A silent book club: how a “happy hour for introverts” spread around the world 📚Laura Gluhanich, Silent Book Club

“It's not that introverts don't want to talk to people. They really value quality conversation over talking to big quantities of people. [Silent Book Clubs] appeal because you can get that little bit of conversation about something that you're interested in. You don't have to come up with small talk. That appeals to the type of person that appreciates that mix, and I think most people are kind of ambiverts.” - Laura Gluhanich 

Laura Gluhanich and Guinevere de la Mare are the type of people who always had a book in hand and enjoyed reading in public spaces. But they shared a mutual frustration for the traditional book club. These sessions were often hard to schedule, and many times required reading a book that wasn’t of interest.  

So to satisfy their desire for social reading, they got creative. They transformed frequent dinner outings in their San Francisco neighborhood into a shared time for quiet reading. They called their rendez-vous a “Silent Book Club”and it became a ritual for the two friends. Soon, other friends started to tag along and they began formalizing the invitations with Facebook events. Then came a series of infection points–people reaching out in Alabama, Japan, Serbia, Italy, the UK and more to start their own Silent Book Clubs, features in NPR and Oprah magazine—that brought them to 220+ chapters today.

Our correspondent Mia Quagliarello talks with Laura about how she and Guinevere learned from their careers in online community building to make an assertive stand with their community guidelines. She talks about how they, as a team, have documented dream partners, personal values and deal-breakers, that have served as an underlying shared basis for decision making. Together they have continued the Silent Book Club as a global passion project with the support of volunteer hosts on the side of day jobs, Laura as the Director of Programs at Him For Her, a social impact venture aimed at accelerating diversity on the corporate board, and Guinevere de la Mare as a UX Writer at Google. 

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