From Laufey to Dua Lipa, eight living stars who champion the humble library card, and why the world’s slowest membership is having its loudest moment.
There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about a library card. It is small enough to disappear into a wallet, yet it can open the door to thousands of stories, unfamiliar countries, forgotten histories, new ideas, and entirely different lives.
Perhaps that is why, in an age of infinite scrolling and algorithmically selected entertainment, the humble library card keeps finding unlikely champions. Some are musicians. Others are actors. Some host book clubs, some make podcasts about literature, and others simply insist that a library remains one of the best places to spend an afternoon.
Here are eight famous readers who have helped make libraries and books feel a little more irresistible.
1. Laufey
Few contemporary musicians have made reading feel quite as charming as Laufey. The Icelandic-Chinese singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist founded the Laufey Book Club in 2022, building a global community around books alongside her music.
In 2026, The American Library Association named Laufey the honorary chair of Library Card Sign-up Month, which takes place every September. She will also appear in ALA’s celebrity READ campaign.
For Laufey, libraries are personal. Growing up between cultures and moving often, she has said, libraries were a safe haven, a place where a book about Iceland, a volume on classical music and a fantasy novel could each speak to a different part of her, and where her wanderlust was well satiated.
Last year, she launched limited edition Laufey Book Club cards with Boston Public Library, Fulton County, LA County, Phoenix and a system in Iceland, and sign-ups broke records at most of them on launch day. This year, the collaboration is expanding across the United States.
2. Jason Schwartzman
The actor known for Rushmore and The Darjeeling Limited has a disarmingly simple reason for loving libraries: they make him feel calm.
Asked by The New York Times for the ten things he cannot live without, Schwartzman listed his library card alongside the Los Angeles Dodgers and helping his daughter with her homework. “I feel calm in libraries,” he said, and goes on to describe how everyone else is calm too, working or researching. It makes it almost like a film set where he has to pretend to be working as well.
His affection is not really about the borrowing. It is about the atmosphere, the quiet company of people reading and researching in the same room. Which makes this the best case anyone has made recently for the library as a third place: what you check out is the borrowed concentration of strangers, and no app has figured out how to sell that.
3. Dua Lipa
Dua Lipa has turned her enthusiasm for books into an international reading community. She launched the Service95 Book Club in June 2023 with an onstage conversation about Shuggie Bain with Douglas Stuart at the Hay Festival. Each month, she personally selects a title representing writing from across the globe, wrapped in author interviews, exclusive essays, further reading lists, and playlists, plus a podcast conversation with the writer.
Service95’s own framing is an invitation to “read the world differently,” and library systems have picked up that exact phrase, building staff-curated catalogue lists that follow her picks.
The reading list moves restlessly across countries and forms. In 2026 alone, her choices have run from Mark Ronson’s memoir of DJing in 1990s New York to Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. Earlier picks reached further still, into Patrick Radden Keefe’s account of the Northern Ireland Troubles and a love story set against 1980s Communist Poland.
In June, she gave the book club a physical home. The Manifesto Library, a permanent collection of 100 books housed in the cultural auditorium at Livraria Lello in Porto, is dedicated to titles that challenge power, censorship, exclusion and dominant narratives, and is organized around four themes: power, control, voice, and memory. “This library is a shrine to books that have disappeared,” she wrote, “to authors whose courage unmasks structures of power and control, and to readers who refuse to be told what book they are allowed to read.”
This autumn she goes further. She is curating the Southbank Centre’s 2026 London Literature Festival, running from October 21 to November 1, with conversations including Zadie Smith, Patti Smith and the poet Mustafa. “Reading has anchored me through every chapter of my life,” Dua Lipa said, describing books as a quiet refuge on tour.
4. Angourie Rice
Angourie Rice’s library cards are more than a gimmick. She belongs to six libraries, collecting new memberships when filming in different cities, including a New Jersey card she picked up while making Mean Girls.
Her love of reading also fuels The Community Library, a podcast she has hosted since 2019 to make literary discussion more accessible. Its episodes range from Shakespeare and Jane Austen to Taylor Swift and Percy Jackson, reflecting her belief that reading should never feel intimidating or exclusive.
