After he was voted off the dating show “Love Island USA” last month, Jeremiah Brown wasn’t sure what to do with his newfound fame.
During his 16 days as a contestant, he’d gained more than two million followers on TikTok, up from just 44 before he went on the show. Shortly after his exit, a suggestion from a follower on social media immediately grabbed him.
“Somebody said, you should start a book club, and I was like, oh my gosh, lightbulb,” Brown said in an interview. “The second I read this idea, I was like yeah, we got to do this.”
When Brown posted about his book club in early July, the announcement generated wild enthusiasm. Soon, the club had around 120,000 members.
“Y’all some nerds,” Brown told his followers.
After polling club members on what genre they wanted to read (romance, naturally), Brown gave them a list of books to vote on, which included BookTok favorites like “It Ends With Us,” “Beach Read,” “Twisted Love” and “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” The winner, by several thousand votes, was “The Song of Achilles,” by Madeline Miller.
The novel, which is more of an epic tragedy than a romance, has already attracted a wide audience, selling more than 4 million copies since its release in 2012. Set during the Trojan War, it imagines a doomed love affair between the warrior Achilles and his devoted companion Patroclus.
The novel got an immediate boost from Brown’s book club, called Jeremiah’s Reading Room, which will meet on TikTok, Discord and Instagram. Shortly after Brown revealed it as the pick, the novel climbed Amazon’s sales rankings, from around 500 into the top 100. Posts with the hashtag “Song of Achilles” rose by 30 percent on TikTok during the first week of July.
It’s not surprising that Brown, a model who lives in Los Angeles, has such devoted followers, many of whom seem willing not just to scroll through shirtless photos of him on Instagram, but to pick up a book on his recommendation. “Love Island,” a reality show on Peacock that’s now in its seventh season, has become a cultural phenomenon. The show brings a group of contestants to a luxury villa in Fiji, where they are tasked with finding romance, or getting booted off.
Miller said in an email that she was “thrilled” when she heard from her publicist that a reality TV contestant had directed more readers her way. “It makes me so happy that new readers are coming to this book from so many different mediums,” she said.
She wasn’t watching “Love Island” but is now “going down a rabbit hole,” she said.
For Brown, who mostly reads what he described as “self-mastery” books by authors like Ryan Holiday and Mark Manson, the book club is a way to get himself to read more widely, and to create more meaningful conversations among his followers, he said. (During an interview on Thursday, Brown said he hadn’t started reading “The Song of Achilles” yet).
“It feels like something that we could have that’s more than just content on TikTok,” he said. “It was something I could build and have a community around.”
He’s planning to pick a new genre and new book every three months or so by polling members. Comments and questions related to “Love Island” will be banned during book club discussions on social media to keep the focus on the book, he said.
His approach to choosing books — letting the people decide — is unorthodox for a book club with so many members. Brown said he decided to run the club that way so that his own tastes don’t dictate the selections.
As the latest celebrity to launch a book club, Brown is entering a sphere that’s dominated by prominent women, including Jenna Bush Hager, Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey and Emma Roberts. Brown said he doesn’t envision the club as a way to get more men to read fiction, but he’s been happy to see it having that effect, at least among his friends, he said.
“It is funny to see my bros text me with pictures like, look what you got me out here reading bro, and it was ‘Song of Achilles,’ he said.
After failing to find love on “Love Island,” Brown seemed stunned by the response to his book club.
“There were some days in there when I thought, dang I might have ruined my life,” he said. “I would have never thought it would get this amount of love.”
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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