For the young of body and mind, literature is sustained by scenes, but as you grow older it is sustained by clubs – and, if you are lucky, sofas. Or so I thought when, after lockdown, I found myself in need of literature and fellowship. I wanted to read good books in the company of like-minded people in comfort, envious as I was of my mother’s longstanding group that meets over fizzy wine and snacks in comfy lounges, and from which I was by distance and, inclination of my parent, excluded.
Being male, there was no ready-made group to join locally. So, like many misguided men before me, I turned to the internet. First stop: the Rebel Book Club, whose site informed me they were reading The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. Not some racy Dimes Square autofiction sadly but a manual on how to persuade yourself that you deserve to be rich, and a typical read for the Rebel Book Club, founded by Ben Keene. This book reading gang has been more successful than the one Keene gathered in the 2000s to build an ecotourist hub in Sierra Leone, a fraught process documented by the BBC’s Tribe: Wanted.
In the function room of a hotdesk tech hub near Old Street, clearly taking any offers since WFH kicked in, 60 paying rebels assembled for bite-sized talks hosted by a miked-up facilitator who was neither Keene nor the author. Interspersed were small group discussions that resembled corporate team-building exercises. When tasked with recalling our earliest money memories, others spoke of counting coins with parents. Mentally recoiling at the Effective Altruism of it all, I recalled stealing 50p from my father’s bedside table, marvelling at the coin’s heaviness in my hand. This was a case of Tribe: Unwanted for me.
The Silent Book Club appeared to offer the solution. At the Silent Book Club, you say hello at the beginning, then you read your own book for a while, and then talk about it. When I attended a British-based online session, I discovered that it’s a global phenomenon. A member of the Albuquerque chapter, who had dropped in on our UK call, explained that two women from San Francisco invented the format – although they hold no monopoly over it. Indeed when the founders endorsed Kamala Harris in last year’s election, a wave of Trump voters left in protest and presumably set up their own Silent Book Group network; less silent now about their silence, one imagines.
The group chat began with a wild list of works: Thomas Hardy, L’Attentat by Yasmina Khadra. Someone was reading not one but two Marilyn Manson biographies, although intriguingly they never returned to the Zoom after reading time. I am embarrassed to say I spent a good deal of the time dedicated to reading, thinking up clever things to say about what I was supposed to be reading. However, the secret rule of Silent Book Club appears to be that you don’t actually talk about the books you’ve silently read at Silent Book Club.
It was an unlucky coincidence that one particular member had been reading next to what was evidently a major fireworks display. It was, however, a revealing one. She was greeted with such overwhelming sympathy in the group that all literary conversation faded. Petitions for banning fireworks were shared in the group chat. If only firework people came to Silent Book Club instead, said one participant. Later I would discover that Silent Book Club’s tagline is ‘Happy Hour for Introverts!’ and this made a lot of sense. It felt less like a book club, and more like a get-together for people who thought lockdown was brilliant.
Two failed experiences in, I unwisely doubled down on my strategy. I read that in the 18th century, when novels and magazines emerged, men gathered in the inns of provincial towns to order pamphlets advertised in the back pages and read them together. Some historians say that this gave birth to the book club. I suspect that’s only half the story. The women, I imagine, were happy at home reading novels together, sharing waspish thoughts in the absence of their bloviating, Hogarthian husbands. Things had not changed apparently. I had to go out into the world to find what I was after.
The MeetUp app, a resolutely 21st century bit of software which does exactly what you expect it would, led me first to a group of earnest, young professionals who had independently moved to an orbital town not far from London. With them, I read a terrific Agatha Christie novel and a really poor fantasy novel. But after a while I noticed how I was conspicuously older and more attached to the books than the average members, who were clearly using genre fiction and overpriced gastropubs as social lubricants. I left the kids to their slate-mounted retro puddings and ploughed onwards.
