You’d be shocked by how many books have women chained in basements,” Reese Witherspoon says. “I know it happens in the world. I don’t want to read a book about it.” Nor does she want to read an academic treatise or a 700-page novel about a tree.

Sitting in her office in Nashville, occasionally dipping into a box of takeout nachos, Witherspoon talks about what she does like to read – and what she looks for in a selection for Reese’s Book Club, which she refers to in a crisp third person.