My earliest reading memory
I was eight when I was given The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley, after being moved from my grand­mother’s care to live with my mother and her husband, who I barely knew. The story is about leaving one world, adapting to another. Surviving. It gave shape to unnamed feelings and developed my survival imagination: imagining beyond my circumstances.

My favourite book growing up
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I followed David’s journey from exclusion to belonging. Dickens vivifies his characters; you grow alongside them. The novel taught me empathy, and that some relationships sustain us while others must be left behind.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I read Wuthering Heights when I was 12 or 13. Heathcliff fascinates me: enigmatic, brooding, never fully explained. Emily Brontë taught me landscape is character. The moors are a living force, mirroring Cathy and Heathcliff’s emotional lives. That shaped my writing: I’m drawn to unknowable characters and psychologically alive places.

The writer who changed my mind
I was in my 40s when a writing tutor suggested I read The Tempest while writing my story collection The Ice Migration. The island setting, themes of displacement and longing for return resonated, and made me realise Shakespeare could speak to my life.

The author who made me want to be a writer
I can’t remember which Toni Morrison novel affected me most: The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby or Jazz. Her worlds are familiar, dreamlike, grounded yet on the edge of the unknowable. Morrison showed me that Black lives and characters from marginalised worlds are worthy of being centred within literature. Her voice made me want to find my own.

The book or author I came back to
When I first read Wilson Harris, his writing felt demanding. Returning to it in my 40s, I was captivated by his Guyanese landscapes. Harris showed me landscape can carry history, memory, imagination. I learned to value my cultural inheritance and bring Jamaica’s landscapes on to the page.

The book I reread
I first read Irenosen Okojie’s Nudibranch in 2019 and return to it often. She does extraordinary things with language and image; at times, the writing creates its own imaginative vocabulary. It is a masterclass in inventiveness, playfulness and creative courage.

The book I could never read again
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I studied it at school. I’ve always questioned respectability politics. The world of courtship and dinner parties feels confining. I respect Austen’s skill, but I’m drawn to books about characters who cross boundaries, venture into the unknown rather than finding their place within the social order.

The book I discovered later in life
I discovered Xiaolu Guo’s Radical in 2023. What struck me was its freedom. Guo combines memoir, philosophy, visual art and language, using Chinese script to guide the reader. I admire its fierce independence: a woman stepping outside prescribed roles to pursue creativity on her own terms. Guo isn’t writing to be liked; she is writing to push boundaries.

The book I am currently reading
I’m reading Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane by Andy Beta. Coltrane’s music has long been a muse for my writing and influenced my new novel, Sky City. Her music is spiritual, hopeful. As a writer, books about music help me to listen for rhythm and pace.

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My comfort read
There’s something deeply reassuring about returning to Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. And Socrates Fortlow is so familiar, he feels like family. His resourcefulness, humour and care for others, even in the face of hardship, remind me of people I’ve known throughout my life. I always come away believing that kindness, dignity and transformation are still possible, no matter what is going on in the world.

Traditional publishers find success in nontraditional ways

Aug 22 2025

These days, many people in the book business are taking the proverb “necessity is the mother of invention” more seriously than ever. Buffeted by inflation, flat sales, and consolidation in such areas as distribution and retailing, publishers are looking for different ways to break the traditional publishing mold. As Jonathan Merkh, CEO of hybrid publisher Forefront Books, puts it, “the time is ripe for innovation.”

More News Stories

One morning in February last year, I received an urgent call from the journalist Paul Burston, alerting me to alarming recent social media posts by a mutual friend, the poet and former model Max Wallis.

It seemed he had left his London flat in deep distress and was headed to a bridge. Our best guess was the Millennium footbridge by St Paul’s Cathedral. Then we heard that Max might have taken refuge inside the cathedral. While I scanned gaggles of tourists in the nave, he was intercepted and removed by ambulance. I was relieved to get a message later that evening that he was safe.

We’d met more than a decade before at an event on the South Bank for the Polari prize, set up by Burston to showcase new LGBTQ+ writers. I and the other judges had shortlisted Wallis’s collection Modern Love. Though the eventual winner was John McCullough, we stayed in touch, going on regular excursions: to Wilderness festival, to readings, to a rooftop art installation in Shoreditch. And always talking about poetry – writing it, reading it, thinking about it, critiquing it.

