I sort of accidentally started a book club three years ago.
I told friends online that I was going to re-read one of my favourite books, Tolstoy's War and Peace, over a year. 'Would anyone like to join me?' I expected maybe half a dozen to be interested in the idea. But the post went viral, and hundreds of people got involved. By 1 Jan 2023, there were over a thousand of us from all over the world! I had never been part of a book club, and now I was running this enormous international group – it was a forbidding prospect, and exciting!
Our first year was extraordinary. We read a chapter a day and discussed it online. Our reading group became this place of calm, while individual readers faced personal challenges and the outside world felt more turbulent than ever. We had these wonderful connections across continents, with everyone reading the same page and immersed in the story. Towards the end of the year, people shared what the slow reading group had meant to them – it was incredibly moving.
In 2024, I decided to do the same with Hilary Mantel's Cromwell books. The first two (Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies) won the Booker Prize, and the third (The Mirror and the Light) is one of my all-time favourites. The discussions we had about these three books were such a profound pleasure, and the re-readers amongst us saw all kinds of things we had never noticed before.
We're now in our third year, and the book club has taken over my life. It has its own newsletter and website (Footnotes & Tangents), and I work full-time on creating material for it and hosting the discussions. Looking towards the future and some other Booker Prize-winning novels I'm keen to do: A S Byatt's Possession, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Pat Barker's The Ghost Road.
As normally such a solitary reader, I never knew I would get so much satisfaction and fulfilment from reading together. This book club is certainly the best accident I've ever had!
Slow reading is an art and wonderfully rewarding as a community experience. We are often daunted by our "lack of time" to read a lengthy work, and forget that great 19th century novels by Dickens and others were serialized and read over years, and that readers across the Atlantic were part of that process. Congratulations on reviving this important reading practice!
Congratulations on a multi-layered achievement...bringing together diverse groups of people is always challenging, and nearly miraculous in such divisive times.
Thank you! And yes, creating civil places on and offline is essential right now. It has been remarkable how courteous and respectful people have been in this group.
We’re 60 readers - parents, nurses, librarians, teachers, care workers, accountants, retirees and more - bound together by stories. We’ve welcomed babies , seen members move towns, and watched quiet coffees bloom into lifelong friendships. People come and go, but what anchors us? The revelation of seeing a story through sixty pairs of eyes.
And Booker novels? They’ve been our companions. We’ve lived inside Bernadine Evaristo’s kaleidoscopic Girl, Woman, Other, argued fiercely over Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, and sat quietly with Damon Galgut’s haunting The Promise. We grappled with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar. And just this year, we let Yael van der Wouden’s The Safe Keep settle into our bones.
What binds us isn’t just the reading. It’s showing up, month after month, year after year. Turning pages together, we’ve built a quiet kind of family.
I found my book club through an old uni friend. We studied literature together years before so it seemed a natural extension of that. At the time I was so lost. In a terrible relationship, with very few friends, unstable work, and bouncing around share houses. Those women and our monthly meetings saved me. For a couple of hours every month I got to put all the drama of my life aside and reconnect to my joy and passion - books. They challenged my reading, pushing me outside my comfort zone. And they became my community, a place where I was accepted and supported. Since joining I've started writing my own book, got a good job, a perfect fiance, and a whole new lease on life.
Book clubs are vital. Everyone needs a space to honour their passions. Getting to yap about books is a gift, it makes me feel vital and alive.
These women have become my friends, I've gotten to celebrate there marriages, book launches, buying houses, making art, trying new hobbies... They are the fiercest most fascinating people I know.
I've now joined a second book club. I just can't get enough.
If I had to give young women one piece of advice it would be to join a book club. It will change your life.
As a twenty-something living in Cape Town, South Africa, it became increasingly difficult to make genuine friends, especially after the pandemic. An expat from Ukraine created an Instagram page called CPT.Reads which blew up. This was around two and a half years ago. We are around 10 core members who meet monthly to discuss a book. There are members who come and go due to the summer appeal Cape Town has for digital nomads. We all have super diverse reading tastes, and we like to give each other a chance to shine. We are no longer just a book club but I friendship circle. In fact, in March we had a wedding where the bride met the groom's sister at book club who introduced them. This book club changed everyone's lives for the better by bringing a diverse group of ladies together over our shared love of reading.
