According to Bookmovement.com, where over 26,000 book club groups are registered, here are the top twenty book club picks of 2010:
The Help, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Sarah’s Key, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, The Next Thing on My List, Little Bee, A Reliable Wife, Olive Kitteridge, Cutting for Stone, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Water for Elephants, The Book Thief, The Art of Racing in the Rain, Eat Pray Love, The Glass Castle : A Memoir, The Wednesday Sisters, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The 19th Wife, The Forgotten Garden, and Three Cups of Tea.
I believe that all of these books have sold over a million copies, some many more. If you are fortunate enough to have a book go viral on the book club circuit, it is a mighty force.
Personally, I hate book clubs. I hate clubs. I like to do most things alone that most people like to do together. These include: eat, go to movies, take walks or run, shop, take long drives, and sing. I would rather be pummeled with a manure filled sock than sit around and drink bad red wine and listen to anyone say that he didn’t like a character because she was unsympathetic.
Some say I hate book groups because I hate myself. Some say I hate book groups because I’m perverse. Sure. No argument from me. Some say it’s because I’m around books all day. I think it’s because the best part of reading for me is being by myself and going into some parallel universe, and sharing that with other people would be like sharing my candy. Reading for me equals solitude.
What about you?
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Kids! Great news! We made the 
The problem with watching too much In Treatment is that you begin to take on Gabriel Byrne’s characteristics, his brooding mien, his Irish accent, his eye twitches that signal he gets it. You start telling people to get a good look at themselves, to find the connections among various life events, to pick up the almighty pattern. And then you try to offer a little hope, just a wee bit of salvation or redemption or revelation. You know: insight.
I know I have a great deal to be grateful for, but I hate this fucking holiday. When people say, have a good holiday, shit, when I say have a good holiday, it always sounds like: try not to kill yourself. It’s funny, but I don’t think I’d be a writer if it weren’t for my family, by which I mean trying to get away from them. The crawl space under the stairs. The fort behind the house. The high school parking lot. The single in Tooting Bec. The little study painted in baby aspirin orange. The quarry in Rockport. And the fat raccoon who wished me well. Every twelve-plex. Every overcast sky. Every trail littered with leaf rot. Try not to kill yourself. And by that I mean, a happy and healthy to all of you wonderful malcontents and bitchin’ ass writers who show up here every day or from time to time. I am certainly grateful for you.
Coming home from Miami last night, my daughter was reading Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea. A far cry from Are You There God, It’s Me Mags. And yes, I bought it for her. Look, she knows about periods. I’m a bad mother. But when I was thirteen I was sneaking Harold Robbins novels from my best friend Lisa Zimmerman’s mother. God, those books were fat and racy. You could feel yourself up reading them.
National Book Award reading tonight. This event lasted longer than the Academy Awards: Four hours from the welcome reception to the medal ceremony, to the reading (twenty authors, twenty!). Some of the authors were fantastic, a couple disappeared themselves, a few had that pronounced MFA way of reading where the breath comes at exactly the wrong beat in some sort of forced air way that is both counter-intuitive and not. I fell in love with the poet 