Now, he tells me about the poetry magazine that emerged from the dark period of addiction that followed his early success. “I lost 12 years of my life, maybe more,” he says over a video call. “The magazine came about from me saying: ‘I have to do something this year; my brain is on fire and it’s running like a hamster wheel.’ I wanted to corral the chaos: how can I find meaning from the ruins of my life?”

After his breakdown, he retreated home to Lancashire. “I had moved in with a friend because I messaged my parents before I went into hospital, saying never talk to me ever again. Instead they opened their arms. My parents were just phenomenal.”

The first imperative was to become clean and sober. He was diagnosed with ADHD and complex PTSD, and gradually rebuilt his life: the first trip into town, getting on a train, taking a driving lesson. But during this period he also rediscovered his craft, channelling his trauma into a memoir and new poems.

“I was a poet all this time but I’d forgotten, essentially. I’m 35 but I almost feel like I’m 21. I have had to learn everything again. In order to be sober, and to get better from PTSD, you sit with the awful emotions that you feel, and you don’t drink or take drugs; you get through the day and move on.”

He started submitting to magazines, but since the new work was themed around breakdown and recovery, Wallis thought only a few poems would get published. With energy to spare (at least on the good days), he began to imagine what a space specifically for trauma poetry could look like. If poetry saved his life, perhaps it could help others. The idea of The Aftershock Review was born.

A poet friend, Anna Percy, had experience of publishing poetry zines in the lively Manchester scene. “No disrespect to those,” Wallis says. “I love zines, but I was thinking bigger, nationwide, book-sized.” Rather than photocopying, he started researching printers. Percy and I joined the magazine as contributing editors and sounding boards, and Wallis put the word out for submissions. Work poured in: from poets who were disabled, disadvantaged, ill, excluded in various ways. The reference anthology was Al Alvarez’s electrifying The New Poetry, which launched Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton to an enthralled readership; Bloodaxe’s Staying Alive series was also hugely admired. “It’s not a pity project,” Wallis insists, calling it “literature forged from survival”.

Established poets were eager to submit, alongside rising stars and unknown writers. Inua Ellams’s “Fuck” poems meld rage, wit and social commentary; Rhian Elizabeth’s Amsterdam states baldly “girl loses her father, girl loses her mind”; Golnoosh Nour’s Burnt Divinities celebrates her heritage: “the glorious / mixture of glitter and garbage”.

The Faber poet and Spectator poetry editor Hugo Williams contributed a sardonic and atypical piece, The Art Scene, which mocks glib responses to trauma in contemporary art. “Max called me up and we had this instant connection,” Williams says. “He seemed different from the average literary type. This kind of writing seems to me to be improvised on the spot and kept like that. People of my generation work so hard to make it perfect, and you wish they wouldn’t!”

Aftershock, he observes, represents a jolt to the mainstream. Contributor Pascale Petit agrees, calling it “a raft to all of us suffering trauma in troubling times. Poetry this open is necessary, and I don’t think any other magazine has dared to address our personal ills so candidly.”

Gwyneth Lewis, a former national poet of Wales, points out that for ages raw, confessional poetry was looked down on as “feminine”: “I’m coming out of a long period of reckoning with lifelong maternal emotional abuse and then chronic illness. I find it deeply encouraging [to realise] that I was in the darkness with so many brilliant poets.”

In the few months of its existence, Aftershock has made an impact – with sales over £3,000, and 360,000 views on Instagram. A giant billboard on Manchester’s Deansgate is seen by thousands daily, and much more is planned for the Aftershock universe: further issues, poetry pamphlets, outreach, events. Perhaps what’s so exciting is that it has tapped into the huge energy and enthusiasm for poetry felt by young writers and readers, who recognise it can be a comfort and release. “Aftershock has given me everything,” Wallis says. “It’s proof that you can take an awful few years and make them into potentially the most astonishing year. Having not wanted to live at all … what it is to choose life over and over again. It’s incredible.”

