This Month’s Featured Article

Born out of a desire to spend more time in third places – locations separate from home (first place) or work (second place) – this year, in the midst of winter, Lindsey and I created a book club with a few of her friends from high school. Part of the reason we started a book club was that we are all bookworms and recent grads between the ages of 22 and 23 years old who were searching for a low stakes, academic hobby that included other people. 

Naturally, the best option was to create a book club. 

We typically meet once per month, where we spend a few hours in The White Hart in Salisbury, CT, drinking coffee and snacking on delicious pastries while we discuss the themes of the book, share our thoughts on the writing style, and ultimately, choose another book to read for the following month. 

A rich history of joining together to discuss literature

The history of book clubs can be traced back to the 19th century. An article from JSTOR Daily, an online magazine meant to bring academic research to a wider audience, traces the origins of book clubs back to the women’s clubs of the late-19th century. Women’s clubs emerged out of the progressive movements and were predominantly composed of white women from the middle and upper classes.

“One of the first such societies – Sorosis – was founded in 1868, when several female columnists were barred from a New York Press Club event honoring Charles Dickens,” author Pamela Burger writes in “Women’s Groups and the Rise of the Book Club.”

“Journalist Jane Cunningham Croly, who created the club with a circle of professional female colleagues, took the name from a botanical term: Sorosis refers to a type of fruit formed from an aggregate of flowers,” Burger continues. “Inspired by Sorosis and the New England Women’s Club in Boston, women across the nation began forming similar societies, from the still-running Ladies’ Literary Club of Ypsilanti, Michigan (1878), to the Ladies’ Reading Club of Houston (1885).”

But women’s groups and book clubs provided more than just a way to join together to discuss a common subject. In a time where women were not expected, and even often discouraged, from pursuing any kind of higher education, these groups promoted female education via lectures, discussed readings, and even written reports. 

“May Alden Ward, writing in 1906, detailed how these clubs promoted female education: They offered scholarships for women’s colleges, opened public libraries, and even raised money to create a girls’ trade school in New York,” Burger writes. “Women’s clubs were also active in political and social reform. Ward states that these societies created ‘better schools, better surroundings, better industrial conditions, and better laws … the club movement is a beneficent influence in the United States.’”

Women’s clubs were also centered around self-development, or what was referred to as “self-culture,” which was based on improving personal, intellectual, and moral character. The women’s clubs of this time period allowed women to focus on personal betterment through academic work, and this idea of self-improvement via reading and discussing remains one of the reasons why people create book clubs today. 

About my book club

Each book club has its own unique structure, and we created a few guidelines to inform our book choices and ensure that everyone was included in the book selection process. We used a Google Form so that everyone could submit three books that fit within these guidelines: must be fiction, be a reasonable length to complete in a month, not have romance as the only plot point, and preferably be considered a modern classic or be otherwise well regarded. 

After submitting our book club picks, we created another Google Form in which we ranked the picks from the ones we wanted to read the most to the ones we wanted to read the least based on the summaries of the books. This was a remarkably effective way for us all to decide which books we were the most interested in as a group and gave us a good starting point. 

We kicked off our book club by reading Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, a 1956 novel that centers around the life of an American man living in Paris as he processes the complicated feelings regarding his relationships with the other men in his life, particularly Giovanni, an Italian bartender who he meets in a Parisian gay bar. We all agreed that this was a fantastic read, and it was a great way to ease back into analyzing texts from an academic point of view (in addition to a casual reader point of view). 

Other books we have read in our book club include White Teeth by Zadie Smith, her debut novel, published in 2000, which centers around the lives of two wartime friends, Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and Englishman Archie Jones, and later around their families and children living in London; James by Perceival Everett (which won the 2024 Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), a reimagining of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain but from the perspective of Huckleberry’s friend, Jim, who is an escaped slave; Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, the 2024 debut from the Iranian-American poet, which centers around Cyrus, a queer Iranian-American dealing with the loss of his parents and the concept of martyrdom; and If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio, a 2017 novel centering around a murder mystery surrounding Oliver Marks, a former actor at the fictional Dellecher Shakespeare conservatory that takes place during his final year at the college.

Being a part of this book club allowed me to not only read more, but also to read novels that I ordinarily would not have chosen. In turn, book club provided me with a social space that empowered me to engage in intellectual conversation in which everyone brings their own unique perspectives to the table, therefore broadening my thought processes and allowing me to view the book from alternative perspectives. For many, this is part of the reason they join book clubs as well. 

Why book clubs have stood the test of time

“Women’s Groups and the Rise of the Book Club,” credits the modern book club boom in part to Oprah Winfrey’s book club segment on her self-titled television show in 1996. 

“Oprah’s Book Club established a template for millions of women to follow: A few friends discuss the monthly selection over dinner, share personal stories, and give empathic interpretations of the text. R. Mark Hall calls the popularization of this model the ‘Oprahfication of literacy,’” Burger writes. “Literature, according to the Oprah formula, is a vehicle for learning about oneself. Books have ‘lessons,’ the novels’ characters are potential ‘friends,’ and reading is a transformational act.”

For Kristen Fischetti, an elementary school principal, joining a book club stemmed out of a desire to form deeper connections with friends. “As an avid reader, joining a group of other people who love to read is both inspiring and enjoyable, especially when they are dear friends. It adds another layer to the connections that we already share,” she explained. 

Kristen’s book club – mostly made up of women from the Pine Plains, NY, community – meets once every four to six weeks either at a member’s house or at a public place where they also have dinner together. Whoever hosts that month is in charge of choosing the book, and they typically incorporate a food theme that is either related to the book in some way or random, depending on the book’s themes. “Everyone brings a dish to share based on the theme. It adds to the fun,” she said. 

Their book club doesn’t have any specific guidelines, other than to discuss the book at some point during the evening. “We share feedback on the book choice, give opinions about our recommendation (or not) of the book, and discuss events within the book. We share the joy of reading together. I’ve read genres that I wouldn’t have read before if it weren’t for the book chosen.” 

Besides being exposed to books that she wouldn’t necessarily choose on her own, Kristen believes that the best part of book club is the time spent together with friends. “It’s so important to find time to do what you love with people you enjoy spending time with. Women easily lose themselves in the many roles we have throughout our days, so to take one night to talk about a book, eat good food, and laugh a lot – who wouldn’t want that?”

Amanda Zick, who also runs a book club in Pine Plains, NY, started her book club with her friend Bethany in 2016. Amanda and Bethany were previously in another book club that was, “well-established, but somewhat exclusive and not open to expanding and adding many new members.” She and Bethany had several mutual friends that had never participated in a book club because of the “intimidation factor,” so they decided to create their own club to add new people to their book discussions. 

Amanda’s club meets roughly every five to six weeks, and the location and book selection rotates throughout the group, with the same person picking a book and hosting in the same month. Her club has no parameters around book picks, which are allowed to be any genre and any length. 

“We try to respect each other’s time and availability, however, so we tend not to pick epically long books (anything over 500 pages). We tend not to choose new releases either, as many of us rely on the library and new releases always have long wait lists,” she explained. 

Amanda’s book club hasn’t changed much since its inception. Although they’ve had some members come and go, they average six to eight members per meeting. “I think the secret is not being too rigid and ensuring that we have some flexibility. If there are too many rules or too much pressure, people will lose interest or stop showing up.” 

Other than talking about books with other bookish folks, Amanda’s favorite part of book club is, “getting people together face-to-face in our local area. Book clubs are a great way to encourage IRL (in real life) relationships that have become more scarce in the digital age.”