Silent Book Club: low-pressure reading group comes to Halifax

It’s a book club where the chit-chat is optional, reading is the focus — and everyone decides on their own book.

Silent Book Club was founded in San Francisco in 2012, by friends Guinevere de la Mare and Laura Gluhanich. Now, there are more than 500 affiliated clubs in this “global community of readers and introverts,” with Halifax as one of the newest chapters.

The idea behind Silent Book Club is disarmingly simple. A group of people get together in a public space — not a host’s home — and they sit together and read. Some clubs meet in bookshops, some in cafes, or bars, or libraries. Some meet outdoors. Some meet on Zoom. Some change it up. In addition to the silent reading period, club members are welcome to share a few words about what they are reading or listening to (audiobooks are welcome) — but there is no obligation. Sometimes there are other reading-related discussion topics too.

Talia Bond is the founder of the Halifax Silent Book Club, which is holding its second meeting on Saturday, December 2, at the Good Robot Brewery. Bond is a psychiatry resident, and she was motivated to start the club in part because she has so little time to read. “I love reading, but I have a challenge making time for it,” she said in an interview.

The idea of joining a traditional book club had interested Bond in the past, but she never did it because she was worried about having time to read the assigned book before meetings.

She heard about Silent Book Club after posts about it went viral on TikTok and Instagram last summer. “I love reading, and I love meeting new people and doing things with friends, so I thought this was the perfect opportunity to prioritize both those things while still having it be very low stress,” Bond said. “You don’t have to read a book every month to join the book club. You don’t have to have prepped answers to questions before you go. It’s very much all the fun of a book club without having the pressure to read a book that you may or may not enjoy, or may or may not have time for before the meeting.”

Bond went looking for a Halifax Silent Book Club, and when she couldn’t find one, she decided to start one herself. She created a Facebook group for the club, and is shocked that it now has over 100 members. “I was kind of expecting it to be, you know, just like me and a couple of friends, and we’d meet a few more people.”

Vicki Ziegler is co-founder of the Silent Book Club Toronto, and has headed it for six years. She and an acquaintance, Jo Nelson, started the club after a post-yoga class conversation in a city park.

In an interview, Ziegler said, “Jo told me, ‘Oh, my latest book club just died: in-fighting, and nobody wanted to read the book. And it was awful, and it was dysfunctional, and it always had to be at this one person’s house, and it was so controlling,’ and blah, blah, blah.”

Ziegler, a lifelong book fanatic who loves to promote reading (she’s a web designer and social media manager by trade) had recently read about Silent Book Club, and now it seemed like an opportunity was dropping into her lap. Meeting silently, in a public place, with participants choosing their own books? That would eliminate most of the tensions that had killed Nelson’s book club — along with so many others.

“One of the things [de la Mare and Gluhanich] were very emphatic about in how the Silent Book Club developed is that you get out of your home. Nobody hosts it, so nobody’s on the hook for beverages and pastries and cleaning the living room. You’re out in public, so that controlling thing isn’t there; that pressure isn’t there,” Ziegler said. “I described it to Jo after the yoga class, and she said we should try it. She’d had sort of a string of book club failures, and said somebody was always pressuring everybody to read the same book, and there was tacit agreement that everyone would read the same book, but people ended up not being happy about it.”

For in-person meetings, getting out of the house is also a way to ensure uninterrupted reading time, especially when so many of us are so distracted all the time by our devices, or other responsibilities. Ziegler said some members have young families and appreciate the “dedicated quiet time.” She added, “I think there is also some — shaming is way too strong a word for it, but there’s some group solidarity when we’re all sitting here, and we’re reading, and I’m getting into the groove with the rest of the group, and you look around and everyone might have a coffee in front of them, but they’ve turned their phones off and they are connecting with their books. And I think that helps people who are maybe getting their reading mojo back.”

Organizing the club takes a fair bit of effort, Ziegler said, because it involves finding venues that are accommodating, and trying to ensure enough people turn up.

“Part of doing this for me, and I think it’s inspiration from Laura and Guinevere, is you’re supporting local businesses. And if only three of us are coming to a coffee shop, we’re just a table — three coffees and some cookies,” Ziegler said. “I want to make it worth the owner’s while, and then potentially the owner makes it worth our while to have some critical mass… I really felt that unless we had at least half a dozen people, and could take up a nice footprint or a nice corner in a bookstore or a coffee shop, it kind of wasn’t worth doing.” But finding numbers has not turned out to be a problem.

Although some Silent Book Clubs draw dozens, even hundreds, of readers, Ziegler said she doesn’t find that personally appealing, and prefers a more modest turnout.

She said she “takes the temperature” before committing to a meeting, to make sure enough folks are going to show up. “I’m now in discussion with a coffee shop owner about how we can configure his space, so we can take up that space and not bother other patrons, because we do have discussion and then we have silent reading. And even for the small group [of six] that we had last Saturday, the barista told me afterwards that all kinds of people were coming up to the counter and going, ‘What are those people in the corner doing? They’re just sitting there.’ It’s kind of a curiosity to see a group of people just sitting there quietly with books.”

The group has met consistently throughout the pandemic, switching to Zoom, outdoor meetings, and gatherings in drafty locales. Now, they’ve gone back to coffee shops, but the Zoom meetings have continued as well. For the Toronto Silent Book Club Zoom meetings, participants chat about their books, then make a commitment to read for an hour.

The Halifax Silent Book Club’s inaugural meeting took place at the Central Library in August, with about 10 people in attendance. Now that another member, Cara McInnis, is helping out with organizing, Bond hopes to set up a regular monthly meeting time.

Like Bond, McInnis first heard of Silent Book Club through social media. A friend in the U.S. who belongs to a club posted about it on Instagram. While she’s never belonged to a formal book club, McInnis said she has had “friend groups that socialized through monthly meetups where we all brought our own books and hung out while reading.”

With Silent Book Club, “You get to read, but also find other readers in a setting that’s a bit more comfortable. It sort of feels like an introverted reader’s gold mine,” McInnis said. “Plus it gets you out of the house and exploring new places in the city.”

Bond said she was encouraged by the demographics of the first Halifax meeting, which included readers ranging from young adults to seniors.

“Definitely it helps encourage people to get back to reading, by being surrounded by other people who are reading and enjoying books. You get to talk with other members about what they’re reading, and since everyone’s not reading the same book, you get lots of ideas of what you might be interested in — different recommendations,” Bond said. “It just really jumpstarts your love for reading again. You get out, you spend an hour reading together, and then you want to read more when you get home.”