The Case for Starting a Book Club

My friends like to make fun of me because many of my relationships over the last decade or so have started with book clubs. Here's how it goes: I form a book club, we meet a couple of times, people connect, books are read (and not read), wine is had, and friendships grow. Some stick, some don't. But that's not the point. The point is connection... and interesting conversation.

I thought about this while reading The Atlantic's recent cover story on the decline of reading in America. Fewer than half of adults reported reading a book in 2022, and just 20 percent of adults account for more than 80 percent of all books read in a year (read that again). The piece calls this shift postliterate: not illiterate, just unable to sit with something long enough to think it through.

What hit home for me wasn't the average attention span on a screen shrinking to 47 seconds, although that did make me want to throw my phone in the ocean. It was that reading forces a slowness nothing else does. You can't scroll through a novel. You sit in someone else's head for a few hundred pages, and that is its own act of defiance.

The real magic happens in discussing it, though. A book club isn't really about the book. It's an excuse to sit across from other women and talk — about the plot twist, sure, but also whatever's actually going on that week, like the diagnosis someone's still processing, or the kid they're worried about but haven't brought up yet.

So start the club. Half of them won't read the book, but most of them will show up for each other.