What's The Highest Rated Pick Of All Time From The Read With Jenna Book Club?
Jenna Bush Hager's book club began, as many good ideas do, with a dare, she told Publishers Weekly. Libby Leist, executive vice president of the "Today" show, spotted a contradiction in two headlines. One story proclaimed reading was experiencing a boom, while the other insisted people had all but given it up. What was the truth? Confident that reading was far from dead, Hager declared, "I'm telling you, we're reading more, and people still love to read."
To test her theory, Read With Jenna was born live on air. Hager's inaugural pick, "The Last Romantics," by Tara Conklin, immediately leapt from near-anonymity to number two on Amazon. And just like that, her television segment became a literary force. Since that first pick, viewers have tuned in month after month to do exactly what the club promises: read with Jenna. The TV personality and former first daughter has a clear preference for fiction, but the list isn't bound by genre. Selections have spanned breezy beach reads, gripping thrillers and mysteries, intimate memoirs, and layered literary fiction.
But one title has risen above the rest in reader acclaim, and that is "Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver." The poetry book holds the highest Goodreads rating of any Read With Jenna pick to date (as of April 2025), with an impressive 4.57 stars from over 24,000 ratings. Surprisingly, even in a lineup packed with blockbuster novels and bestselling authors, it turns out poetry has the last word.
Poetry, not fiction, is Read With Jenna's highest-rated pick
"Devotions" was Jenna Bush Hager's final book club choice of 2024, presenting viewers with a tender holiday gift. The collection, curated by Mary Oliver herself shortly before her death in 2019, brings together some of her most beloved poems — each one a reminder to notice the world in its simplest, most miraculous forms.
Oliver, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, built her career on close observation of the natural world — of birdsong and branches, tides and seasons — but also of the inner landscape that mirrors the natural one. "Wild Geese," one of her most popular works, has found a second life on TikTok, its iconic first line — "You do not have to be good" — passed around social media like a secular prayer.
For Hager, poetry is a balm to the chaos of life. As she told Today, "When I'm unsure of the world, there are a few things I can do: I can go outside and be in nature. I can lean into my faith. Or something else really therapeutic is reading poetry." She often sends poems to friends and family, she said, to put into words her feelings that otherwise resist articulation. "Devotions" may not have been the splashiest release or the most talked-about debut, but it resonated, and readers responded in kind.