Shssh! It’s the Silent Book Club

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I don’t remember when I first heard about silent book clubs (it was fairly recently) but I was delighted to find out through LinkedIn that one existed in my hometown. I have never been a member of a book club, although my wife is a member of at least two, or is it three? I have always been chary of making the commitment to read a certain amount of content by a set date, given how easily distracted I am by the normal run of events, and so have never stepped up to join one. (As an aside, I am delighted that my wife enjoys them though, because periodically she hosts one of her groups at our home with the happy result that after everyone leaves, there is lots of leftover home baking to enjoy). But I digress. One of the advantages of the silent book club format is that there is no commitment to read a certain book by a certain date. You can read whatever you want, at your pace, and simply show up to discuss your book, (or not), and learn about others.

According to the website Silent Book Club (trademark registered, apparently), it all started in San Francisco in 2012 (although I suspect the format has been going on for much longer than that). There is a community of over 2000 chapters in more than 60 countries ranging from Iceland to Indonesia. You can go on to the website to find one in your community. While there you can also order a BYOB (Bring Your Own Book) hat or sign up for a book reading retreat in Italy or Hawaii.

Silent book clubs are supposedly attractive to introverts, and it is true that reading a book can be a pleasurable solitary experience not necessarily shared openly with others. But it can also be a social experience; think of Grandma and Grandpa silently rocking by the fire while they read their books together(maybe in silence broken only by the ticking of the wall clock) or people congregating in libraries to read in each others’ company (silently). In the case of silent book clubs, after a period of quiet reading participants are encouraged to share with others information on the book they are reading, but there is no pressure to do so. So how does it work in practice?

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I decided to kick the tires on our own Silent Book Club in town. We were informed it would gather at a local bistro at 2 pm and that is where we showed up, ready to go. It wasn’t hard to find the gathering because of the noise. It was the most unsilent silent book club imaginable. Animated people were busy introducing themselves, ordering coffee (or stronger tipples), and generally enjoying themselves. There were about 30 people in all, although only 4 of them were men. Good odds. The coordinator came around and took note of everyone’s book and then set the timer. Silence fell, only to be broken by the occasional slurp of coffee and the rustle of the turned page. Of all those present, I only noticed one person using an e-reader, which I found a bit surprising given the growing popularity of digital books, as I discussed in a recent blog post. A few had what were obviously library books, outed by their bar codes on the covers, but most people seemed to have turned up with a purchased paperback edition of their current favourite. I was astounded at how quickly the hour of quiet reading went by. Then it was time to break into small groups and discuss our respective books. This I found to be the most interesting part of the experience.

There were 4 women and one other man in my group. Both my male colleague and I were reading non-fiction, but all the women were into fiction. I was and am reading He Did Not Conquer, the recent book written by Canadian journalist Madeleine Drohan about Benjamin Franklin’s obsession with having Canada (then mostly the settled area around Montreal and Quebec City, populated mostly by French-speaking merchants, habitants and clergy) join what became the United States. While everyone knows that Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, the book traces his long obsession with “Canada” because of the presence of a large, predominantly ethnic French population professing, in the parlance of the day, “Popish” beliefs, and the threat he believed they posed to the English-speaking colonies and later the US. Even before the Declaration of Independence in 1776 a ragtag American army had captured Montreal and attacked Quebec City (on December 31, 1775), only to be driven off. Franklin spent some time in Montreal in April and May, 1776, trying unsuccessfully to convince the locals to join the revolutionary cause. That was my book, certainly relevant today given the current 51st state rhetoric from Donald Trump. The other non-fiction work was For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising, by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, also extremely topical given what is happening in Iran today.

The books being read by my female companions were equally eclectic. They included Yellowface by Asian-American writer Rebecca F. Kuang, a complicated story of plagiarism and self-justification apparently and a Canadian novel by Elizabeth Hay, set in Yellowknife, NWT, titled Late Nights on Air. Another was a Freida McFadden mystery (I forget which one, but it inspired me to go and see the movie The Housemaid based on one of her books). The final book was The Island of Sea Women, by Lisa See, which is a story of female friendship set in Korea’s Jeju Island. It features two haenyeo, females who dive (traditionally without assistance of breathing apparatus) for abalone, woven with a story of Japanese occupation and collaboration. This is a pretty impressive Asian background setting for an American writer although Lisa See has written a number of books with oriental themes. So there you have it, a microcosm of what people are reading just from my small discussion group. It was an interesting range of interests and topics and I learned quite a bit.  My wife and I think we’ll be back again next month. Group reading, even silently, is fun and can be very social. Why not give it a try?

© Hugh Stephens, 2026.