I had just started my master's program and I wanted to read something interesting and fun that wasn't necessarily romance books - which, honestly, take up most of my reading these days - and that wasn't academic articles. I found a group that had been meeting for several years who were all friends after knowing each other for so long. I joined, not knowing what to expect since it was my first book club, and everyone was super welcoming, they discussed the things they loved about the writing and the plot. We were never judged if we didn't like the book or didn't finish it on time, it was more about connection.
I found so many interesting perspectives as a result of reading along with everyone. I would look at the book one way and share my experience and someone else had a completely different experience with the same book. It was fascinating and made me love some of the books even more. It was never about the stuff I learned about in literature classes like themes or character stereotypes, it was about enjoying a story.
I have been a member of my book club for over 30 years. We were 10 women, now we are 9, and we meet more or less monthly in each other's houses. 5 of us are English, 2 American, one Canadian and one Slovenian. What we have in common is that we all married Mexicans and moved to Mexico many years ago. We have read a lot of books, nearly all in English and the only problem we have is circling the book between us all in time for the next meeting. It's not so hard nowadays since the invention of kindles and online reading, but most of us prefer the real thing.
Holding a book, feeling the paper, inhaling the smell of its newness or age brings a smile to our faces. We protect our books, treat them carefully although I will never forget the state of my copy of The House by the Dvina by Eugenie Fraser which came back to me in pieces, the pages all there but needing an elastic band to stop it falling apart completely. But our club is about friendship, long-lasting friendship, which has held us together for such a long time. Through divorces and death, changes of government, hurricanes and earthquakes, and now aches and pains. And many many books including Booker Prize winners and runners up. Of course.
An acquaintance and I started a book group in March of 1995. She asked 3 friends to join and so did I. Our group is still going strong with 10 members now, 7 of whom were in the original group. We read all genres of books, except Science Fiction and Romance, with an emphasis on Literary Fiction. In fact, we've read several of the recent Booker winners in the last several years and liked them all very much: Girl, Woman, Other; Shuggie Bain; The Promise; and Lincoln in the Bardo.
We read 11 books each year, one a month except in December when we have a party, do a Secret Santa book exchange, and vote on the best and worst books we read that year. (Sometimes, "worst" doesn't mean much). Each month, one member reviews the book, looking up information about the author and critiques of the book. She leads the discussion also. We choose all the books for the following year at one time in the previous October at a special get-together. Sometimes that includes a weekend at the Oregon Coast.
I can certainly say that I've made some very good friends over the years and read many books I would have never chosen myself. I'm so grateful for our group.
Two friends and I started the “Washington DC Literary Society” Book Club in 1989. We grew to and have remained a steady 12 members till today. From the start it was co-ed and focused on fiction. We meet almost monthly with a book discussion first, and then dinner and lots of wine. Over the years we have filled 4 journals with notes, menus, photos and commentary on every book we’ve read. It’s fascinating to see the different hairstyles, houses and clothes that changed over the years and things that were on our minds 20 some years ago. We’ve celebrated marriages, many babies, mourned the loss of parents and divorce but we remain devoted to each other and our diverse literary taste. We’ve read nearly 300 books together.
The host chooses four books and in choosing, we read the first paragraph and a random paragraph from each book out loud. Then we vote on the selection for that month. At the end of each year we rate each book and measure things like best book, most controversial book, most satisfied reader etc. We keep a spreadsheet with all the details! Normally, everyone takes a turn hosting in their house but over Covid we met via Zoom. This allowed us to include 2 members who had moved to France and another in Ohio.
Book Club is a happy part of our lives and has had me read books I might never have chosen myself. I am much better for it and I know all the other members of the group would say the same thing. We love our Book Club!
I started Cyprus Bookworms Club just after Covid, during the darkest chapter of my life. I was locked at home with an abusive partner, raising my son in silence and fear; and the only escape I had was through the pages of books. When I finally broke free and rebuilt myself, I gathered the courage to post an open invitation on social media: “If you love books, come read with me by the sea.” 12 people showed up. 6 of them are still part of our circle today. Two years later, we’re 240 members strong across 3 cities in Cyprus. We cry together, laugh loudly, and grow wiser with each story. Books saved my life; and now, through them, I get to witness life saving others too, connecting them through friendships, relationships and business ventures. Books are not dead. Neither are we.
