Every so often, the headlines declare literacy dead. High schoolers are supposedly reading at their weakest levels in over two decades, and college students, we’re told, have lost the ability to finish a book. There’s real cause for concern buried in those numbers. But the obituary for reading is premature, much like Mark Twain’s own reported death.
Young people who grew up amid pandemic lockdowns and an ever-present social media feed are hungry for something screens can’t give them: real human connection, the kind built on asking questions together, thinking out loud, and grappling with the strangeness of the world as it actually is, not as it appears online. Books, it turns out, are remarkably well-suited to anchor exactly that kind of gathering. So the practice of engaging with written text, which has shaped our cultural, political, and intellectual life for five centuries, isn’t disappearing. It’s adapting, offering something digital platforms simply cannot: real-time, in-person encounters between people. Put simply, the future of reading looks less like solitude and more like a gathering.
Books are pulling people together in new ways. Gen Z reading groups are springing up across the US, and the Silent Book Club, a community built around the simple act of reading quietly in each other’s company, now counts more than 2,000 chapters spanning 68 countries. The Bad Bitch Book Club runs weekend reading retreats and summer camps that draw anywhere from 15 to 90 participants, giving “escapist literature” a whole new, literal meaning. Sally Mercedes, events coordinator at Magic City Books in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sees bookstores increasingly serving a social role for their customers. “A lot of bookish people tend to be introverts,” she said. “We need a space where we know that we’re on common ground with others.”
Other formats are pushing the traditional book club further, or abandoning its shape entirely. The Consumption Book Club, a “literary and culinary event series” run by Gen Z artists Colette Estelle and Kyle Barnes, brings books like Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation to life through carefully themed dinners and guided discussion. A public reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” organized by a group of twentysomethings, recently drew hundreds of people to Washington Square Park in New York. At the Strother School of Radical Attention, where the author works, groups gather more than a dozen times a month across six states for Sidewalk Study, a practice of reading and performing long-form texts while walking through public space.
These gatherings differ wildly in setting, length, and subject matter. But they share a common belief: that reading can be just as much a vibrant, social act as it is a private, inward one.
