Silence in the Book Club!

A few months ago, a friend of mine posted in a group chat about the idea of "silent book clubs." This is a new trend (I guess it's a BookTok thing?) where people get together to read books. But unlike what you might associate with book clubs, people getting together to talk about books, in these people get together to not talk. The idea here is that everyone works on a book they want to read, away from the distractions of home and work.

My friend Kim thought this sounded stressful—would these people judge her for the slightest noise she made? (my friend Kim is always afraid of being judged)—but to me it sounded potentially fun.

I totally forgot about it for a couple months until I came across a post in the Tampa subreddit, where someone was looking for things to do, and someone else recommended the newly formed Silent Book Club of Riverview. (There is also a Tampa one, but Riverview is a Tampa suburb close to the Tampa suburb that I live in.) I have been looking for things to do that bring me into contact with other people more often, so I hunted down and joined the facebook group.

bookstack for April meeting

The first meeting I attended was the April one, which was at a coffee shop—actually one closer to my neighborhood than Riverview, conveniently enough. The meeting was on a Sunday, and ran from 1:00 to 3:00pm. The procedure is that you have from 1:00 to 1:30 to check in, order drinks, and get set up, then everyone reads silently from 1:30 to 2:30. The last half hour is for chit-chat or more reading or whatever.

I did indeed get a nice hour of uninterrupted reading time; I read most of The Mimicking of Known Successes, a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novella. One fun thing is that we were given a target word, and anyone who found that word in their own reading got a prize. I did not find it, but it was fun to hear the other readers read their sentences aloud.

I had kind of imagined there might be some kind of discussion prompt for the last thirty minutes ("what did you read? how was it?" or the like), but it wasn't very structured, and if there's anything that makes me awkward it's talking to people I don't already know in an unknown environment, so I hightailed it out of there after the bookstack photo and the group photo.

bookstack for May meeting

Still, I was into it enough to go back for the May one, which was held at a brewery. This place had loud music, and I accidentally staked out a table basically as far away from the organizer as it was possible to be, so I had a hard time hearing anything she said this time. If there was a target word, I do not know what it was. But I did get a nice hour of uninterrupted reading time with Naomi Kritzer's Liberty's Daughter, a Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book finalist.

I had thought maybe I would chat with some people after? But I am awkward and wasn't sitting near anyone and so I once again bolted ASAP. I will be back in the future, I expect, but I am finding that I do wish there was a little more talking at the silent book club! Am I part of the problem?