Story Club Alternative Chapters 6 & 7

Options for Titles You May Not Want to Learn From

In creating Story Club, I looked for a book where an author explains some writing technique by way of looking to the “greats” that have come before. In our first round of Story Club, using 27 Essential Principles of Story by Joshua Rubin, this included a diverse array of stories from page, screen and audio formats. In Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, this list consists of only novels and that list leans into the world of the best selling books of their time. While compiling the list of novels we would read during this round of Story Club, I could not ignore that, regardless of their popularity at the time, some of those titles have not aged well and have become questionable reading recommendations in 2025. Two that float to the top of that problem pool for at the moment are: