The Silent Book Club
Today, I decided to attend a meeting of something called the Silent Book Club.
This was a club where we briefly introduced ourselves before committing 70 minutes to not talking to each other at all. I had never quite understood what the “Anti-social social club” sweatshirts I had always seen around meant, but I figured the Silent Book Club was probably the closest I could get.
It was one of those things I never would have done during the school year. While reading silently sounds kind of interesting, on any given day in the semester, I never would have taken the effort to silently read books with strangers.
And I was pretty sure the multitude of MIT students focused on the complete diversity of just engineering subjects wouldn’t either. When you’re faced with impossibly looming deadlines, taking the time to read seems impossibly luxurious.
But there was something about the summer (and the fact that I lived a 5 minute walk from the bookstore where the club was held) that gave me an urge to try something new. I walked into the cafe area and sat down. I decided to order a decaf coffee with cream to make meeting strangers a little less awkward.
People sat around the wooden tables silent at first (I assumed that the Silent Book Club didn’t exactly attract extroverts), but I started to ask them a bit about themselves, beginning with the guy who had brought a book about trees, and people began to chat, starting with the natural opener of what the books they brought were.
I didn’t remember all the names, but the books were generally as follows.
- A book with a series of memoirs about trees
- The Town That Forgot How To Breathe
- A book about a girl’s school after an apocalypse
- The Opposite of Loneliness
- A work of fiction describing the world after robots have taken over
I started to be a bit intrigued – some of the books, particularly the one about trees, didn’t seem like books I would ever read, and I wondered what prompted their choice.
My particular book was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I had read the first chapter before, which was about…a man who mistook his wife for a hat. It was so interesting that I had used it for several conversation topics after reading it, but I figured it was a little ridiculous to continue talking about a book that I had only read a chapter of, so I decided to finish it.
After reading it, I now know that:
- There are people who cannot understand the concept of “left” and have to turn circularly to the right to do things like eat food on the left side of their plates
- There was a man who had amnesia corresponding to most of his life, and lived as a 19-year-old World War II soldier.
- There was a woman who went 60 years of her life thinking and acting as if her hands were utterly useless, just lumps of clay. After beginning treatment with a doctor, a nurse in the facility brought her a bagel and placed it just out of reach. She immediately reached out and grabbed it. Within months, she had full control over her hands and used them to create life-sized sculptures.
At the end, others debriefed their books as well. The older woman who was reading the book about the all-girls school said she was surprised when it began to show queer themes and normally didn’t like “gay books” but thought it was alright.
A middle-aged Asian woman who had just moved to town described her book of memoirs on the opposite of loneliness. I wondered what her experience reading the book was.
The person next to me, a young guy with glasses, read the book describing the world where the robots had already taken over, and several other people nodded their agreement that it was a good book.
Despite us having hardly talked to each other at all throughout the entire experience, I felt an odd sense of solidarity with the people I had just spent the last 90 minutes with. We stayed a little longer to chat with each other, commending each other on our choices of books. As someone interested in the future of AI, I asked the guy with glasses about his main takeaways from the AI book. He said he thought it was odd how the machines were taxed, and wondered where that would go in the future. I agreed.
As someone who’s hardly read in years, beginning reading again, particularly with a group of non-MIT people also interested in spending that time silently with a book, was a unique experience that I don’t think I’ll forget in a while.
Side note: At some point in life I decided that random beverages make conversations run far more smoothly. I think it’s correct but I’ve never been able to quite figure out why.