Although I am a writer—and thus, a reader—I’ve never stuck with a book club. I’m too excited by the potential energy of my pile of uncracked titles to bend to the whims of a group. Instead, I prefer the serendipity and intuition of taking a book into my hands and deciding, You’re next.
As it turns out, there is a way to marry these impulses: Silent Book Club.
The now-global organization was created by friends Guinevere de la Mare and Laura Gluhanich in 2015. They had begun reading quietly together at a wine bar in San Francisco a few years earlier. Instead of rushing to finish an agreed-upon book and feeling pressured to have a smart take during discussion, they wanted to create a community around simply enjoying the process of reading alongside others. Within a year, the group had 20 chapters; today, there are over 2,000 chapters in more than 60 countries.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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Members gather in bars and public parks and Zoom chats and hotel lobbies to read books—titles they choose individually—together. On a cold December afternoon a few days before Christmas, I attend my first meeting at Brave Neighbor, a coffee shop attached to a laundromat in Northeast Portland.
Sravani Vadali started Silent Book Club Portland in July 2024. While there are a number of chapters in Portland’s metropolitan area, her monthly meetup maintains a steady Instagram presence, which is how many new members discover the group. In fact, the meeting I drop in to is so well-attended—more than 20 readers pack the café, leaving just a few seats free for others—that I have to share a table. It’s a perfect problem, since the whole point is to build community around an activity usually conducted in isolation.
Emily, my tablemate, plans to read a copy of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass she pulled from one of Portland’s hundreds of Little Free Libraries, while I’ll read Nina MacLaughlin’s 2023 paperback essay, Winter Solstice. After 20 minutes of a group journaling exercise, we are set free for nearly an hour of uninterrupted time. “Happy reading!” Vadali says, before sitting down to her own book.
The majority of the readers are in their 20s and 30s, but it’s a diverse crowd by Portland standards and includes a couple of school-age kids, one of whom is reading the children’s book Bird Nerd, by Jennifer Ann Richter. But most surprising is, well, the silence: the descent into stillness in a public place inhabited by more than two dozen people.
The experience is different from the usual comforts of notebook scribbling or passage underlining in public, a quiet dot in a noisy sea. Instead, we are a collective coalesced around a private reverence for the written word. We have all paused here on a winter weekend, the fleeting sun still shining through the window. We could be anywhere. But we are here, protecting this time.
Soon enough, that reading time is over. Vadali invites us to share what we’re reading—a few words of summary; whether we’d recommend the book. The ensuing conversation proves that silent reading fills the mind with sound and color. A man enjoying a Becky Chambers novel says that he had to resist the urge to laugh out loud so as not to disturb people. A woman explains that she’s only reading “super-lighthearted, cozy things right now,” a brace against the darkness, both seasonal and metaphorical, of these days. We all laugh. We all know. We can share so much with so little.
After a group photo of members holding their books—a cluster of mostly paperbacks and a couple of e-readers—the crowd dissolves into animated chatter, the chapter’s “Shh…We’re reading” signs now happily ignored. On the way out, I run into a man returning to the coffee shop. “Forgot my book!” he says. I’m unsurprised. The book is the key, but people are the open door.•