I joined my book club in 2011 and am currently the secretary as there is a little bit of administration involved. When I joined it had already been going for a number of years. Our book club is aptly called The Paper Dolls and we are situated in a little seaside village close to Cape Town called Melkbosstrand. We are 10 ladies with careers ranging from journalists and an artist, to a hairdresser and a financial advisor, but we all have one thing in common: we love to read. We do not read one book a month, but instead we all pay an amount of money each month which then goes to one member (we all take turns) to buy books for us to read. We all have different preferences and read all genres. Our monthly meetings are not only to discuss the books that we read each month but also to enjoy good food and wine and lots of laughter. When it comes to choosing books to read for the month there is always active competition between the ladies to get
their hands on the books that are more popular. The number of books a member is allowed to choose in a month is not prescribed. It is fine if you choose just one book but also good if you choose six books. Orbital by Samantha Harvey is currently a very popular book to read. We have read a number of Booker prize winners over the years but also look at the short list for interesting reads. Even though my turn to buy books will only be in September, I already have a list of prospective books and James by Percival Everett is a definite
buy. Other current favourites are John Boyne’s Elements series and Chris Hammer’s murder mysteries.
Since joining the Paper Dolls I have not only expanded my personal library, but but I have also learnt to read beyond my own preferences.
Our end of year functions are often styled according to a book or books that we read in the year. In a year where we read a lot of books set in France, we had a French themed dinner party. In another year when Recipes for Love and Murder by Sally Andrew proved to be a favorite read, our end of year function featured dishes from the book.
Our book club is not only about reading books and discussing our impressions thereof, but it is also about fun and friendship.
I made a life-long friend in my parish book club who introduced me to my partner of 18 odd years. I had moved to a new city and needed to make friends. As an academic you don't get to fully see how literature and life connect till you participate in reading with people at different life stages. I will never forget the discussions on the imagination, and how our sense of reality is shaped by our reading, when we read Ian McEwan's Atonement. We no longer have a book club today, but that community stays with me in spirit, everytime I take up a book and imagine how each of them ( some of whom are no longer alive) might have responded. I am so much the richer for getting to know people through books . To think and feel together is a rare thing, and a book club makes that possible.
We have a book club with my friends, but we actually don't read a book together, we just share what we read last month and recommend books to each other. Quite often it happens that multiple people read the same book over a few months and it sparks nice conversations about what each of us liked and hated about it.
I started running a book club last year. I live in Prague, but we always read in English, so most of the attendees are expats. Only once we read a whole book and it wasn't very successful. Normally, we read a short story. It allows me to read the story several times, dig deeper and prepare questions tailored to the story. The book club is part of a community of female professionals. We read only female authors with female protagonists. They often deal with something others can relate to, we share our experience from real life and how similar/different from the story characters it is. One particular moment I remember was when we read The Witch by Shirley Jackson and I asked if they ever experience any kind of abuse in public transport (it was also time of a big campaign about it in Prague) and everybody had such experience. It was horrifying. But it also felt good and empowering, because you learn you are not alone in this, it is not because of you, how you dress or how you look, it happens to everybody. We share tips how to deal with it and also nice stories when another passenger noticed and spoke up for us. Reading a book alone at home you would get this feeling as well, but when sharing it in the group, real magic really happens.
From Booker Prize authors we read Evaristo and her Girl, Women, Other (the only book we read), it didn't fit the format very well, but people really liked it. Then we read the story "Sexy" by Jhumpa Lahiri (from Interpreter of maladies) and it was a big success, because it was a bit about expats and many attendees had similar experience. Last time we picked up the story "Lu, Reshaping" by Booker author Madeleine Thien (published in New Yorker magazine), but it didn't resonate much, maybe it was a bit too long and pace was a bit slow. I was thrilled to see this year International Booker Prize winner, because it is a collection of short stories about strong women, so I am sure we will pick one from it shortly.
I coordinate a book club for people who are over 50 years old, as part of a community programme. All except one of the attendees are women, and almost all are over 60, around half are over 70 years old. I suggested the first reads, but as the group got to know each other better, we began to create the reading list together - they'd suggest a topic or a location that interested them, I'd come up with choices for us to pick from. We've read Booker winners such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Margaret Atwood.
