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It’s commuter hour on a late-summer morning and the sun is still stretching through the leafy canopy of Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens. In the cool, concrete sanctuary of MPavilion – the city’s annual architecture installation/event space/public shelter – a small group of people sit reading. Some recline on beanbags, some perch on stools; others lean against the fluted concrete wall, breeze running through their hair. For close to an hour, nobody speaks; they just read.
This is Silent Book Club, where there is no required book list, no entry fee, no organised discussion. Just reading, quietly, in company.
Billed as “book clubs for introverts”, Silent Book Club was started in 2012 when a couple of friends in San Francisco felt traditional book clubs involved too much pressure – to read a particular book in a certain amount of time, to “have something smart to say” – so they started their own kind of club, where neither was required. Silent book clubs have become global since then, with chapters opening on every continent.
Taken at face value, it’s a project that seems steeped in contradiction. A good book should be absorbing – why consciously gather to participate in a solitary practice that, if it’s going well, should result in you ignoring each other? What makes this any different or better to sitting in a library on any given day – especially if the other people reading around you are strangers?
On this morning, Skye Bennett, the Melbourne chapter’s founder, greets everyone gently. She invites them to take a seat wherever they feel comfortable, and to find a book if they don’t have one: the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne’s hub for all things literary, has set up a bookshelf against one wall of the pavilion. It’s stacked with books linked to ideas around community and gathering. Most attendees, though, have brought their own.
Bennett says about 60 people attend the regular sessions she holds in Docklands on the last Sunday of the month, and they often sit around reading for far longer than the set time. Today, about 10 people gather in the pavilion – the small turnout likely a reflection of it being both a workday and an out-of-schedule, pop-up event. There’s a bit of quiet chatter before reading time officially begins, but not much. And then we open our books.
Last month, research commissioned by advocacy organisation Australia Reads showed that more than half of us want to read more than we actually do, but even very engaged readers struggle to make enough time for it – particularly those who work full-time. It doesn’t bode well for recreational reading that many also said finding motivation for it was more difficult than scrolling through social media or watching television – even when they said they read for leisure and pleasure.
Bennett says many of the Melbourne participants are keen readers but busy people, and Silent Book Club allows them to ensure they prioritise a reading habit among other competing tasks. It seems likely, too, that for those struggling with motivation, it may function like body-doubling – a tactic used by some people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to accomplish tasks they find difficult by having a second person working alongside them, as a kind of social scaffolding.
The low-expectations of social contact that goes along with it also seem to help people come out of their shell, Bennett says.
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“It seems counter-intuitive that new friendships would be forged in a club that embraces silence, however I’ve witnessed many new connections and friendships form and flourish at Silent Book Club,” says Bennett.
“It’s quite typical for a participant to initially attend a meeting alone however leave in the company of others. I think that’s the beauty of Silent Book Club – once the social pressure, expectations and obligations are removed, people feel permitted to connect with others in ways that feel comfortable and authentic to them.”
For Melbourne in particular – famously the most locked-down city in the world and still arguably in the long tail of Covid recovery – there’s perhaps an understandable attraction to the idea of consciously spending time in company with minimal social pressure.
Perhaps part of the attraction, though, is something slightly more numinous.
At MPavilion, as the sun slowly creeps above the semi-open roof and the traffic hums in the background as we sink into our novels, the experience of Silent Book Club feels less like engaging in art with friends and more like meditation, or even prayer. Here we gather together with like-minded devotees, setting our own individual intentions for the time we’ve carved out to participate in this, a ritual of reading. It’s church for people who love books.
