ABSTRACT
The Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan Book Club models a way of reading that places it in the tradition of feminized, middlebrow literary culture. This chapter presents a range of middlebrow literary behaviors, from commercial entrepreneurship to moral seriousness, but four, heavily gendered reading practices. The chapter describes Madeleys emphatically emotional response to My Best Friends Girl; he mentions three times that the book made him cry. It suggests that the show engages ambiguously with the status of women's reading, both affirming and sometimes distancing itself from a gendered position, but the hosts deliberately distinguish their approach from more academic ways of reading. The barbed script trivializes the reading or non-reading practices of the suburban, all-female book club. Book clubs are middle-class institutions, part of the middle-class package of values that includes education and self-improvement.