The Aftershock Review issue one (£12.99) is available from aftershockreview.com

I married my wife in October 2022 and, in the lead-up, it was obviously my job to source the wedding poems. I have published seven poetry collections, I read poetry every day, I own more than a thousand poetry books. I should have read through my favourites till I found the perfect fit. But that’s not what I did.

Instead, for some bizarre reason, I sat down at my laptop and furtively Googled the words “wedding poem”. Why do we all do this, poets included? Well, I think, even though we want to express something deeply personal, the word “wedding” makes us all panic and reach for stock texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s How Do I Love Thee? or The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe (“Come live with me and be my love”) or Ecclesiastes 4 (“Two are better than one”).

Up until very recently, a wedding was no place for reinvention. Now, gay marriage is legal in Britain; heterosexual couples can have civil partnerships; you can get married in a yurt or a cave or on a rollercoaster. But the old traditions die hard, and despite these new freedoms, the word “wedding” still influences our imaginations in ways that can feel alienating or limiting. When it comes to the “wedding poem”, even a Star Trek-themed do will find us translating the same old Shakespeare sonnet into Klingon.

My friend and fellow poet Rachel Long and I decided the time was right for a brand-new wedding anthology, “alternative poems for alternative weddings”, shaking up the genre. When a publisher picked up our idea we felt smug that we would be getting paid to spend months reading love poetry – now all we had to do was pull together 100 wedding poems that fitted our brief of “something new”. We arrived at the Poetry Library in London, the largest public collection of modern poetry in the world, armed with a list of our favourite contemporary poets. The hard part, we agreed, would be whittling them down.

In order to sift for suitable poems, we’d given ourselves these criteria:

1) Does not necessarily need to mention weddings, but must believe in the concept of lasting love.

2) The hope must outweigh the sadness.

3) No profoundly grim last lines.

Simple, right? As we quickly discovered, these criteria ruled out nearly every contemporary love poem ever written. Our Poetry Library days looked something like this: two women hunched in silence over poetry books, speed-reading and frowning. Our dialogue consisted mainly of “No”. Occasionally one of us would say, “Maybe?” – and the other would sit up like a meerkat, briefly hopeful – then we’d read on and say: “Oh no, sorry, the last line is about the inevitability of death.” Charles Simic’s Listen begins “Everything about you, my life, is both make-believe and real” – promising, I thought – then ends with “a small child leaping out of a window with its nightclothes on fire”. Fantastic ending, not a wedding poem.

Sometimes one of us was sure – “Yes! This is a beautiful wedding poem!” – then the other would take a closer look and ask “Isn’t this about an affair?”, or “But doesn’t this leave the reader with a deep, pervading loneliness?” or, and this became a frequent question, “Is it a bit too sexy?” Could a wedding poem really proclaim, “I place your ring on my cock where it belongs”? (American Wedding by Essex Hemphill.) As the piles of books dwindled, our list barely grew. Days went by, then weeks, then months. Reading love poems became a slog.

As summer turned to autumn, Rachel and I spent the evenings manically texting each other vast threads of poems from our personal bookshelves. What the hell did we actually mean by a wedding poem, anyway? What were we looking for? Love poems, of course. But what kind? As our reading attested, a huge majority of contemporary love poems are tinged with doom; and this is expected, after all, as often the emotional key to effective poetry is contradiction, an alloy of joy and sadness, anxiety and hope, clashing together to spark the unparaphrasable world of a poem.

However, if a celebrant stood up and said, “Statistically 42% of marriages end in divorce,” they’d be breaking the rules of the day and perhaps get a glass of prosecco thrown in their face. The point of a wedding is to provide you with enough optimism, support, encouragement and affirmation to sustain you through the hard times ahead; therefore, to be a wedding poem, a love poem mustn’t let in too much hard reality, or predict the end of love, or contain so much emotional ambiguity that it pours a gravy boat of sorrow over the vol-au-vents. But what about tone? What tone should a wedding poem have?

