One night a month, an unusual phenomenon takes place in the back corner of the Bampot tea house on Harbord Street.
As spectacles go, it’s notably quiet: A group of people, scattered around tables, bow their heads over books. The titles they’re absorbed in — a plastic-covered library hardback of “Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials” by Marion Gibson; “The Paradise Problem” by Christina Lauren on Kindle; a well-thumbed paperback of Madeline Miller’s “The Song of Achilles” — are as diverse as the readers.
This is a meeting of the Curious Company Reading Club, started by friends Lawvin Hadisi and Marilyn Kehl.
“Marilyn and I really bonded over reading. We were reading the same books, or if we weren’t (we were) saying, ‘You need to read this book,’” Hadisi, who works in health care marketing, told the Star. “We were constantly messaging each other.”
One day last spring they had a brainstorm: What if they read together, rather than alone beside partners who didn’t understand why they couldn’t put that book down? And what if they did it in public, inviting others to join?
“Reading has been seen as an isolating hobby that you would do on your own,” Hadasi said. “Our reading club and others are reinventing that. Reading in the presence of other people is just as fun as other hobbies. We have a social aspect as well, so you’re getting the best of both worlds.”
Their first meeting was on a Thursday evening last June at Trinity Bellwoods Park. Nearly a year later, it’s become a regular monthly event where time is split between reading and chatting. Some attendees are dedicated bookworms plowing through multiple books a week; others are looking to get their reading mojo back after hitting a slump.
“We’ve had some people who purely want to focus on reading; some people want to engage. We’re just fostering a meetup, and there’s no right or wrong answer to the approach,” Kehl said.
“The whole point of it is to build a bit of community.”
Literature as a communal activity has usually taken the form of a book club, where members read the same book and then get together to talk about it. A new wave of reading clubs — or clubs about books that are not book clubs — are offering the city’s bibliophiles a different way to share their love.
For Malcolm Duncan, founding Actual Book Club in 2023 was an act of resistance against social media’s obsession with books as esthetic objects.
“I thought it would be a good idea to get ahead of the inevitable commodification. I wanted to create a space for people who read, without the financial obligation associated with this type of resurgence, or the social pressure of traditional book clubs,” said Duncan, a 30-year-old urban planner. “Actual Book Club takes a meta perspective — rethinking what a book club is and what it can be.”
Practically speaking, that encompasses a meeting at Parkdale’s Osprey Cafe once a month and hosting the occasional book swap or zine launch.
“Being a ‘club about books’ rather than a ‘club about a book’ gives our members the autonomy to read what they like on their own schedule,” Duncan said. “Since we’re not all reading the same book at the same time, our meetings often include more generalized book discussions, recommendations and present opportunities for peer-to-peer lending.”
Along the way, the club has raised more than $2,000 for charities like the literacy program Parkdale Project Read. “My favourite moments are the ones that bring me closer to people,” said Duncan, who describes the monthly meetups as “very chill, unpretentious, third space kind of vibes.”
The “third space” element — the idea that humans need a place that’s not home or work to connect with others — is key to the appeal of this growing global trend, according to Amanda Gauthier, a category manager at Indigo.
It’s not dissimilar to a long-standing behaviour that the bookstore chain has embraced for decades, she said — “that someone would come and sit in a stuffed chair in the window of a downtown street and read publicly as a gift to themselves.
“There’s something about occupying that space that must scratch some kind of itch in terms of a soft social need that we have.”
Citing Alberto Manguel’s “A History of Reading,” Gauthier added that the first libraries were not silent places anyway, since reading was done by sounding out letters aloud.
“I think of that often, that idea that there is something about recognizing a fellow reader, seeing and understanding what they’re experiencing.”
She also connects it to a dissatisfaction with our screen-centric lives.
