On a recent evening in Durham, on the second floor of Letters Bookshop, the room is hushed. Two people sit reading; neither is talking or reading the same book, but they are there together—sort of.
It’s the second Tuesday of the month, one of the two evenings that Letters hosts a chapter of the Silent Book Club hour (the other evening is the fourth Thursday of the month). Described as a “happy hour for introverts” on its website, the Silent Book Club (SBC) has over 1,000 chapters in 50 countries. The event, as its name implies, provides a quiet place for people to come together and independently read.
When it comes to the books landscape, things are mixed: There were 2,599 independent bookstore locations in the United States, for instance, as of 2023, according to a survey by the American Booksellers Association done by Statista, a number that’s been steadily increasing since 2009 when only 1,651 independent bookstore locations were recorded.
But the picture is also more complicated. According to the same survey, with the convenience of online stores, fewer people are buying books in stores. Overall, bookstore sales have also decreased—in 2022 sales amounted to less than $9 billion, whereas a decade earlier sales were over $12 billion. However, community efforts like book clubs seem to be growing. According to ticketing platform Eventbrite, book club event listings grew by 24 percent in the United States from 2022 to 2023, and the platform Meetup saw a 10 percent increase in book club listings.
At Letters, the reading hour is split in two: It begins with a nonsilent time for socializing, in which readers can start the book club by chatting about what they’re reading and what kinds of books they’re interested in, before phasing into an independent reading time.
An activity like a silent book club—with contradiction implied in its name—is an intriguing proposition. We’re living in an increasingly atomized era where things come right to our doorsteps and our phones. Why leave the comfort of home to participate in a solitary activity, of all things? But perhaps living in a less social world is exactly why people want to join a silent club.
On June 10, the two participants who showed up to Letters, William Page and Tierra Flowers, both happen to be fans of fantasy and science fiction. Flowers came for the first time to try a new low-stakes activity. She’s reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a novel she found through TikTok. Before attending an SBC, she says that social media was the closest space she’s had to a community of book lovers. She’s enjoying A Little Life, she says, and is about halfway through, an admirable dent in a 700-page book.
“I just love the escapism of it,” Flowers says. “I can definitely get lost in a good book.”
Flowers says she’s searching for the right book club to join. While her friends enjoy reading, she says, it’s not to the same extent that she does, and she wants to find other active readers to talk about books with.
The other SBC participant, Page—who is also an employee of Letters—says that he enjoys the opportunity to read communally without being confined to reading a certain book.
“I don’t think reading should be something that anyone is stressed about,” Page says.
Flowers agrees with the sentiment: once she has a deadline and a certain number of pages to read, she says, it takes the fun out.
Blackbird Books and Coffee in Raleigh also has an SBC chapter. Shop co-owners Bre Brunswick and Hannah Brunswick started it because they both felt it was the kind of book club they themselves would want to be a part of, Bre Brunswick wrote in an email to the INDY.
Blackbird’s SBC meets twice a month and usually has around 25 or so people show up, Bre Brunswick wrote.
“It was always meant to be a social event but with a very specific structure,” Bre Brunswick wrote. “I’ve found that most people really thrive when there are super firm expectations—especially when they are trying something new.”
Durham’s Night School Bar found that this similar structure, with space for accountability, can be helpful for students in the form of a writing hour. The organization, which offers classes to adults on a range of topics in the arts and humanities on a sliding scale, has a silent writing hour—similar to SBCs.
The hour began when Night School Bar writing workshop participants expressed an interest in a larger writing community, owner Lindsey Andrews wrote in an email to the INDY—a time for people to come together and focus on individual writing and goals. On the bar, a card catalog contains writing prompts and index cards on which people can outline their goals.
“They can meet other writers, find motivation, or just keep themselves accountable and feel good about making and meeting goals,” Andrews says.
At Letters, the silent reading hour began earlier this year. The number of people ranges, but the activity itself stays the same, Page says. The club’s origin story was simple, he adds: “The people that started this say it just started as—‘Hey, do y’all want to go read somewhere?’”
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