We realised this was the wrong question. Every wedding, every couple is different. The dream of the “perfect wedding poem” is something that speaks directly, seemingly specifically, to a particular love. We can all picture that guy standing up to the microphone to awkwardly read a poem, using words (and a wooden poetry voice) that sound nothing like him. Well, I’m a firm believer that if a poem speaks to you, it will speak like you when you read it aloud. So, we didn’t want a “one-size-fits-all” anthology. We needed to be braver. Maybe a wedding poem could be a bit sexy? Or reflect real love in a difficult world? Unrequited, probably not, but funny and irreverent? Yes. These were alternative poems for alternative weddings, after all, be they small, huge, camp as Christmas, hilarious, glamorous, shotgun, a third wedding held in a nursing home, or the low-key but profound culmination of a 40-year love.

Who says a wedding poem should feature stars, skies and rivers? Who limited our imaginations in that way? What about vacuum cleaners, the Tapton Bridge, black Chevrolets, cheese and onion rolls, brass bands, scaffolding and kittiwakes? What about “the ethereal gleam of wet tarmac”? (Michael Pederson.) Or laughter that “fills up the corners of the room with a thousand upside down cartoon bats”? (Hera Lindsay Bird.)

After all, weddings need poems because poetry can express the inexpressible, translate longing into language, throw a can of paint over an abstract feeling. We reach for poems on these days because “love” is too small a syllable to elaborate on the endless uniqueness of the heart. So, rather than creating a safe generic tone across the whole anthology, we decided to include all tones, so that at least one poem would speak to a reader’s wedding specifically. Perhaps the couple are two lighthouses joined by a “beam of alignment” (Two Lighthouses by Julia Darling)? A Mr and Mrs “unveiling each other” (Measuring Light by Theresa Lola)? Masons, building a wall of “sure and solid stone” (Scaffolding by Seamus Heaney)? “Pure flame and song” (Serenade by Terrance Hayes)? “Two fat cats in love” (Cat Worship by Golnoosh Nour)? “Less silk and lace, more heather and thistle” (A Boy Gets Married by Lewis Buxton)? Or flying to the moon “by the speed of queer zest” ( i love you to the moon & by Chen Chen)?

Finally, we had an anthology of one hundred (and one) newly selected poems for the big day, of all sizes, flavours and styles. Some are cheeky, some are weird, some sexy, subtle, domestic, ecstatic and sweet. You won’t find many featured in your frantic Google search, but we can assure you that their hope outweighs their sadness, and they all believe in lasting love.

Something New: Alternative Poems for Alternative Weddings edited by Caroline Bird and Rachel Long is published by Picador. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Alternative readings for the big day

Two Lighthouses
by Julia Darling

I would like us to live like two lighthouses
at the mouth of a river, each with her own lamp.

We could see each other across the water,
which would be dangerous, and uncrossable.

I could watch your shape, your warm shadow,
moving in the upper rooms. We would have jokes.

Jokes that were only ours, signs and secrets,
flares on birthdays, a rocket at Christmas.

Clouds would be cities, we would look for omens,
and learn the impossible language of birds.

We would meet, of course, in cinemas, cafes,
but then, we would return to our towers,

knowing the other was the light on the water,
a beam of alignment. It would never be broken.

The Kiss
by Stephen Dunn

She pressed her lips to mind.
– a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

Excerpted from Everything Else in the World: Poems. Copyright (c) 2006 by Stephen Dunn. Used with permission of the publisher, WW Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Poets pick their favourite wedding poems

Andrew McMillan
The joy of a wedding is the singular love celebrated within a community; and the party afterwards, of course. The Wickedest, by Caleb Femi, is a collection that captures that vibe perfectly, and a great one to read aloud would be Max Meets Shelley on the Balcony. It begins: “like a planet flung I danced / unroped”. A perfect start or end to any ceremony.

Joelle Taylor
Lawless and adventurous, XIII from Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems in The Dream of a Common Language is a poem to launch a lesbian marriage.

The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we’re out in a country that has no language
no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years …

It is a sonnet to another way of life, another kind of love, its unmapped territory being the thrill of it. It ends with a moving sense of ancestry, of wrong-walking women connected across time.