“The penny is dropping. We want to get off our phones. This does feel like a low-risk way to put yourself out there,” Gauthier said. “There’s something really meaningful about having that book in your hands, and saying, ‘I know the people who are there are going to enjoy talking about books, and that’s going to give us a place to begin.’”
That’s exactly why Monique Findlayter started the Melanin Silent Reading Club, designed to be a “safe space for BIPOC women to come together,” in February 2024.
She had been reading Will Smith’s memoir, in which he writes about going on a silent retreat. An avid reader who got into Bookstagram “because none of my friends or family care about what I read,” Findlayter wondered if there might be a getaway centred around books.
“It’s just the thought of being in a space where nobody is talking, and then adding books to that,” said the 43-year-old Findlayter, who runs her own cleaning company, “where I can be in a space with other women and just read, knowing we’re all here because of books.”
Her initial search revealed options in the U.S., but nothing in Toronto. After two years and two failed attempts to get a retreat off the ground, an acquaintance sent her a Facebook post about a silent reading club.
“I did run a traditional book club 10 years ago that lasted about a year, but … not everybody wants to read the book that’s chosen; it feels like it’s school having to finish by a certain date,” Findlayter said. “So I thought, ‘Yeah, I want to try this silent book club — but everybody can bring their own book.’”
A dozen women attended the first meetup. “It was absolutely amazing,” she said. “Everybody bought their own book or a Kindle or listened to an audiobook. We met at a restaurant, chatted for a bit, and spent a portion of our time together reading.”
The Melanin Silent Reading Club has been meeting regularly ever since — and, last October, they were finally able to go on that silent reading retreat.
“Six of us went to Muskoka for the weekend. We did more chatting than reading, but it was exactly what we needed,” Findlayter said. “As women, especially Black women, it’s just hard finding meaningful friendships out there. It’s become more than just reading.”
Finlayter also hosts a monthly “reading sprint” on Zoom, where everyone reads together virtually for an hour and a half on a Saturday morning.
The atmosphere when they are all silently reading together, she said, is peaceful.
“I know for myself, this is my only social gathering for the month. I’m a single mom, so I don’t really have a lot of options to say, ‘Hey, watch my daughter.’ I make sure that once a month I find a babysitter, because this is my time.”
There is also an official, trademarked Silent Book Club, founded in San Francisco in 2012, which boasts 1,500 chapters in 54 countries (including Canada), and whose members gather in bars, bookstores and libraries to read together quietly.
One of the newest arrivals on the scene is the Toronto chapter of Reading Rhythms, a social-media-famous global organization that bills itself as “a reading party” — a phrase they’ve trademarked — rather than a book club. With chapters in four countries and 20 cities (and a database of a 100,000 people requesting one in their own city), Reading Rhythms is probably best known for hosting one of these parties in New York’s Times Square last year — at 6 a.m.
The Toronto chapter had their very first event in March, a gathering at the Annex’s Duke of York pub, whose $20 tickets quickly sold out.
“Their approach is to have a trained host to facilitate a curated experience for readers and hold readers accountable to come and read their book, but also connect with a community of readers,” said Jackie DaSilva, a 39-year-old campaign strategist and the Toronto chapter lead. “It’s that juxtaposition of ‘reading’ and ‘party,’ the introvert and the extrovert.”
Every party follows the same format honed by the original New York chapter started in 2023: quiet reading time mixed with time to chat.
“It’s giving people permission to talk to strangers,” DaSilva said. “In Toronto … I don’t think people are casually talking to people they don’t know. We’ve become a lot more guarded and skeptical.”
Reading Rhythms uses books as that opening conversational gambit: You might be encouraged to go up to someone who’s reading a book you’re intrigued by, or join a group revolving around a theme you gravitate to and begin chatting.
One of DaSilva’s favourite moments from the first event was seeing the pub basement fill up with people who didn’t know one another, many of whom came alone.
“It was almost instantaneous that people started talking to each other,” she said, adding that at the end of that night, she was elated.
“I felt like it was the start of something really great.”
