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THERE IS NO CIRCLE of chairs, no facilitator posing thoughtful questions about this month’s selection and no raised hands waiting eagerly to offer insightful takeaways. Instead, at this book club, held on the sunny Saturday afternoon of 14 June, about two dozen 20- and 30-somethings, each with a different book in front of them, are sitting separately and reading silently.
These young adults have joined in on the worldwide, buzzy trend of quiet reading at the Harare chapter of Silent Book Club, a volunteer-run international organisation offering a low-stakes alternative to the traditional book club in which readers are the masters of their own literary fate. Instead of reading the same book and later meeting to discuss it, bibliophiles across the globe are opting to come together to read works of their choosing and talk about them only if they want to, and book lovers in Harare and Bulawayo have caught the bug.
With this model, “there’s no pressure,” said Thuthukani Ndlovu, the 31-year-old Bulawayo native who launched the Harare chapter of Silent Book Club in March.
Officially established in 2015 by two friends in San Francisco, California, in the US, Silent Book Club has sprouted into a global community with close to 2000 chapters across 57 countries, including Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania and Nigeria on the African continent. The event is BYOB (bring your own book), includes one hour of quiet reading and 30 minutes each before and after for socialising, and is typically held at a new venue each time.
Ndlovu, who runs a creative consultancy called The Radioactive Blog, first encountered Silent Book Club while living in South Africa, where he attended the Cape Town chapter. When he moved back to Zimbabwe, he started the monthly group in Harare with the unofficial tagline “Where solitude meets community.” The space “encourages people to read” and “provides an avenue to grow the reading culture” across all ages, he said, recalling a father-son duo who attended one of the previous gatherings.
The typical setup of the traditional book club can be limiting, Ndlovu said, but for a good reason. The confines — one book, a singular discussion, a set of questions — create a structure that some people might find useful and enjoyable. However, anyone who has ever participated in this conventional literary gathering knows the feeling of scrambling to complete the assigned reading before the next meeting or maybe even skipping out on the discussion altogether because they haven’t finished it.
The Silent Book Club, Ndlovu said, eliminates these worries by upending the orthodox format, making for a more inclusive space where readers can come as they are, with their desired picks in tow, no matter the genre.
The book selections at June’s Silent Book Club Harare gathering at Café Mocha off of Churchill Avenue confirmed this. Readers flipped through everything from self-help to literary fiction. Dale Carnegie's “How to Win Friends and Influence People” appeared alongside Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's “Purple Hibiscus” and “Dream Count,” a rare sight. Ndlovu even brought along a few poetry books, a genre he said isn’t commonly selected for book club discussions.
Silent Book Clubs, Ndlovu added, are also inclusive of members of the Deaf or Blind communities who may read using Braille or audio assistance, or for whom verbal discussions are not accessible and who might otherwise be excluded from standard book clubs. “We're just trying to create a space that anyone is welcome to come through,” Ndlovu said.
There is also proof of the demand for this type of programming. The Silent Book Club Harare WhatsApp and Facebook groups have grown in membership over the last four months, now at over 70 and 160 members each, as of the time of writing.
For some participants, Silent Book Club Harare was their introduction to book clubs in general. Sibonginkosi Mandengu, 31, learned about the gathering through a friend’s WhatsApp status.
“I love reading, and I thought, ‘Oh wow! This is so cool. Silent reading. I’ve never heard about the concept before,’” she said. So, she took a chance and encouraged her friend, Cynthia Bhake, 37, to come along.
“I just felt like, why can’t I just give it a try?” Bhake said, adding that it was an opportunity to learn and meet new people. She’s generally not much of a reader, but she showed up to the Silent Book Club with a new book in hand: “How Did We Get Here?” by Mpoomy Ledwaba.
On the same day, down south in Bulawayo, the launch of Silent Book Club Skyz drew 21 readers to The Roasted Bean Café, a successful pilot, said the event's curator, Sondlane Dube, who is from Bulawayo. In his experience, Dube, 29, said traditional book clubs usually attract the same people with the same interests.
“But with the Silent Book Club, it's just you going with a random book, whatever book you choose. There are very low chances that the rest of the people will be reading the same book,” he said. “So if you feel like you're not smart enough to have a proper analytical [discussion] of a certain book and text, you might not decide to attend the book club. But this book club is about saying, ‘Soon afterwards, whatever happens is up to you.’”
Dube, who also goes by Sox the Poet, is the founder of Wecre8te Afrika, a poetry and mentorship platform. Throughout his time in the literary arts space in Bulawayo, his hometown, he noticed a gap in the city's arts and culture programming. Many events, he said, focus on performance, so "curating Silent Book Club meant creating an audience and a community around reading” to fill the void.
“The reading culture is alive, but [there are] very few spaces to accommodate that,” he said. Not many people join libraries nowadays, instead choosing to read at home. But it's “nicer to be within a community where you know that soon afterwards, you can grab a cup of coffee, have conversations with a new person, and you never know, new and lasting bonds can be made within that space.”