Rice’s approach is refreshingly simple: you do not need a literature degree to read Austen or understand every reference in Shakespeare. You can simply pick up a book and begin.
5. Sarah Jessica Parker
Long before Sarah Jessica Parker became associated with New York, fashion and Carrie Bradshaw’s book-filled apartment, libraries were part of her childhood. Her mother was a devoted reader, and there was one rule in their house: never leave the house without a book, even if you can’t read yet. Parker says she still follows it, sometimes turning back for a book even when she is running late.
Her love of reading has remained a constant. She has described reading on film sets, on the subway and anywhere else she can find a quiet moment.
In 2017, Parker became honorary chair of the American Library Association’s Book Club Central, helping promote books and reading communities. She has described her local library as a place where she could “find a new friend on every shelf.”
6. LeVar Burton
For several generations of readers, LeVar Burton is practically synonymous with the joy of books. Much of the book world traces its love of reading to his PBS children’s series, Reading Rainbow, and he has carried the work forward with LeVar Burton Reads, the podcast on which he reads short fiction aloud. By 2023, it had run 12 seasons, more than 175 episodes, and 25 million downloads.
His advocacy goes well beyond encouraging people to read. In 2023, he became the first actor to serve as honorary chair of Banned Books Week, the annual event held that year from October 1 to 7 that brings the book community together in support of the freedom to seek and express ideas. “Books bring us together. They teach us about the world and each other,” he said, arguing that shelves have been emptied because of a small number of people’s misguided efforts toward censorship. He said that everyone should do at least one thing to defend the right to read.
The Right to Read, a documentary that premiered that year in which Burton is an executive producer, positions America’s literacy crisis as a civil rights issue. His career carries a lesson about reading itself. Books are not valuable because they tell us what to think. They are valuable because they give us the room to think at all. Which makes a library, at its best, a place where curiosity is protected.
7. Ebon Moss-Bachrach
The library card has found a champion in an unexpected place: among the everyday essentials of The Bear star Ebon Moss-Bachrach. Asked by GQ in 2024 to name the 10 things he cannot live without, the star of The Bear chose his Brooklyn Public Library card. He praised the library’s digital offerings that he enjoys often while away from home, and closed by thanking librarians for their hard work.
He is not describing a room he misses. He is describing something he uses on the road, between jobs, which is a more convincing endorsement than nostalgia. As the audience, we can take it as a simple reminder that a library card doesn’t just grant access to physical books, but a whole range of digital media you can carry with you wherever you go.
8. Oprah Winfrey
Few readers with a public platform have done more to turn reading into a communal ritual than Oprah Winfrey. Her book recommendations have brought millions of readers into the same stories, while the ALA credits her Book Club with helping renew interest in reading and libraries.
Her own relationship with libraries began in childhood. Winfrey has recalled that getting her library card felt like “citizenship,” and she has encouraged parents to make a special occasion of taking children to the library and getting their own cards.
Her story captures what libraries do best: turning a private love of books into a shared experience. A teenager can sit beside a retiree, a student can discover a writer from another country, and a child can find a story that changes how they see the world. A library card is not simply an access pass. It is a small invitation to belong.
Why Everyone Needs a Library Card
The appeal of these celebrities is not their fame, but what their love of books represents. A library card asks us to slow down, browse instead of scroll, and encounter stories and ideas beyond our usual worlds. Their enthusiasm reminds us that reading can make us more curious about other people, cultures, and ways of seeing the world.
A book can take us across the world without leaving our chair, introduce us to lives unlike our own, and open doors to ideas we might never encounter otherwise. And at the library, that experience remains wonderfully accessible to everyone.
So the next time you pass a library, step inside. Browse the shelves slowly. Ask a librarian what they love. Pick up a book you would never have searched for online. You might arrive looking for something to read and leave with a new world to explore.
Because sometimes, the best journeys begin with a library card.
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K Lou
K. Lou is a writer born in the U.S. who found her way to Japan through a spiritual calling—or, more precisely, better access to tea. She writes about travel, culture, and the occasional creative piece, inspired by her enduring love of books. This love began in high school when K. Lou carried books around to avoid seeming odd while lost in thought. Once she started reading, she never stopped. With zero regrets, she continues to explore the written word and invites others to join her in celebrating its varied forms.
