The Silent Book Club Just Turned 10 and Introverts Everywhere Are Celebrating

Can you believe it? Silent Book Club, the delightfully low-pressure, “introvert happy hour” bookish phenomenon, is turning 10 years old! It’s officially been a decade since it came to life as a global reading community that reimagined what a book club could be: zero obligations, zero forced discussion, just a bunch of strangers quietly reading together (and maybe chatting if you feel like it).

So let’s cozy up with our favorite novels and dig into this milestone celebration.

From Low-Key Beginnings to Worldwide Reading Movement

The magic of Silent Book Club actually started way back in 2012, when two friends, Laura Gluhanich and Guinevere de la Mare, would meet for low-key reading sessions at a wine bar in San Francisco. There was no assigned book, no pressure, no need to prove anything, just the joy of reading in good company.

They got to enjoy quiet companionship and the joy of pages turning in shared silence. At that moment, they had no idea that it would soon blossom into a global sensation.

A handful of years later, the two officially launched the Silent Book Club in 2015, rolling out the idea as something genuinely and intentionally different from traditional book clubs. They set the club up with the goal of breaking down barriers.

By removing the assigned books and structured discussions, they removed all the pressure. The book club became more about sharing the love for reading and hanging out, rather than proving you understood Little Women better than Karen down the road.

A Decade of Growth and Community

The growth of The Silent Book Club is truly inspirational. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane:

• 2012–2015: Quiet reading in San Francisco evolves into a formal club with chapters in San Francisco, Brooklyn, and L.A., coining the charming taglines “Introvert Happy Hour” and “BYO Book.”
• 2016: Expansion hits international turf, England (Andover), Australia, India, and more U.S. cities, reaching about 20 groups.
• 2017: Major press starts buzzing, Poets & Writers, LitHub, O, and The Oprah Magazine jump on board; chapters proliferate across Italy, Canada, and South Africa, pushing past 40 globally.
• 2019: A viral NPR feature catapults the club from 70 to 180 chapters across 20 countries by year’s end. Susan Cain (Hello, Quiet Revolution!) praises the movement’s unique take on socializing.
• 2020: Pandemic hits, chapters hit about 260 across 30 countries, and virtual meetups take over, keeping the community alive even when everything shut down.
• 2023: The world craves in-person connection again. The Silent Book Club membership doubled, growing from 300 to 600 chapters across 50 countries, helped along by a tell-all feature in The Wall Street Journal and a viral Instagram/TikTok video from a West Seattle meetup.
• 2024: Expansion explodes. 1,075 new chapters pop up, bringing the total to 1,500+ chapters in 55 countries. Media outlets like Good Morning America, CNN, NYT, NatGeo, NPR, and Time spotlight the group and what it does. Eventbrite reports a whopping 223% increase in Silent Book Club events.
• 2025, 10 years in: Now the big one. Silent Book Club has grown to about 2,000 local chapters in 61 countries, with more joining each week! Over a million readers are gathering, reading alone together, every single month or more. Oprah even had the organizers on her Book Club podcast!

Why Is the Silent Book Club a Hit?

People are clearly investing their time into this, so what makes it special?

First things first: no pressure, full freedom. The fact that there are no required readings, no judgments on what you choose to turn up with, and no tight deadlines really appeals to modern-day readers. These days, readers have to fight to fit their hobby in around their 9-to-5, so deadlines and picking up books they’re not really interested in simply isn’t what people want.

Something like the Silent Book Club also makes this battle to read easier, as it carves out a specific time to do it. The world is so distracting, and it can be hard to build time into our busy lives to sit down and relax! But with the Silent Book Club, there’s a scheduled, much-needed escape from the hubbub.

The Silent Book Club also has an additional appeal for introverts. People who don’t want to sit and have an hour-long debate about Hamlet after reading it for pleasure. The perk of the Silent Book Club is that you can be social while staying quiet. You’re around others, but there’s no expectation to chat or perform. It’s just being alone, together.

Taking that pressure away often actually makes connections form more easily. Nobody’s forcing themselves to connect out of obligation; they’re simply chatting when the mood strikes or a person has a particularly intriguing book with them! This has been the key to people finding friends and even lovers at Silent Book Clubs.

And, finally, there’s the surroundings. With the Silent Book Club chapters being independently run, they’re often hosted in local gems. This might be a café you didn’t know about, or it might be the local museum that you’ve just never had the time to visit. The meetings give people a chance to enjoy their city in a way that maybe they’ve never had the chance to before.

Time to Celebrate!

So, after 10 years, what is The Silent Book Club doing to celebrate? It’s not like all the members will fit in one big hall for a party!

To involve everyone, from San Francisco to Europe to Asia and Australia, the Silent Book Club is hosting several events to mark this milestone. In person, they are doing a Global Readathon from October 10 to October 12, where nearly 100 chapters of the group are running special anniversary readathon events together.

Some chapters are going the extra mile and throwing a local party to celebrate! Online, there’s a special merch shop stocked to the brim with anniversary goodies (tote bags, tees, sweatshirts, hats, stickers) so that members can rep their love of reading out and about. They’ve also launched a timeline on their website for members to explore.