I am nervous about starting my own book group. What should be the first rule of any California-based book club?
—INTIMIDATED IN THE CITY OF QUARTZ
GUSTAVO: Keep it simple and choose books that connect back to where we live. My book club—called Guti’s Fookin’ Ingrate Book Club, after a favorite epithet of mine in the film version of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting—mostly sticks to books about the West. It has about 100 members, but only 20 regularly show up to our Zoom meetings.
STACEY: I’m a graduate of two book clubs. The successful one was a yearlong reading of Anthony Powell’s 12-volume beast, A Dance to the Music of Time. We read a novel a month and had a party at the end where we came dressed as our favorite characters. (I was Gypsy Jones, the communist agitator.) I’m an endurance book-clubber: I can go the distance. So in keeping with Gustavo’s advice to stay local, maybe someone wants to do a California equivalent, Armistead Maupin’s 10-volume Tales of the City? I’ll bring the Tab.
GUSTAVO: Damn, next thing you’re going to tell me is that you read Hubert Howe Bancroft’s seven-volume History of California, including the two-volume Zamorano index (see “The California Novel No One Can Find”)!
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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Is joining a book club and not showing up because you haven’t read the book that big of a deal? In all fairness, our gatherings are mostly just an excuse to drink wine together.
—FLAKY AND FLUSHED
STACEY: Not showing up is unforgivable. And anyone who can’t muster the energy to Zoom in and pretend to have read the book does not belong in polite society.
GUSTAVO: I tell the book club members that every time someone doesn’t read the assigned book, an AI devil gets its pitchfork.
STACEY: So that’s the culprit! The beast is feeding off all those unread copies of Where the Crawdads Sing! Flaky, if you’re looking for some good critiques to trot out when you haven’t read the book, let me help. I like to just shake my head while tapping the cover and say, “Missed opportunity, missed opportunity…”
You two are fancy creative types. If you could manifest a fantasy book club, what would it look like?
—GENRE BUSTING IN SAN BERDU
STACEY: I don’t think there’d be an empty seat at my fantasy book club, where we’d only read books by L.A. women on the perimeter of rock ’n’ roll. I don’t mean Pamela Des Barres’s I’m with the Band (too obvious). More like Earth to Moon, by Moon Unit Zappa; High on Arrival, by Mackenzie Phillips; Say Everything, by Ione Skye… What? My last book? Goodness, no! Creating a book club for your own book is certainly the worst book club faux pas. Worse, even, than creating one for I’m with the Band.
GUSTAVO: Your awesome fantasy book club is missing Alice Bag’s Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage—A Chicana Punk Story. But I agree: Even I would never stoop to being so shameless as to assign my own books for my book club!
Do I really deserve to be called out when I haven’t bought my club pick from an indie bookstore, but have instead fed the Amazon monster or put money in the pockets of my Barnes & Noble bestie?
—NOT PAYING FULL PRICE IN FULLERTON
STACEY: I get all my books from the library. I’m on a one-woman campaign to keep that place open.
GUSTAVO: Oh, so we’re playing quién-es-más-bookworm now? Well, I try to buy my books exclusively from any Friends of the Library bookrack I can find—because we all know where government funding isn’t going to in this administration unless a library’s biography section is crowned with a poster-size cover of The Art of the Deal.•
Gustavo Arellano is the author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. In 2025, Arellano was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was formerly editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, and penned the award-winning ¡Ask a Mexican!, a nationally syndicated column in which he answered any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Arellano is the recipient of awards ranging from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Best Columnist to the Los Angeles Press Club President’s Award to an Impact Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and he was recognized by the California Latino Legislative Caucus with a 2008 Spirit Award for his “exceptional vision, creativity, and work ethic.” Arellano is a lifelong resident of Orange County and is the proud son of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.
Stacey Grenrock Woods is a regular contributor to Esquire and a former correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She writes and consults on various TV shows, and has a recurring role as Tricia Thoon on Fox’s Arrested Development. Her first book is I, California.