Everyone attends because they like to read, and they love to share their thoughts. Debates always arise and are always a lot of fun. I'm a PhD student and I had worked before teaching Literature in high schools, but this has been one of the most rewarding experiences my line of work has taken me to. One of the participants drove me home once -she's around 71 and was very shocked to find I can't drive-. In that short drive, she told me about all the things she does in a day: she goes swimming at around 7, since she began swimming in competitions after she retired. She attends to a couple of the community programme activities. She reads what I send, and then looks for more to read, using the book club reads as a starting point to create her own reading list. She didn't read much before retirement, because she was too busy: she's an internationally recognized engineer, which I find even more admirable since she must have been one of the one girls studying engineering in the 60s/70s over here. This is only one example, but every person who attends has shared something about themselves, and their own stories as readers. Some were teachers like me, some had long pregnancies throughout which they read so many novels when they had to rest in bed for months. We've read many short stories about women in different kinds of marriages, and their insight and opinions are so rich and different from those you'd hear in a different age group - many of them are either widows or have been in a marriage for most of their lives.
It's a wonderful experience for me and I learn so much from them. Creating and participating in spaces with people who are younger, older, with different social realities - it takes you out of your own bubble and reminds you life is so much more than what isolation will make you believe sometimes. A book club is an enriching and fun way to build community, which is, or should be, such a big priority in the present days.
In 2023, after months of reading alone and silently rating books on Goodreads, I joined bookclb.com on a whim. I wasn’t looking for anything big—just a space to talk books with real people, beyond online reviews and reading challenges. What I found was a quiet kind of joy I hadn’t expected.
At first, I was hesitant. Online book clubs felt like one more screen in a life already full of digital meetings. But that changed quickly. Our first read together was Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. It wasn’t the book itself that struck me, but how differently everyone responded to it. One member found hope in its quiet defiance, while another was frustrated by how little resolution it offered. That conversation made me realize something simple but powerful: reading in a group makes books feel more alive.
What’s kept me coming back isn’t just the books—it’s the people. We’ve built a rhythm: thoughtful conversations, a bit of good-natured debate, and occasional tangents into everything from childhood libraries to favorite comfort reads. There's always someone who’s read ahead, someone who didn’t finish, and someone who turned up just for the chat (no judgment). And I like that.
The most unexpected thing? The sense of accountability. Not in a pressured way, but in a gentle, “we’re all doing this together” way. I’ve picked up titles I’d normally never try—like A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki—and found myself thinking about them long after the discussion ended.
Of course, not everything’s profound. Once, during a tense discussion on The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, someone’s cat walked across their keyboard mid-sentence and accidentally voted to DNF the book for all of us (thankfully, that feature doesn’t exist—but it broke the tension). Another time, we spent more time talking about snacks than about the actual book.
We’ve read a few Booker-nominated titles—The Bee Sting sparked a particularly layered conversation. Half the group praised its complexity, while the other half found it overwhelming. But that’s the thing: reading together doesn’t mean agreeing. It means listening.
Joining bookclb.com reminded me that reading doesn’t always have to be a solo pursuit. It’s a way to connect—across time zones, professions, and personalities. The club has become a small but steady part of my life. It’s a space where I feel heard, and where I learn to see stories—and sometimes the world—through other people’s eyes.
No dramatic endings, no fairy-tale book club romances. Just good books, honest conversations, and a growing appreciation for the community built one chapter at a time.
I met my fiancé through my book club. He told me he’d read one of my favourite books as a way to impress me - he actually had just googled an online synopsis of it - but I chose to overlook that little white lie because, as I quickly realised, he’s the best person I’ve ever met. And as life long book lover, I love that my book club brought us together 🥹
Basically for our bookclub there was four members and we’d meet monthly. Each month we’d take turns picking the book we would all read. One month one of the members picked The Vegetarian by Han Kang (great book). We met up to discuss the book and our theories. The person who picked the book had insane ideas. They were a bit of the stretch but somewhat believable. Anyway, months pass and we were talking about that book again. The person mentioned before admitted they had actually not read the book. Now usually that would annoy me, but I was so impressed by the way she managed to waffle so impressively that we had believed she did. Master manipulation
I sort of accidentally started a book club three years ago.
