Another all-male reading group, this one with a name even more insistently macho than that of the Man Book Club, is the International Ultra Manly Book Club, of Kansas City, Kan. It was started by a group of college friends, and its website hammers home its he-man identity through prominent images of Chuck Norris, Dwayne Johnson (better known as the Rock) and Oprah Winfrey, standing before an Oprah’s Book Club logo beneath the legend “Not Your Mother’s Book Club.”

Unlike the Marin County group, the International Ultra Manly Book Club is not big on the dinner-party element. When one of its members does bring food to one of the monthly get-togethers, it tends to be “manly — like, spicy,” said John Creagar, 32, one of the regulars.

In explaining the club’s purpose, the International Ultra Manly Book Club website makes explicit the notion that men take literature as seriously as women. The “About Us” section says it was founded, in part, on the vision that “one day we could step out of the shadow of our mothers’ book clubs and proclaim that yes, we too, are intellectuals.”

If that mission statement seems a tad defensive, there are indeed women who treat book clubs as entities that lie beyond the masculine sphere. Two years ago, Edward Nawotka, 44, a writer and editor in Houston, was out for drinks with the guys from his reading group, the Houston Men’s Book Club, when a woman started hitting on its president.

“She asked how we knew each other, and when we said, ‘book club,’ she was like, ‘Wait, are you gay?’” Mr. Nawotka said. (He added that he and the woman ended up dating.)