’s expectations.

Name something you need in order to write.
Solitude. I find the heavy lifting near the beginning, where you have to imagine a world out of nothing, easier if I can go away and basically not interact with anyone. More than a week and it starts to become oppressive, but a week of solitude can be very useful.

The story goes that in 2016 you came within a hair’s breadth of winning the Booker. Do you ever think what might have been?
Of course. Just being shortlisted transformed my career – I sold far more books than I did before – but it was very disappointing at the time. If I’d won, maybe I’d have become lazy. It feels like some big peak to come back from; more prosaically, you probably get enough sales generated that you don’t have to publish for some years. Either way I’ve managed to convince myself that not winning was a good thing.

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“My dream is that people’s eyes will be opened instinctively to their surroundings,” says Simon Jenkins at the end of his new book. “I want people to point at buildings, laugh, cry or get angry. I want them to hate and to love what they see. I want them to speak architecture.” So he has written A Short History of British Architecture, which he hopes will help people understand what he calls the “language” of styles – such things as the difference between Doric and Corinthian columns, or between early English and perpendicular gothic.

It turns out to be two books in one. The first 200 pages are a brisk rattle through four-and-a-half millennia of the greatest hits of British building from Stonehenge onwards, talking about cathedrals, country houses and monuments rather than the places of everyday life, delivered with the measured if sometimes opinionated tone of a benign tour guide.

The last 70 pages are a partisan polemic about the ravages wreaked on British cities by modernist planners and architects. He writes these as an engaged and enraged combatant: as a young journalist he was involved in the 1970s campaign to save Covent Garden from redevelopment, and he has taken an interest in issues of heritage and planning – including as a former chairman of the National Trust – ever since.

The first part is a readable retelling of the standard histories, animated by the odd engaging tale and personal observation. He makes sweeping statements as to what architecture is. Stonehenge is; the intricate, older complex of circular houses at Skara Brae in Orkney is not. He contestably asserts that the Elizabethan Hardwick Hall – a towering and violently original assertion of power and wealth in glass and stone and tapestry – “exudes an English dignity and calm”.

He seems uncomfortable with more creative and inventive architects, such as Nicholas Hawksmoor (whose use of baroque elements is called “tentative”) or Sir John Soane. His own preference is for what he calls a “golden age” in the second half of the 18th century, a more tasteful and stylistically orderly era when “for perhaps the first and only time, a large constituency of Britons managed to speak architecture”, by which he means a mostly aristocratic clientele who shared with their architects an education in ancient Roman and Greek styles.

The second part of the book is more vivid. Here Jenkins lambasts the postwar destruction of British cities by architects, planners and politicians, intent on sweeping away the “obsolete”, handing over public spaces to cars, and fulfilling (in his telling) the demented visions of the Swiss-French modernist Le Corbusier, a man who hated the ordinary shop-lined streets that make up most cities.

This tale has been much told, and it’s a little wearying that Le Corbusier continues to be belaboured (as he is in Thomas Heatherwick’s recent Humanise) at least 50 years after his urban ideas went out of fashion. The collateral damage of Jenkins’s onslaught on the modern also includes much beautiful and successful architecture, but it is nonetheless hard to disagree that some true atrocities were perpetrated. And the author, who was there in those planning battles, has earned the right to talk about them. It is because of these disasters, he writes, that he wants to educate the public in architecture, so that they can’t be duped by professionals in the future. This is an aim that anyone who loves the art of building can applaud.

I’m not sure, though, that the focus on the “language” of architecture – a thing whose rules are to be learned – is rich enough to bring about a transformation in public understanding. It’s a way of looking at buildings that treats them as objects of connoisseurial contemplation rather than as three-dimensional spaces that are made, inhabited and lived, as creations of both beauty and strife. He is sometimes illuminating about the role of politics in architecture, and big on the elitist contempt that he says modernist architects had for ordinary people, but he’s light on the ways in which the brutalities of the enclosures and slavery funded the country houses of that “golden age”. Architecture, in other words, is more magnificent and more turbulent than Jenkins allows.