Is reading dead? Not at the Bay Area’s thriving Silent Book Clubs

“I wish we had a book club without homework,” Guinevere de la Mare remembers telling her friend Laura Gluhanich back in 2012 when the two women — who’d become friends over their mutual love of books — were catching up at a San Francisco wine bar.

She’d been feeling stressed about not having finished a recent book club selection and began imagining what it would be like to just sit and read with friends, rather than meet up to talk about what they’d read.

“Let’s do it,” Gluhanich said.

And that’s how Silent Book Club started in San Francisco, according to de la Mare. Today, it’s grown into a global movement described widely as “introvert happy hour,” with more than 2,200 chapters in 70 countries and on all seven continents. Meetups have been held in locales as far-flung as Antarctica’s McMurdo Station.

But in the first couple of years, it was just Gluhanich and de la Mare. They started meeting up regularly to read, with just one rule: They had to each read one chapter of their respective books before they could start chatting. Soon, other friends heard about the practice and wanted to start their own reading gatherings. In 2015, Silent Book Club launched a website and social media accounts and began to formalize how people could start their own chapters.

“From there, it really has just been an upward trajectory,” de la Mare says. “We definitely saw the most significant growth after the pandemic. People were really, after lockdown, looking for ways to get back into the world in a safe, low-stakes way. Silent Book Club catered to that.”

The booming popularity of Silent Book Clubs stands in stark contrast to a series of statistics about the state of reading in the U.S.: A popular Atlantic article last month that confidently declared “The end of reading is here” in its title cited reports that fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book in 2022, and that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day fell to 16% in 2023 from 28% in 2004.

Yet de la Mare remains bullish on the future of reading.

“Are people sitting by the fire reading leather-bound hardcover classics in the evenings? Nope, that’s definitely not happening as much anymore. Are young adults reading? Absolutely. Romantasy is booming,” de la Mare says. “If you spend a minute on BookTok or talk to independent bookstore authors who are bringing communities together to rise up and fight against Amazon, there is a huge movement of people who are very passionate about reading.”

Younger people in the millennial and Gen Z cohorts are also combining reading with socializing to combat loneliness, she says. “Connecting through books and book clubs is one of the ways they’re doing it.”

Silent Book Clubs have established a strong presence in the Bay Area. The trademarked organization gives each chapter a license to use the brand, and organizers agree to follow the format: Hold a free meetup in a public place, and set aside an hour for quiet reading, with an option for people to stay and chat afterward. Beyond that, chapters are given flexibility to pick the time, frequency, location and method for publicizing their events, de la Mare says.

As a result, bookstores, libraries and individuals have taken the template and run with it, building their own reader communities around the world. “We try to keep our arms as open as possible to make room for more readers,” she says.

The meetups are particularly helpful for people who are new in town as a tool for making new friends, de la Mare adds. “You can identify as a book lover and find ‘kindred spirits,’ as Anne of Green Gables would say.”

That’s how Cleo Brock got involved with the San Jose Silent Book Club chapter. “I’d just moved to the Bay, and I didn’t know anyone,” she says. “I ended up finding some really good friends through this. To dive into talking about how good a book was — or how bad — you realize how many other things you have in common with people who read, separate from literature.”

Brock, along with friends and co-moderators, Michelle Berg, Hannah Nielsen and Amy Ly, now run Silent Book Club events in San Jose and Campbell nearly every week, moving between libraries, cafes, parks and pubs, coordinating sessions for readers of different book formats — the group hosts monthly audiobook walks, and recently hosted a “Matcha & Manga” meetup at the Campbell cafe Maruwu Seicha.

At Banter Bookshop, which opened in Fremont in 2022, around 10 to 20 people come to the store after hours on the second Wednesday of each month for Silent Book Club, according to owner Amy Davis.

“It’s been very positive for the store,” she says. “It seems to bring a lot of joy to a lot of people.”

There’s a wide range of ages represented in the readers who attend the Fremont events, and some of the Banter Bookshop regulars are starting to build friendships. They seem to appreciate the hour of quiet time, as well as the opportunity to take a break from screens, Davis says.

“I think we do have to pay attention to refocusing and building our stamina for focus,” she says. “It’s great to see people are still making it a priority.”

If You Go

There are chapters in Oakland, Concord, Richmond, Benicia, Pittsburg, South San Francisco, Millbrae, Burlingame, San Mateo, Redwood City, Sunnyvale, San Jose, Fremont, San Francisco and Santa Cruz. A new Silent Book Club chapter in Livermore is also in the works at Word on the Street Books, a new bookstore set to open later this summer.

Or, if you’ve got the time and money, the organization also offers reading retreats around the world, with upcoming destinations including Sardinia, the Colorado Rockies, Regency England and Vietnam.

Go to silentbook.club to track down the meeting times for a convenient chapter near you.