Silent Book Clubs For Introverted Readers

Silent Book Clubs can be found all over the world from the USA to Hong Kong, Italy to India, London to Sweden!

If you are the type of person who enjoys reading in company- but you don’t like the prospect of being forced to converse with anyone- then a silent book club may be for you.

Silent Book Club was founded by a couple of friends in 2012 who enjoyed reading in “companionable silence” at their local bar, after their previous attempts at regular book clubs had not worked out.

Traditional book clubs usually involve a pressure to finish the assigned book, and the awkward added pressure of having to offer something clever to the discussion. Imagine a book club without those pressures!

“Wouldn’t it be great to have a book club where you could just enjoy books, friends, and wine—without any homework?”

Silent Book Club was founded by Guinevere de la Mare and Laura Gluhanich, in hopes it would inspire other people to start Silent Book Clubs of their own.

“I wished that I had a book club where basically there was no assigned reading but you could just show up, hang out with your friends, talk about what you were reading and then just sort of read your book with no pressure to prepare snacks or vacuum your house or do any of the things that normal, traditional book club hosting entails,” said de la Mare, “And Laura was like, ‘That sounds amazing. Let’s do it.’ And so we did.”

The great thing about a Silent Book Club is that the group can be anything from a few friends to a pub full of reading addicts. The team at Silent Book Club offer advice and help along the way, as well as templates for flyers and posters to advertise the club.

It is so easy to start a silent book club of your own– all you need is a good book, a few friends, and a local bar. If you then want to open an official public Silent Book Club, it just takes a little more effort to reach out to your community with some help from the SBC team, and perhaps gather some supplies such as Silent Book Club bookmarks and notebooks for your group.

“Bring a book, bring a friend. Then read, wine, repeat.”