Book Clubs

Only 7% of American adults say they took part in a book club in the past year, according to a Pew Research Center survey from October 2025. Women were twice as likely as men to be in one, 10% to 5%. That’s a small club for an idea at least four hundred years old, and I’d bet plenty of the other 93% have wondered whether they’d like it.

This page answers the questions I’d want answered before joining one: what a book club actually is, what it’s good for, how to find or start one, and which tools take the admin off your hands.

Same book, same deadline, one room

A book club is a small group that reads the same book on a schedule and meets to talk about it. Library guides put the comfortable size at 6 to 12 people: enough that a few no-shows don’t sink the night, few enough that everyone gets a turn. Most meet monthly for an hour or two, in a living room, a library room, a café or a video call.

The name gets stretched. Oprah’s Book Club, which began in 1996, and the celebrity clubs that followed are mostly a shared reading list with a famous person choosing. The Book-of-the-Month Club, founded in 1926, is a mail-order service. Shared Reading, a model from the UK charity The Reader, turns the usual format around: the group reads aloud together in the room, so nobody arrives having done homework.

What actually gets said

This was the part I couldn’t picture. On my Impossible List each book gets a star rating and a line, and I wasn’t sure what I’d say about even a favorite beyond that. It turns out the rating is where the talking starts. Library guides suggest swapping “Did you like it?” for “What was your reading experience?”, so the question in the room becomes why it got four stars and what kept it from five.

Most of an evening runs on a few kinds of question:

• Where you got hooked, where you nearly quit, and which scene you read twice.
• Who you trusted, who you wanted to shake, and whether anyone changed.
• Why the author ended it there, told it from that seat, or skipped the scene everyone wanted.
• What it reminded you of in your own life, as much or as little as you care to share.
• Where you disagree. Someone loved the book you couldn’t finish, and I suspect those make the best meetings.

Preparing is lighter than it sounds. LitLovers suggests reading with a pencil and marking the passages that land, then bringing them along as evidence, so you arrive with two or three page numbers and a question you didn’t get answered. Some groups also ask whoever picked the book to say why they chose it, which gets the room going while everyone settles in.

Sermons on a ship, 1634

The usual candidate for the first book club is a group Anne Hutchinson started in 1634 on her way to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where women met to discuss the week’s sermons. In 1827 the Society of Young Ladies in Lynn, Massachusetts, began a run of African American women’s literary societies across the Northeast. For a long time a book club was where people kept out of formal education got some anyway, and I think that’s still a fair description of what a good one does.

Why join one

A survey of 2,000 American book club members, commissioned by ThriftBooks, asked why they joined. The top answers were reading new books (68%), socializing (63%) and making new friends (59%), and 28% said they’d struggled to meet people with similar taste in books before. It’s a sponsored poll of people already in clubs, so it tells you what members say, which isn’t the same as what clubs do.

My own guess at the biggest benefit is the deadline. A book you’ve promised to discuss on the 14th gets finished, and a book on your own shelf can wait forever. I say that as someone whose reading list on the Impossible List will comfortably outlive me.

Is it good for you?

People often say book clubs are good for you. The best-known work comes from the University of Liverpool, which ran Shared Reading groups for adults diagnosed with depression for a year. Depression measures improved while the groups ran, but the researchers said plainly that a small sample, dropouts and no control group meant they couldn’t call it an effect. A 2025 review of Shared Reading studies found the same pattern: better wellbeing and fewer depressive symptoms, mostly in small studies with nothing to compare against. It’s promising, and nobody has proven it yet.

Finding one to join

Start at the library. Many public libraries run book clubs of their own, and the staff tend to know which local groups want members. Bookstores, Meetup and Eventbrite come next; in 2026 Eventbrite told Axios that book club events on its platform were up 33% on the year before, driven mostly by very niche meetups.

Online, the choice comes down to how much structure you want. Goodreads groups are huge and free. Fable and The StoryGraph both host clubs inside a reading app. A few times a year OverDrive runs the Big Library Read, a global ebook club where one title can be borrowed through Libby by everyone at once, with no waitlist.

Try two or three before you commit. Every club has its own speed and seriousness, and a club that reads like a seminar will lose the person who came for the snacks, and the other way round.

Starting your own

1. Invite three to five people and ask each of them to bring a friend, which one library recommends as the quick way past your own circle.
2. Pick a regular slot. Monthly is the standard, and every six weeks gives long books and slow readers room.
3. Agree at the first meeting how books get chosen. Choosing several months ahead gives everyone time to find a copy, and BookBrowse passes on a rule I like: whoever nominates a book has to have read it.
4. If members don’t know each other yet, meet somewhere public the first time, like a library room or a café. Bars look fun and are usually too loud for a real conversation.
5. Give one person the job of opening the talk with a single open question, and pass that job around.

The first book matters more than the rest. If you’re the one starting the club, pick something you’ve read, liked and can talk about for an hour.

Tools that help

Kits vary by library, so check your own catalogue; some, like Halifax Public Libraries, keep more than two hundred titles. If the group is spread out, a video call does the job of the living room. And for the night itself, a kit’s discussion guide or a list of general questions that fit any book will get a quiet room talking.

So what’s a book club for?

Mostly it’s for finishing the book, and then hearing what a handful of other people saw in it that you missed. The case that it’s good for your health is still small studies and good intentions, and the history says the best clubs were always about getting something people weren’t otherwise offered. If you’re one of the 93% who has wondered, the library is the cheapest place to find out whether you’d like being in the club.

Sources

Figures and app features checked in November 2026. The member survey was paid for by a bookseller and only asked people already in clubs. The history comes from secondary sources, and “first book club” is a claim nobody can prove. App features and prices change quickly, so check each tool’s own page before you rely on it.