I told friends online that I was going to re-read one of my favourite books, Tolstoy's War and Peace, over a year. 'Would anyone like to join me?' I expected maybe half a dozen to be interested in the idea. But the post went viral, and hundreds of people got involved. By 1 Jan 2023, there were over a thousand of us from all over the world! I had never been part of a book club, and now I was running this enormous international group – it was a forbidding prospect, and exciting!
Our first year was extraordinary. We read a chapter a day and discussed it online. Our reading group became this place of calm, while individual readers faced personal challenges and the outside world felt more turbulent than ever. We had these wonderful connections across continents, with everyone reading the same page and immersed in the story. Towards the end of the year, people shared what the slow reading group had meant to them – it was incredibly moving.
In 2024, I decided to do the same with Hilary Mantel's Cromwell books. The first two (Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies) won the Booker Prize, and the third (The Mirror and the Light) is one of my all-time favourites. The discussions we had about these three books were such a profound pleasure, and the re-readers amongst us saw all kinds of things we had never noticed before.
We're now in our third year, and the book club has taken over my life. It has its own newsletter and website (Footnotes & Tangents), and I work full-time on creating material for it and hosting the discussions. Looking towards the future and some other Booker Prize-winning novels I'm keen to do: A S Byatt's Possession, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Pat Barker's The Ghost Road.
As normally such a solitary reader, I never knew I would get so much satisfaction and fulfilment from reading together. This book club is certainly the best accident I've ever had!
Slow reading is an art and wonderfully rewarding as a community experience. We are often daunted by our "lack of time" to read a lengthy work, and forget that great 19th century novels by Dickens and others were serialized and read over years, and that readers across the Atlantic were part of that process. Congratulations on reviving this important reading practice!
It’s hard to beat that story! How wonderful.
This story absolutely made my day!
Congratulations on a multi-layered achievement...bringing together diverse groups of people is always challenging, and nearly miraculous in such divisive times.
Thank you! And yes, creating civil places on and offline is essential right now. It has been remarkable how courteous and respectful people have been in this group.
Grateful to have discovered you here on Substack and the second half of my travels with W&P.
Awesome!
Amazing achievement!
Thank you!
We’re 60 readers - parents, nurses, librarians, teachers, care workers, accountants, retirees and more - bound together by stories. We’ve welcomed babies , seen members move towns, and watched quiet coffees bloom into lifelong friendships. People come and go, but what anchors us? The revelation of seeing a story through sixty pairs of eyes.
And Booker novels? They’ve been our companions. We’ve lived inside Bernadine Evaristo’s kaleidoscopic Girl, Woman, Other, argued fiercely over Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, and sat quietly with Damon Galgut’s haunting The Promise. We grappled with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar. And just this year, we let Yael van der Wouden’s The Safe Keep settle into our bones.
What binds us isn’t just the reading. It’s showing up, month after month, year after year. Turning pages together, we’ve built a quiet kind of family.
I found my book club through an old uni friend. We studied literature together years before so it seemed a natural extension of that. At the time I was so lost. In a terrible relationship, with very few friends, unstable work, and bouncing around share houses. Those women and our monthly meetings saved me. For a couple of hours every month I got to put all the drama of my life aside and reconnect to my joy and passion - books. They challenged my reading, pushing me outside my comfort zone. And they became my community, a place where I was accepted and supported. Since joining I've started writing my own book, got a good job, a perfect fiance, and a whole new lease on life.
Book clubs are vital. Everyone needs a space to honour their passions. Getting to yap about books is a gift, it makes me feel vital and alive.
These women have become my friends, I've gotten to celebrate there marriages, book launches, buying houses, making art, trying new hobbies... They are the fiercest most fascinating people I know.
I've now joined a second book club. I just can't get enough.
If I had to give young women one piece of advice it would be to join a book club. It will change your life.
As a twenty-something living in Cape Town, South Africa, it became increasingly difficult to make genuine friends, especially after the pandemic. An expat from Ukraine created an Instagram page called CPT.Reads which blew up. This was around two and a half years ago. We are around 10 core members who meet monthly to discuss a book. There are members who come and go due to the summer appeal Cape Town has for digital nomads. We all have super diverse reading tastes, and we like to give each other a chance to shine. We are no longer just a book club but I friendship circle. In fact, in March we had a wedding where the bride met the groom's sister at book club who introduced them. This book club changed everyone's lives for the better by bringing a diverse group of ladies together over our shared love of reading.
