Go On—Join Another Book Club

It is mid-August. I’ve spent a pleasant eight months of this year throwing myself fully and shamelessly into my passion for reading.

Back in January, someone I cared for said, “There’s got to be something you want from life other than books!” I think of them sometimes when I’m picking out my next novel to read.

2026 is the year that I allowed myself to be the shameless, obsessive, bookish, page-sniffing reader I have always been. I allowed reading to become my identity and personality at last. I have never known such freedom.

Indeed, it is freedom when we throw ourselves into our passions—when we pursue them without caring what others will think of us. We’ll be criticized no matter what. We might as well just do what we want.

Looking at the titles in my reading log, I had an epiphany: Perhaps I could share this with other people. I could start a book club. In my opinion, there are never too many.

Would you, dear reader, join me?

When I reach 3,000 subscribers—which will be sometime this autumn—the Tearoom Book Club will open. For $6 a month, we will read and discuss beloved novels, digging into the history and events that inspired them. I will, at last, build the book club I’ve always wanted.

Reading is often imagined as a solitary pastime, yet some of literature’s most memorable novels quietly challenge that assumption. The Book Club for Troublesome Women. Summer Reading. The Secrets of Flight. In each of these stories, books become the beginning of friendships, conversations, and unexpected transformations.

Perhaps that is why book clubs have become such a beloved feature of contemporary literary fiction. We may read alone, but we do not have to remain alone.

No two readers ever truly read the same book. Each person notices something different, lingers over different passages, and brings different memories and experiences to the same pages. A conversation can illuminate something we thought we already understood.

That is the sort of fellowship I hope the Tearoom Book Club can create: people who delight in stories, who ask thoughtful questions, who disagree kindly, who recommend forgotten favorites, and who linger over a good novel a little longer than necessary.

I know that Substack already has hundreds of wonderful book clubs to choose from. I’ve been watching my dear friends manage their clubs and have so much fun doing it.

There’s no room for another, the voice in my head kept telling me. No one would want to join another!

My head says there are already plenty of great clubs. But my heart argues that this is the best sort of competition. It’s a good problem to have so many book clubs, each with their own themes and communities, to choose from.

And, though this might sound cheesy, I wonder if perhaps I was born for this.

Reading has always been the thing in life that I did best. What joy it would bring me to have a gathering of friends with whom to enjoy some good novels—to read them slowly, talk about them at length, and see what everyone else noticed along the way.

The Tearoom has been making new friends over the summer. I set a goal for myself: when we reach 3,000 subscribers—that is, 3,000 potential reading buddies—it will be the perfect time to launch the Tearoom Book Club.

I dream of this book club.

I’ve been thinking that, if the book club does begin in the autumn, Little Women would be an excellent inaugural book. Here are the others that I hope to explore with a friend group.

What if we could step inside the world behind one of the most recognizable paintings in the world? Tracy Chevalier imagines the story of the young woman who became Vermeer’s famous subject, taking us into a household shaped by art, class, beauty, and unspoken desire.

This feels like an especially fitting book for the Tearoom, where our conversations so often wander between literature and art. And that is only the beginning. I’ve narrowed the possibilities down to seven—but I have six more novels waiting on the table.