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“Like the dope fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm, I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter,” W Somerset Maugham wrote in his 1932 short story “The Book Bag”. I entirely agree: if you want to feel at home in a new city, simply bring a book as you saunter the streets.
Maugham’s protagonist lugged around a large laundry bag brimming with books; I slip slim volumes of poetry or essays into my backpack. With a book in hand, even if you’re alone you have good company. It gives you room to idle, to push back against the relentless pressure to rush from one attraction to another.
Just the act of being a reader in a crowd of commuters gives me a sense of having and taking my time. As the editor and writer Anika Burgess noted in a 2021 essay in The New York Times, “Even in the busiest of places, if you have a good book, you can retreat into solitude.”
I used to be the kind of reader who preferred to read only in libraries or nooks at home, ideally with a cat spread out over my feet (and, less ideally, over the pages of the book I was trying to read). But over time, I’ve begun to love reading while roaming — finding a quiet spot in the middle of the Frankfurt Book Fair bustle, in New York’s Central Park or on Mumbai’s Marine Drive as runners and chaat-eating families pass by.
In New York, I yielded to temptation and took Edith Wharton’s classic society novel The Age of Innocence off for a walk around Grace Church and Gilded Age Manhattan. The American essayist Anne Fadiman called this “You Are There” reading — such a frisson of delight, to read a book in its rightful setting. I remember the thrill of reading Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma at Lake Como, where his fictional family had a castle, while back home in Delhi, reading Anita Desai’s In Custody or the late Hindi novelist Krishna Sobti’s Chandni Chowk books gave me a deeper sense of place, and lost time.
The best thing is, you don’t even need to travel. If you’re in search of companionable solitude while reading, no matter the location, it might be time to discover the pleasures of Silent Book Club. It has a simple but bold premise: readers gather at a pre-arranged time and place to read together, but they don’t utter a word. They can agree to read the same book, or different ones altogether. Afterwards, they may engage in conversation, but they can also simply leave. It is the introvert’s answer to the usual chatty, note-taking book club.
The club was started in 2012 by two friends, Guinevere de la Mare and Laura Gluhanich, who began reading together “in companionable silence” at their neighbourhood bar in San Francisco. “We loved books, and reading with friends, but most of our previous attempts at book clubs had fizzled out,” they write on their website. The model seems to have struck a chord — Silent Book Club now has about 300 “chapters” around the globe. Most are clustered in North America, but there are several in Europe and Asia, from Guernsey and Munich to Singapore and Iwakuni in Japan.
Just before I left Delhi for the US, I visited the city’s local chapter. It was started in 2019 by Rachna Kalra, a veteran Delhi book publicist. In a city of gawkers and loud talkers, it felt wonderful to see readers take up their spots among yoga enthusiasts, amateur Bollywood singers and exuberant young karate kids in Lodhi Garden, among the soaring 15th-century tombs. Reading together in public, perhaps counter-intuitively, forces people to put down their phones and be social — “real, live, breathing-the-same-air social, not hearting-you-on-Instagram” social, as Gluhanich and de la Mare put it.
In the Conservatory Garden, three young girls sat side by side, immersed in their own paperbacks. There was not a screen in sight between us. It was a dream. I read Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans as they read RF Kuang and Nicola Yoon. We occupied our individual, side-by-side paradises, briefly companions on the same trail.
Only one rule is set in stone: do not interrupt a reader, just because they’re in a public space. You may surreptitiously note the title of a promising book, but asking “So, what’s it about?” is a minor act of cruelty. Leave them in peace.
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