I had just started my master's program and I wanted to read something interesting and fun that wasn't necessarily romance books - which, honestly, take up most of my reading these days - and that wasn't academic articles. I found a group that had been meeting for several years who were all friends after knowing each other for so long. I joined, not knowing what to expect since it was my first book club, and everyone was super welcoming, they discussed the things they loved about the writing and the plot. We were never judged if we didn't like the book or didn't finish it on time, it was more about connection.
I found so many interesting perspectives as a result of reading along with everyone. I would look at the book one way and share my experience and someone else had a completely different experience with the same book. It was fascinating and made me love some of the books even more. It was never about the stuff I learned about in literature classes like themes or character stereotypes, it was about enjoying a story.
I have been a member of my book club for over 30 years. We were 10 women, now we are 9, and we meet more or less monthly in each other's houses. 5 of us are English, 2 American, one Canadian and one Slovenian. What we have in common is that we all married Mexicans and moved to Mexico many years ago. We have read a lot of books, nearly all in English and the only problem we have is circling the book between us all in time for the next meeting. It's not so hard nowadays since the invention of kindles and online reading, but most of us prefer the real thing.
Holding a book, feeling the paper, inhaling the smell of its newness or age brings a smile to our faces. We protect our books, treat them carefully although I will never forget the state of my copy of The House by the Dvina by Eugenie Fraser which came back to me in pieces, the pages all there but needing an elastic band to stop it falling apart completely. But our club is about friendship, long-lasting friendship, which has held us together for such a long time. Through divorces and death, changes of government, hurricanes and earthquakes, and now aches and pains. And many many books including Booker Prize winners and runners up. Of course.
An acquaintance and I started a book group in March of 1995. She asked 3 friends to join and so did I. Our group is still going strong with 10 members now, 7 of whom were in the original group. We read all genres of books, except Science Fiction and Romance, with an emphasis on Literary Fiction. In fact, we've read several of the recent Booker winners in the last several years and liked them all very much: Girl, Woman, Other; Shuggie Bain; The Promise; and Lincoln in the Bardo.
We read 11 books each year, one a month except in December when we have a party, do a Secret Santa book exchange, and vote on the best and worst books we read that year. (Sometimes, "worst" doesn't mean much). Each month, one member reviews the book, looking up information about the author and critiques of the book. She leads the discussion also. We choose all the books for the following year at one time in the previous October at a special get-together. Sometimes that includes a weekend at the Oregon Coast.
I can certainly say that I've made some very good friends over the years and read many books I would have never chosen myself. I'm so grateful for our group.
Two friends and I started the “Washington DC Literary Society” Book Club in 1989. We grew to and have remained a steady 12 members till today. From the start it was co-ed and focused on fiction. We meet almost monthly with a book discussion first, and then dinner and lots of wine. Over the years we have filled 4 journals with notes, menus, photos and commentary on every book we’ve read. It’s fascinating to see the different hairstyles, houses and clothes that changed over the years and things that were on our minds 20 some years ago. We’ve celebrated marriages, many babies, mourned the loss of parents and divorce but we remain devoted to each other and our diverse literary taste. We’ve read nearly 300 books together.
The host chooses four books and in choosing, we read the first paragraph and a random paragraph from each book out loud. Then we vote on the selection for that month. At the end of each year we rate each book and measure things like best book, most controversial book, most satisfied reader etc. We keep a spreadsheet with all the details! Normally, everyone takes a turn hosting in their house but over Covid we met via Zoom. This allowed us to include 2 members who had moved to France and another in Ohio.
Book Club is a happy part of our lives and has had me read books I might never have chosen myself. I am much better for it and I know all the other members of the group would say the same thing. We love our Book Club!
I started Cyprus Bookworms Club just after Covid, during the darkest chapter of my life. I was locked at home with an abusive partner, raising my son in silence and fear; and the only escape I had was through the pages of books. When I finally broke free and rebuilt myself, I gathered the courage to post an open invitation on social media: “If you love books, come read with me by the sea.” 12 people showed up. 6 of them are still part of our circle today. Two years later, we’re 240 members strong across 3 cities in Cyprus. We cry together, laugh loudly, and grow wiser with each story. Books saved my life; and now, through them, I get to witness life saving others too, connecting them through friendships, relationships and business ventures. Books are not dead. Neither are we.
