On Tuesday, in a characteristically delightful interview with Bustle, Dakota Johnson launched her “TeaTime” book club, announcing that her first pick was Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino. It’s a quiet, lyrical book published in January by FSG, about a working-class girl named Adina who is born in 1977 and soon starts being visited each night by aliens from another galaxy who use her to glean information about life on Earth. It’s exactly the kind of slightly off-kilter thing you’d expect Dakota Johnson to be drawn to if, like me, you are a semi-scholar of the queen nepo baby who made a fool of Ellen DeGeneres and has claimed both to love and to be allergic to limes and simply will not promote her wannabe-blockbuster movie, Madame Web, which is what she’s really supposed to be doing interviews about right now. Instead, here she was talking about her book club. “Our book club is literary fiction. It’s not beach reads. It’s not silly,” Johnson told Bustle. “It’s not all female authors, but it is female-forward, and it’s a lot of first-time novelists.” She wants to use the club to bring a bit of gravitas to Instagram: “People need to deep dive into knowledge about specific things rather than talking about what fucking face serum they’re using and thinking that that’s the most important thing in the world.” She then went on to say that she loves face serum.
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