Wendy Cope
At our wedding a friend read the Apache Wedding Blessing. My favourite lines are “Now there is no more loneliness / For each of you will be companion to the other”. It ends: “May your days be good and long upon the earth.” I later learned that it is “fake folklore”, written in 1947. I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time. I still like it.

Michael Rosen
When I got married we read pieces about things we liked that were personal to us, so they don’t really translate – but here’s a new poem:

When you get married
they ask you to write an inscription
Think of it as being
like taking out a subscription.
You should sign it
with a feeling of elation
and hope it won’t end
with a cancellation.

Mary Jean Chan
“At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever. /
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.” I love Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems, which speaks about love as a political act, one that arrives like a revelation and endures against all odds in a patriarchal and violent world. Elsewhere, Rich writes, “I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence”.

Len Pennie
We tend to think of love as a completed action, a noun trapped in amber, a red rose. I wrote a poem called The Vow, which will be published in my new collection, Poyums Annaw, to acknowledge love as a verb, a choice, an action and commitment that’s continually taken every single day. It’s a visceral, embodied action unique to every person and relationship. It celebrates what it is “To be loved through each compromise, question or qualm / To be sheltered from storm and enshrined in the calm / To be held, not like glass, but the end of a deal”. And ends: “I am yours for as long as you’d like to be mine / If you ask me, I’m certain, forever is fine.”

Harry Josephine Giles
Love is overburdened with old images, so we need poems to help us see it clearly again. In Gràdh (Love) Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul compares it to a bird hanging upside down, eating nuts from a feeder:

Cho daingeann
’s a tha gràdh,
a’ crochadh an sin
sna speuran.

(How solid / love is / hanging there / in the air.)

Marriage is one of those heavy stories that wants lightening up if it’s to sing: this simple lyric, in ordinary Gaelic worn smooth by good use, could bring breath into the ceremony so that people can see love hanging there in the air above them.

Rishi Dastidar
A friend once commissioned a poem from me for his wedding. I wrote something I thought was plangently romantic. I was summoned to a crisis meeting, where the bride-to-be said: “Can you make it funny?” Now if asked for a wedding poem I’d suggest Victoria Kennefick’s Deposition, with its ardent evocation of the marriage between waves and cliffs: “silt and foam, my wedding dress; spray and salt, my veil”.

Online book clubs let you engage with others about books instead of just reading them alone. They bring together curious readers on forums, apps, or virtual meetups to discuss a shared book in depth. In a good online book club, you connect with fellow bibliophiles around the world, explore themes and characters you might have missed, and find motivation to finish your reading. Unlike a celebrity “pick of the month” or a casual social media thread, a serious book club is a discussion-based experience with a clear structure. Many readers join these clubs because they want a dedicated space and thoughtful conversation, things that celebrity-led clubs or one-off chats don’t provide. In other words, an online book club is about participation, not just passive reading.

What Is an Online Book Club (and What Is It Not)?

An online book club is an organized discussion group for readers, much like a traditional book club, but meeting via the internet. It typically has a set reading schedule, a facilitator or moderator who guides the conversation, and a group of members who share their insights. A serious, discussion-based book club focuses on literary analysis: it’s a place to examine themes, ask questions, and hear diverse viewpoints. This is not the same as browsing book recommendations or liking and commenting on social media posts.

In contrast to celebrity book clubs, serious readers look for a dedicated forum and active leadership. Readers in a real book club expect clear schedules and back-and-forth dialogue. So if you’re joining an online book club, think of it as entering a friendly literary salon – where you’re invited to contribute, ask questions, and deeply engage with the text.

If instead you prefer just receiving a recommendation or responding to one-way social media posts, then a casual “book-of-the-month” trend or celebrity list might feel sufficient. But for genuine conversation, look for clubs that advertise discussion threads, guided questions, or live chats rather than just announcements.

What Happens in a Serious Online Book Club Meeting?

In a well-run online book club meeting, there’s usually a clear structure. The moderator (or host) will announce a book and a reading timeline in advance, sometimes dividing it into sections. Members read at their own pace and then log into the forum or meeting to discuss. If the conversation is taking place via zoom, then it will usually last an hour or so.

