Vital online and offline book exchanges

We aimed, as we’ve done for the last couple of months, to have a two-part silent book club meeting today, first on zoom, then a bit later with a smaller group in person in our local park. Capricious weather cues and conflicting forecasts forced us to call off the much anticipated park visit. As disappointing as that was, the vitality of our zoom meeting – brimming with great reading and listening recommendations and stimulating discussion – was palpable and clearly savoured by all.

While the connections this month were largely online, our trusted recommendation network of book club friends keeps buzzing offline. That network extends to physically distanced discussions and book exchanges. We’re meeting and dropping books off at each other’s homes, and we’re spurring each other to head to library branches and bookstores, and to borrow and purchase online. In bookish terms, our “new normal” is a hybrid of online and offline opportunities to continue to boost and share our collective love of reading … something that has helped, in no small part, to navigate the many “new normals” with which we’re all contending.

Silent book club zoom group

Silent book club member reads The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Here is our brimming, buzzing, lively combined reading list for this month. The titles featured each month combine print and digital versions of books, along with audiobooks (which are indicated separately).

Our previous silent book club meeting reports (online and in-person incarnations) and book lists are here.

We’re pleased and honoured to have been interviewed about the silent book club concept and how to start a club of one’s own. You can check out links to articles, CBC Radio interviews and more here – some with San Francisco-based Silent Book Club founders Guinevere de La Mare and Laura Gluhanich, and some with us here in east end Toronto.

Learn more about silent book clubs via Guinevere and Laura’s Silent Book Club web site. You can find information on meetings happening around the world and close to where you live. Some clubs are currently on haitus, but many are running virtual meetings in different formats. Please feel free to contact me for more information about our club and its offerings.

A silent book club meeting with friends and neighbours, held at and in support of a local business exemplifies exactly the kinds of freedoms we are foregoing now to get through these unsettled and unsettling times … and is where we’re all going to want to be when we get through this. Read well where you are now, gather in the ways that are safe and make most sense, including virtually. Be well and let books buoy your spirits, make our ever changing and challenging circumstances more tolerable, and make the time pass swiftly.

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