English Silent Book Club Paris - France

What is our Silent Book Club?

Silent Book Club is happy hour for introverts. Bring a book and maybe bring a friend. Then settle in for an hour of reading in silence with fellow book lovers.

There is no assigned reading or discussion guides. We are here to read for our pleasure, so we read whatever we want. There is no judgement here and certainly no guilt. We read all genres, all formats (paper books, eBooks, audio books, web sites, anything) and in all languages.

If you’re interested in the concept and the origins, you can learn more on the Silent Book Clubs web site.

Why English-language?

We wanted to have two different groups for two different discussions. This is the English-language group where we discuss in English. You can read text in any language you want. But our discussions are in English. We also manage the Club de Lecture Silencieuse Paris (en français).

We have several participants for whom English is not their first language. Our sessions are a great place to practice English language conversation as you can participate as much or as little as you want.

Why online-only?

We wanted to start with the easiest and quickest way possible to see how all of this works and what the interest may be.

When there will be enough of us, on a regular basis, we'll eventually find ourselves with a mixture of online sessions and in-person sessions at a café or bar or bookstore. They should not be that difficult to find here in Paris.

How does it work?

We meet once every two weeks:

19:00 - 19:30

Introductions and general discussions of who's reading what

We note down what each reader is reading (title, author, format, ...) for our session summaries and reading lists

 19:30 - 20:30

Silent Reading Hour (all microphones muted)

 20:30 - 21:00+

Optional socialising and general discussion or keep reading.

Cameras and/or microphones are optional. Text-only chat is also possible.

Depending on the number of participants we often go overtime on the pre-reading discussions and sometimes on the post-reading discussions. But we always leave a full hour for reading no matter what. For the post-reading discussions some of us have other things to do, or other responsibilities, or hunger on a weeknight. You can leave the sessions at any time with no judgement and no guilt. We are happy you participated.

We are currently using Zoom for our online sessions. But we are open to all possibilities.

We currently record each of our sessions, and you will hear a notification whenever you join one of our sessions. However, these recordings are for internal use only. We rewatch our sessions when we create the session summaries so as to not have to take notes during our sessions. These recordings are never shared or published.

Session Summaries

We create a summary after each session with the reading list of what was read and a summary of our discussions with relevant links to more information.

We publish the summary on our various social network accounts and we distribute directly to our newsletter subscribers.