I joined my book club in 2011 and am currently the secretary as there is a little bit of administration involved. When I joined it had already been going for a number of years. Our book club is aptly called The Paper Dolls and we are situated in a little seaside village close to Cape Town called Melkbosstrand. We are 10 ladies with careers ranging from journalists and an artist, to a hairdresser and a financial advisor, but we all have one thing in common: we love to read. We do not read one book a month, but instead we all pay an amount of money each month which then goes to one member (we all take turns) to buy books for us to read. We all have different preferences and read all genres. Our monthly meetings are not only to discuss the books that we read each month but also to enjoy good food and wine and lots of laughter. When it comes to choosing books to read for the month there is always active competition between the ladies to get
their hands on the books that are more popular. The number of books a member is allowed to choose in a month is not prescribed. It is fine if you choose just one book but also good if you choose six books. Orbital by Samantha Harvey is currently a very popular book to read. We have read a number of Booker prize winners over the years but also look at the short list for interesting reads. Even though my turn to buy books will only be in September, I already have a list of prospective books and James by Percival Everett is a definite
buy. Other current favourites are John Boyne’s Elements series and Chris Hammer’s murder mysteries.
Since joining the Paper Dolls I have not only expanded my personal library, but but I have also learnt to read beyond my own preferences.
Our end of year functions are often styled according to a book or books that we read in the year. In a year where we read a lot of books set in France, we had a French themed dinner party. In another year when Recipes for Love and Murder by Sally Andrew proved to be a favorite read, our end of year function featured dishes from the book.
Our book club is not only about reading books and discussing our impressions thereof, but it is also about fun and friendship.
I made a life-long friend in my parish book club who introduced me to my partner of 18 odd years. I had moved to a new city and needed to make friends. As an academic you don't get to fully see how literature and life connect till you participate in reading with people at different life stages. I will never forget the discussions on the imagination, and how our sense of reality is shaped by our reading, when we read Ian McEwan's Atonement. We no longer have a book club today, but that community stays with me in spirit, everytime I take up a book and imagine how each of them ( some of whom are no longer alive) might have responded. I am so much the richer for getting to know people through books . To think and feel together is a rare thing, and a book club makes that possible.
We have a book club with my friends, but we actually don't read a book together, we just share what we read last month and recommend books to each other. Quite often it happens that multiple people read the same book over a few months and it sparks nice conversations about what each of us liked and hated about it.
I started running a book club last year. I live in Prague, but we always read in English, so most of the attendees are expats. Only once we read a whole book and it wasn't very successful. Normally, we read a short story. It allows me to read the story several times, dig deeper and prepare questions tailored to the story. The book club is part of a community of female professionals. We read only female authors with female protagonists. They often deal with something others can relate to, we share our experience from real life and how similar/different from the story characters it is. One particular moment I remember was when we read The Witch by Shirley Jackson and I asked if they ever experience any kind of abuse in public transport (it was also time of a big campaign about it in Prague) and everybody had such experience. It was horrifying. But it also felt good and empowering, because you learn you are not alone in this, it is not because of you, how you dress or how you look, it happens to everybody. We share tips how to deal with it and also nice stories when another passenger noticed and spoke up for us. Reading a book alone at home you would get this feeling as well, but when sharing it in the group, real magic really happens.
From Booker Prize authors we read Evaristo and her Girl, Women, Other (the only book we read), it didn't fit the format very well, but people really liked it. Then we read the story "Sexy" by Jhumpa Lahiri (from Interpreter of maladies) and it was a big success, because it was a bit about expats and many attendees had similar experience. Last time we picked up the story "Lu, Reshaping" by Booker author Madeleine Thien (published in New Yorker magazine), but it didn't resonate much, maybe it was a bit too long and pace was a bit slow. I was thrilled to see this year International Booker Prize winner, because it is a collection of short stories about strong women, so I am sure we will pick one from it shortly.
This is how my bookclub functions too - well the first part.
I do like the idea of reading a short story together as well!
I coordinate a book club for people who are over 50 years old, as part of a community programme. All except one of the attendees are women, and almost all are over 60, around half are over 70 years old. I suggested the first reads, but as the group got to know each other better, we began to create the reading list together - they'd suggest a topic or a location that interested them, I'd come up with choices for us to pick from. We've read Booker winners such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Margaret Atwood.
