(Photo by Maggie Macintosh, CBC Toronto)
Ours is a no-pressure book club, where you bring whatever you’re reading or would like to read. After all attendees tell a little bit about what they’re reading, the group reads silently together for an hour, and then chats about their reading after the hour is up.
You can enjoy all our silent book club meeting reports and book lists here. Our group has evolved and changed a bit over the course of the pandemic, so I need to rewrite this intro, but some of the wonderful changes and discoveries we made when we took the group online, then resumed some live meetings while still keeping up our online connections, are recounted in our reports – so enjoy!
Running since the fall of 2017, our beloved book club was originally inspired by the Silent Book Club founded in San Francisco, now boasting chapters around the world. The group has grown modestly (by design) and steadily, with a dedicated core of readers who meet monthly at east end Toronto’s PRESS Books Coffee Vinyl. In March 2019, CBC Toronto paid a visit and profiled what our group was all about. Our club was also included in a late 2018 feature about silent book clubs in the international news publication The Christian Science Monitor. Enjoy the article here. San Francisco-based Silent Book Club founders Guinevere de La Mare and Laura Gluhanich were featured in the February 2019 issue of O, the Oprah Magazine, describing the club’s genesis and extolling its virtues (if we haven’t done that enough here!) as the concept and clubs spread worldwide.
In May 2019, Rakuten Kobo (they of the e-books, audiobooks, e-readers and tablet computers) touted our club as one of “five incredible book clubs from across Canada” …
… and then, also in May 2019, I had the absolute pleasure to sing the praises of silent book clubs to CBC Radio hosts in St. John’s, Toronto, Fredericton, Calgary, Yellowknife, Victoria, Kelowna, Whitehorse and Edmonton. At the same time, San Francisco silent book club originator and founder Guinevere de la Mare (she and Laura Gluhanich started the first club in 2012 – check www.silentbook.club for the latest on the more than 75 chapters worldwide that are spreading the sbc love!) spoke to CBC Radio in London ON, Cape Breton, Winnipeg, Halifax, Vancouver, Sudbury, Thunder Bay and Saskatoon. I hope that means that friends across the country will soon have the chance to enjoy what I go on and on about every month – right in their own towns!
Enjoy my (dead nervous) interview with Reshmi Nair on CBC Toronto’s Here and Now.
After that series of interviews, I was subsequently invited to CBC Radio’s Ontario Morning studio to talk to host Wei Chen. You can listen to our chat here (starting at 41:20).
You can enjoy all our silent book club meeting reports and book lists here.
See also: Story: Ordinary People Making a Positive Difference (from Jofacilitator blog)
If you’re interested in starting your own silent book club or are in the Toronto area and perhaps interested in checking ours out, please feel free to contact me for more information.