Why Book Clubs Are Good for You: Three Rooms That Changed Their Members

On a Tuesday evening in Philadelphia in September 1831, about twenty women met and put their own writing into a box. Anonymously, so that the criticism afterward would land on the work rather than the writer. They called themselves the Female Literary Association, and one of them, a teacher named Sarah Mapps Douglass, usually opened the evening with an address. They were free Black women in a city where their right to read, write and gather in public was under active attack. The month before, Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia had hardened attitudes across the country.

The box in Philadelphia

The Association did something unusual for a women's society of that era: it wrote a constitution and sent it to The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, which published it that December. Members' letters and essays appeared there over the following years, which is how we can still read what they argued about.

They were not alone. By the 1830s, dozens of literary societies had formed among African Americans in northern cities, each one a combination of reading group, debating club and lending library. Philadelphia's Reading Room Society dated from 1828, the Library Company of Colored Persons from 1833. Boston had the African-American Female Intelligence Society by around 1830. New York had the Philomathean Society and a Ladies Literary Society. In 1839 a group of young men in Philadelphia founded a society they soon renamed the Demosthenian Institute, after the Athenian orator, because what they wanted to practice was public speech.

These were people locked out of colleges, lyceums and most public halls, who responded by building the institution themselves in a front room. The reading was the material. The argument afterward was the education, and the practice of standing up and defending a position in front of your neighbors was training for the abolition and suffrage work many of them went on to do.

The correspondence course that became America's oldest book club

In August 1878, at a lakeside summer assembly in western New York, a Methodist minister named John Heyl Vincent announced a four-year reading course for people who could not go to college. It was called the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. Members read a prescribed list of four or five books a year, sat examinations, and after four years marched behind a banner at a recognition ceremony to receive a diploma.

Over 8,400 people signed up in the first year. In 1882, 1,718 of them graduated. Members were encouraged to form local reading circles so they could share the cost of the books and keep each other going, and those circles spread across the country. By 1891 the enrollment had reached 180,000. By the 1920s it passed 300,000. In the first two decades, around 10,000 circles formed, a quarter of them in villages of fewer than 500 people.

The people it reached hardest were the ones with the fewest other doors: women, rural households, and schoolteachers who had never been taught the subjects they were teaching. The Chautauqua circle is still running, and circles still meet in Nagasaki and in Harare.

Tuesday evenings in Cairo

In 1913, a Lebanese-Palestinian writer named Mayy Ziyadah began hosting a salon at her family's home in Cairo. It ran on Tuesday evenings for more than twenty years, and it was the first salon in the city where men and women sat together in the same room to discuss literature and ideas.

The attendance list reads like an index of the Arab intellectual renaissance: Taha Hussein, Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad, Ahmed Shawqi, Khalil Mutran, Salama Moussa. Huda Sha'rawi, who led the Egyptian women's movement, came sometimes. Guests were expected to write ahead to say they were coming, and letters written out of those conversations were published afterward, so the salon leaked into print the way the Philadelphia box leaked into The Liberator.

Ziyadah was in her twenties when she started it. She wrote biographies of three earlier Arab women writers, lectured at Cairo University and the American University in Beirut, and argued publicly that Arab women should be educated and employed. Her Tuesday room was the instrument.

What all three understood about reading together

Solitary reading gives you the book. A group gives you the book plus every other reader in the room, and the second part is what none of these organizers would have traded away.

The Philadelphia women put their work in a box so the judgment would be candid. The Chautauqua circles existed because a reading list mailed to an isolated person is a chore, while the same list read alongside six neighbors is an event. Ziyadah's guests apologized in writing when they missed a week. Every one of these designs solves the same problem, which is that reading alone is easy to abandon and reading in company is not.

There is also the matter of what a group does to comprehension. Explaining a plot to somebody forces you to rebuild it, disagreement hands you a second reading you would never have produced yourself, and having to say what you thought turns a vague impression into a sentence. The clinical research on shared reading, including the Liverpool work on reading groups and depression, sits in the companion piece on the health benefits of reading rather than being repeated here.

How this applies today

Keep it small and keep it regular. Six people meeting monthly outlast twenty people meeting whenever everyone is free. The Tuesday-evening habit is doing more work than the reading list.

Choose together. Every group described here selected its own material, and the ones that survived longest were the ones where members had a vote. A list handed down from a single enthusiast dies quietly.

Make room for disagreement. The Philadelphia women built anonymity into their process precisely so that criticism could be real. A group where everyone agrees the book was lovely is a pleasant evening with no second reading in it.

Let people come having not finished. Attendance is the habit that matters, and a person who read forty pages and shows up will read the next book. A person who stays home in embarrassment stops coming.

Start one with children. A group of three families reading the same book and meeting to argue about it gives a child the experience of discovering that someone they like read the same pages and came out somewhere else entirely.