Everyone attends because they like to read, and they love to share their thoughts. Debates always arise and are always a lot of fun. I'm a PhD student and I had worked before teaching Literature in high schools, but this has been one of the most rewarding experiences my line of work has taken me to. One of the participants drove me home once -she's around 71 and was very shocked to find I can't drive-. In that short drive, she told me about all the things she does in a day: she goes swimming at around 7, since she began swimming in competitions after she retired. She attends to a couple of the community programme activities. She reads what I send, and then looks for more to read, using the book club reads as a starting point to create her own reading list. She didn't read much before retirement, because she was too busy: she's an internationally recognized engineer, which I find even more admirable since she must have been one of the one girls studying engineering in the 60s/70s over here. This is only one example, but every person who attends has shared something about themselves, and their own stories as readers. Some were teachers like me, some had long pregnancies throughout which they read so many novels when they had to rest in bed for months. We've read many short stories about women in different kinds of marriages, and their insight and opinions are so rich and different from those you'd hear in a different age group - many of them are either widows or have been in a marriage for most of their lives.
It's a wonderful experience for me and I learn so much from them. Creating and participating in spaces with people who are younger, older, with different social realities - it takes you out of your own bubble and reminds you life is so much more than what isolation will make you believe sometimes. A book club is an enriching and fun way to build community, which is, or should be, such a big priority in the present days.
In 2023, after months of reading alone and silently rating books on Goodreads, I joined bookclb.com on a whim. I wasn’t looking for anything big—just a space to talk books with real people, beyond online reviews and reading challenges. What I found was a quiet kind of joy I hadn’t expected.
At first, I was hesitant. Online book clubs felt like one more screen in a life already full of digital meetings. But that changed quickly. Our first read together was Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. It wasn’t the book itself that struck me, but how differently everyone responded to it. One member found hope in its quiet defiance, while another was frustrated by how little resolution it offered. That conversation made me realize something simple but powerful: reading in a group makes books feel more alive.
What’s kept me coming back isn’t just the books—it’s the people. We’ve built a rhythm: thoughtful conversations, a bit of good-natured debate, and occasional tangents into everything from childhood libraries to favorite comfort reads. There's always someone who’s read ahead, someone who didn’t finish, and someone who turned up just for the chat (no judgment). And I like that.
The most unexpected thing? The sense of accountability. Not in a pressured way, but in a gentle, “we’re all doing this together” way. I’ve picked up titles I’d normally never try—like A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki—and found myself thinking about them long after the discussion ended.
Of course, not everything’s profound. Once, during a tense discussion on The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, someone’s cat walked across their keyboard mid-sentence and accidentally voted to DNF the book for all of us (thankfully, that feature doesn’t exist—but it broke the tension). Another time, we spent more time talking about snacks than about the actual book.
We’ve read a few Booker-nominated titles—The Bee Sting sparked a particularly layered conversation. Half the group praised its complexity, while the other half found it overwhelming. But that’s the thing: reading together doesn’t mean agreeing. It means listening.
Joining bookclb.com reminded me that reading doesn’t always have to be a solo pursuit. It’s a way to connect—across time zones, professions, and personalities. The club has become a small but steady part of my life. It’s a space where I feel heard, and where I learn to see stories—and sometimes the world—through other people’s eyes.
No dramatic endings, no fairy-tale book club romances. Just good books, honest conversations, and a growing appreciation for the community built one chapter at a time.
I met my fiancé through my book club. He told me he’d read one of my favourite books as a way to impress me - he actually had just googled an online synopsis of it - but I chose to overlook that little white lie because, as I quickly realised, he’s the best person I’ve ever met. And as life long book lover, I love that my book club brought us together 🥹
Basically for our bookclub there was four members and we’d meet monthly. Each month we’d take turns picking the book we would all read. One month one of the members picked The Vegetarian by Han Kang (great book). We met up to discuss the book and our theories. The person who picked the book had insane ideas. They were a bit of the stretch but somewhat believable. Anyway, months pass and we were talking about that book again. The person mentioned before admitted they had actually not read the book. Now usually that would annoy me, but I was so impressed by the way she managed to waffle so impressively that we had believed she did. Master manipulation