Hallowed halls

It’s not a book club. It's a reading party.

Salvo, Aprile, 2000

The hottest new club in the city is… the silent book club.

I watched a TikTok explaining one of these events, how you show up with your own book, how you settle in to read silently among other book lovers, how it combines reading with parallel play. Someone commented “so… a library?” Another person says, “I can’t decide if it’s pretentious or brilliant.”

I get it, we love to make fun of rich kids thinking they’ve invented something new (remember when they re-invented the bodega?), but I have to come to their defense on this one.

The library was one of my absolute favorite places as a kid. There was a branch right next to the Boys & Girls Club in my town, and I got a library card the summer I moved to America (before I knew how to speak English!).

When my family moved to a different town a few years later, my first stop was my new library, just four blocks from our house, to get a new library card. As soon as I turned sixteen, I applied to get a job there. They were never hiring, but I dropped off my resume every summer anyway. I mostly curated my reading list based on the covers that caught my eye, which is how I ended up reading Haruki Murakami, a right of passage for any reader.

Despite the hours I spent at the public library, I never met anyone there. I was there to browse the shelves, find books, use the computer, return my loans.

The silent reading party allows for a facilitated space to meet strangers. The reading time is silent but many of these events include breaks at specific increments to chat with the people around you. We have precious few spaces for this kind of social interaction besides school and work.

“Or you can just go to a bar with your book.” Sure, I’m no stranger to taking myself out for a quiet night on the town, kindle in tow. At best, you might have a brief chat with the bartender or, at worst, a man sitting at the bar who uses your book as a pretense to hit on you. After all, men have been taught that books are a useful peacocking tool to pick up women thanks to The Game which sold more than five million copies.

I digress! These silent reading parties are hosted and facilitated in a way that makes conversation and connection easier. There’s a structure, there’s facilitation, and there’s inklings of a developing community. Many of these events are recurring—a necessary ingredient for building new friendships.

It’s also not a book club. There is no homework and no pressure to finish your book within a month. There is enough shared context to have a conversation deeper than small talk, and it allows for intertextuality between different books since you’re not all reading the same one.

We don’t have many places to go to meet people, and we definitely don’t have many places to go without having to buy anything. The numbers tell us that younger people (under 35ish) are using libraries more than previous generations. This is particularly true for young Black folks. Even more surprisingly, nearly half of the people who use libraries regularly don’t identify as “readers.”

And we are desperate to meet people. Henry Earls is a twenty-year old student who uses the library as the backdrop for thirst traps on TikTok. “I want to cultivate an aesthetic when I go to the library. And, honestly, I dress up to see if someone will come up to me and say hi.”

As more people are using libraries, their funding is being decimated across the country. The first services to go are often hours and programming. In New York, we lost Sunday hours at our libraries last year. Think about all the lost opportunities for thirst traps and meet cutes.

Of course, reading parties can’t and shouldn’t replace libraries. These two spaces can reinforce each other. The more people read, the better it is for our libraries. The more people are connected to their community, the better it is for our public life in general.

It’s more pretentious to think there’s a right way to read than it is to host or attend a silent reading party. Though, as a lifelong organizer, I’m a sucker for facilitated community building, even if I have to pay twenty bucks to attend (people deserve to get paid! hosting an event is labor!).

It’s no surprise silent reading parties in cities all around the world are selling out immediately. We are starving for meaningful social connection at a time in history where we are the loneliest humans have been, likely ever.