Once upon a time, reading was a solitary activity. Alone in their room, the introverted bookworm would pass the hours immersed in another time and place. But suddenly reading is not only a group activity, it’s a party.
Or maybe not “suddenly”. Book clubs and literary societies have been around for hundreds of years, and after Oprah Winfrey pioneered the model of the celebrity book club on her TV show in the 1990s, others like actor Reese Witherspoon and pop star Dua Lipa have followed in her footsteps on social media. Smaller-scale book influencers in various bookish channel-specific subcultures including BookTube, Bookstagram and now BookTok continue to follow suit. Celebrities and influencers are a boon to publishers as they inspire people of different generations to buy books, read books, and talk about them.
But away from your social media feed, anyone who’s been in an in-real-life book club knows what a challenge they can sometimes be. You fix a date to meet, and then half the people didn’t read the book. Or they give fair warning that they didn’t, and the meeting gets put off, once, twice, indefinitely. Or maybe you’ve all finished the assigned reading, but it seems no one actually read the same book – nobody can agree on anything. And when it comes time to pick a new book, nobody can agree on that, either.
In other words, book clubs can make reading feel like a chore. There’s even homework! For die-hard book addicts who love nothing better than escaping into a book, is this what reading is meant to be?
Which may be why there’s been a recent shift toward a new kind of group reading experience that has moved beyond the living room at home: the silent reading party. The first “official” silent reading party seems to have taken place at Seattle’s Hotel Sorrento in 2009. Started by writer and editor Christopher Frizzelle, readers gathered in the hotel’s cozy wood-panelled Fireside Room to read, listen to ambient live piano music, have a drink, and maybe talk. What was so unique about this book club is that in a room full of strangers, no one was reading the same book, and talking was optional.
The idea caught on. In 2012 Silent Book Clubs started in San Francisco, using the same minimal-commitment formula: meet in a café, bring your own book, talking is not required. They expanded on the model by creating an umbrella organization that spawned new chapters around the world. A buzzy new iteration of this trend is now landing in Italy from America – New York to be exact. Called Reading Rhythms, their innovation – besides apparently trademarking Reading Party™ – seems to be curated music and alcohol-free events: a December event in Milan includes tea and biscuits in your €16 entrance fee.
People will argue about which generation owns the idea, but ultimately it doesn’t matter who started it when you can participate in one of many similar experiences you launch your own. Whether you call it a book club or a reading party, it can be refreshing to find solidarity in the once-solitary experience of reading. Meet in a café or a library or living room. Gather a few friends or find your place among a few hundred you’ve never met before. Alcohol is optional. Talking is optional. The only thing that matters is your belief that a shared passion for reading is something worth celebrating.