The resurgence of book clubs: our testimonials

You have probably seen the line that reading for six minutes cuts your stress by 68 per cent. I quoted it myself for years. It comes from a 2009 piece of research by Mindlab International, it involved sixteen volunteers, it was commissioned by a chocolate brand, and it was never published in a peer reviewed journal. Which is a shame, because the real case for book clubs turns out to be sturdier than the fake statistic ever was.

What made me join one, after saying no for years

My work is sociable in a way that is also strangely lonely. I spend whole days in close physical contact with people I will probably never see again, talking about their skin and their wedding and their nerves, and then everyone packs up. What I was short of was the other kind of company: the same faces, repeatedly, with no professional reason to be pleasant.

A friend dragged me to a group that meets in a pub back room on the first Tuesday of the month. I had resisted for years on the grounds that I did not want homework. That turned out to be the wrong objection. The book is the excuse, not the point. Nobody in that room has ever been unkind about a half-finished novel, and the conversation leaves the text within about twenty minutes anyway.

The evidence on reading and wellbeing, without the chocolate advert

The honest version of the research is less dramatic than the viral one and considerably more useful. In The Reading Agency’s 2024 State of the Nation’s Adult Reading work, 44 per cent of regular readers said reading had improved their mental health and wellbeing, compared with 23 per cent of people who had lapsed or never read much. Earlier research from the same organisation found that 19 per cent of readers said reading stopped them feeling lonely.

Two things to hold onto here. These are people reporting on themselves, so they show an association between reading and feeling better, not proof that one causes the other. And the trend underneath is going the wrong way: regular reading in England has fallen from 58 per cent of adults in 2015 to about half in 2024. The clubs are growing against the tide, not with it.

Where the picture gets more convincing is on the social side. The Reading Agency’s Reading Friends programme, which pairs people over shared reading specifically to tackle loneliness, reports that a large majority of participants feel more connected to others afterwards and that most feel less lonely. A shared book gives two strangers something to talk about that is neither the weather nor themselves, which is a genuinely difficult problem to solve any other way.

The format that is quietly taking over

If the idea of discussing a novel in front of eleven people makes you want to lie down, the growth story of the last two years is for you. Silent Book Club began in 2012 when two friends, Guinevere de la Mare and Laura Gluhanich, started meeting to read at a San Francisco wine bar. They formalised it in 2015. It now runs as a network of local chapters, around 2,000 of them across more than 60 countries, and the BBC reported a 460 per cent increase in UK events between 2024 and 2025.

The format is exactly what it says. You arrive, there is a short round of introductions where people say what they brought, then everyone reads their own book in the same room for an hour, then there is a drink and an optional conversation. No set text. No deadline. No performance.

I have been to two. The strange part is how much easier it is to talk to people afterwards than at a normal social event, presumably because you have already spent an hour comfortably not talking to them.

How to start one that survives past the third month

Most new groups die between meeting three and meeting five, usually for logistical reasons rather than literary ones. What I have seen work:

1. Fix the date before you fix anything else. First Tuesday, second Sunday, whatever it is, make it a rule rather than a monthly negotiation.
2. Keep it to six to ten people. Below six, one absence kills the evening. Above ten, it turns into two separate conversations.
3. Set a page limit rather than a taste. Under 350 pages in a month is a promise people can keep.
4. Rotate who chooses, in a fixed order, so nobody has to justify a pick.
5. Say out loud at meeting one that turning up without finishing is allowed. This single sentence is the difference between a club that lasts a year and one that lasts a season.
6. Pick a venue with a corner you can book. Volume is the reason more groups fold than any disagreement about a novel.

Where the celebrity clubs actually help

It is easy to be sniffy about them. Oprah Winfrey launched Oprah’s Book Club in 1996 and reached her hundredth selection in 2023 with Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. Reese Witherspoon launched Reese’s Book Club through her company Hello Sunshine in 2017, with a stated focus on stories with women at the centre, and Hello Sunshine was bought by Candle Media in August 2021 in a deal valuing it at $900 million. These are not hobbies. They are distribution businesses.

They are still useful. A monthly pick removes the hardest part of reading more, which is choosing, and it gives thousands of small groups a shared shortlist to argue with. Libraries do the same job without the commercial layer: the New York Public Library has run book discussion groups for years, and in the UK The Reading Agency reported hosting more than 9,000 reading groups across a single year.

What I would tell anyone hesitating

Join the badly organised group near you rather than waiting for the perfect one. Mine meets in a room that smells of old carpet, half of us are behind on the book most months, and it has done more for how my weeks feel than any wellness purchase I have made in the same period. If you want the quiet version, find a silent chapter. If you want the talking version, find a pub.

Dr Seuss put it better than any of the research, in I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!: the more that you read, the more things you will know. The bit the quotation leaves out is that reading in company gets you something else entirely, and that is the part the numbers are starting to catch up with.

Sources: The Reading Agency, State of the Nation’s Adult Reading, 2024, and published Reading Facts and impact reporting; Lewis D, Mindlab International, Galaxy stress research, 2009, unpublished; Silent Book Club published history and chapter figures; BBC reporting on UK silent book club growth, 2025; public reporting on the sale of Hello Sunshine to Candle Media, August 2021.