Looking back, looking ahead
Silent Book Club @ Graduate Nashville / Photo: @thebookshopnashville
Looking back, looking ahead
Here in our last newsletter of the year, we want to take a moment to express our gratitude for all of you who carved out time in 2021 to be a part of this community, reading together in solidarity through tough times.
To our local chapter organizers who wrangled logistics and Zoom and endlessly shifting Covid protocols, you are the heroes who inspire us to keep this thing called Silent Book Club alive.
To our Facebook moderators—Meg, Leah, Robin, Denise, Akhila, Emily, Ellen, and Mel—your patience, fortitude, and humor keep the social media wolves and trolls at bay. Without you, our group would surely have succumbed to the great internet dumpster fire of 2020-2021.
To our bookstore and publishing partners, thank you for putting books into the hands of our readers and helping us pay the bills.
Sending a special shoutout to the 52 new chapters that launched in 2021, and the 243 continuing chapters celebrating anniversaries. For two minutes of pure joy, watch this birthday/holiday video created by our talented friends at SBC Genova.
Speaking of anniversaries, 2022 will mark ten years since we first sat down with a glass of wine and a couple of books and brainstormed a plan for a new kind of book club with no required reading. (You can read our origin story here.)
Silent Book Club launched with two readers in San Francisco in 2012, but in the last decade it has spread to 41 countries across six continents. If anyone knows anyone based in Antarctica, drop us a line at hello@silentbook.club. We'd love to send them some books and swag to conquer the last continent.
Happy holidays, happy new year, stay safe, and stay well,
— Guinevere & Laura
BOOKMARKS
Here are some highlights of what we've been reading online
Jolabokaflod: The most wonderful night of the year Silent Book Club
Silent Book Club's top 40 books of the year Bookshop.org
Remembering feminist icon bell hooks NPR
2021's award-winning novels LitHub
Brain games don't make you smarter. Reading with friends does. Slate
Roxane Gay's favorite indie bookstores across the USA Libro.fm
A Christmas Carol is just one of five holiday classics by Dickens The Guardian
An incomplete list of the great literary minds we lost this year LitHub
The best book covers of 2021 New York Times
An interview with Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby The Guardian
The Poetry Podcast: Amanda Gorman reads Tracy K. Smith The New Yorker
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FIND THE SBC CHAPTER FOR YOU
Find and join an in-person or virtual chapter meeting up on our website.