In the most effective online book clubs, the discussion begins with a few curated questions posted by moderators to get people talking, then members can respond to these questions and add their own topics over an extended period (in the case of BookBrowse, usually six weeks). This asynchronous format allows everyone to participate when it’s convenient for them, creating a rich, ongoing conversation rather than a single-session discussion. Because the conversation unfolds over several weeks, latecomers can join in even if they finish the book after everyone else, and early readers can revisit the discussion as new insights emerge.

Because everything is online, you don’t need to coordinate schedules or attend at specific times, unless you’re meeting via zoom or another video chat. The key is that spoilers are managed: for example, dedicated discussion sections might cover specific chapters or themes so nobody spoils the ending prematurel. Having professional moderation maintains focus while creating a welcoming atmosphere where everyone feels comfortable sharing their thoughts.

In practice, a serious online club feels like a guided dialogue where everyone gets to share. Here is a sample 6-week schedule for a moderated online book club:

• Week 1: Kickoff and initial discussion questions posted by moderators. Members begin responding to these questions and adding their own as they start reading.
• Weeks 2-5: Ongoing conversation develops organically. As members progress through the book at different paces, they contribute to existing threads and introduce new topics. Moderators occasionally add fresh questions to explore additional themes.
• Week 6: Wrap-up and reflections. Final thoughts on the book’s ending, overall impact, and takeaways. Members may suggest titles for future discussions.

This kind of structure (professionally curated questions plus extended asynchronous discussion) helps everyone participate meaningfully, regardless of their schedule or reading pace. Over the six weeks, you’ll often see the same group of regulars chiming in, creating a cozy, familiar vibe even in a large online forum.

What Kind of Books Do Curated Online Book Clubs Read?

Curated book clubs pride themselves on choosing quality and variety. For example, BookBrowse’s club features a mix of new releases, classics, and hidden gems, both fiction and nonfiction. In other words, don’t expect only the latest bestseller or celebrity pick. Instead, look for clubs that span genres and eras—perhaps a contemporary novel one month and a time-honored classic the next.

Each selection usually has an available reading guide or background articles, so participants come prepared with context and key questions. In short, if you join a curated book club expecting something lightweight every time, you might be surprised—in a good way. These clubs want you to grow as a reader, exploring new voices and ideas together.

Of course, each book club may have its own focus or theme, so its important to understand that prior to joining a specific online book club.

Are There Online Book Clubs That Aren’t on Facebook?

Absolutely. The world of online book clubs is much broader than just Facebook groups. You’ll find serious, active clubs on all kinds of platforms.  For a more detailed breakdown of online book clubs, see our article here.

Where to Find Reading Guides and Discussion Questions

Not all books have ready-made club guides, but there are ways to find or create discussion questions. Official reading guides exist for only a fraction of titles (publishers usually create them for expected bestsellers or paperback releases). If you need one, start by googling “[Book Title] reading guide” or checking the publisher’s website. Sometimes bloggers or book websites also post discussion questions.

However, a great resource is BookBrowse itself: it maintains an extensive index of reading guides. In fact, BookBrowse offers over 1,800 free reading/discussion guides for top fiction and nonfiction (with around 10+ questions each). You can search by title, author, genre or theme.  Each guide includes context like reviews and author interviews to enrich the conversation.

If you can’t find an existing guide, don’t panic. You and your group can make your own discussion questions: think about the plot, characters, themes, and what stood out to each of you. BookBrowse even has DIY tips for creating discussion questions. In short, use available guides when you can, and otherwise generate your own topics to discuss.

How to Choose the Right Online Book Club for You

Not every club is right for every reader. Ask yourself these questions to find a good fit:

Why am I joining? Do you want deep literary analysis or casual conversation? If you crave structured discussion and insight, a moderated club with guided questions is best. If you prefer just hanging out and chatting about plot twists, a more informal group may suffice.

What commitment can I make? A serious club often follows a schedule. Be honest about your reading speed and time. A club that reads a book per month might suit you, but if you can’t keep up, look for one with a slower pace or no strict deadlines. Consider whether an asynchronous format (like BookBrowse’s six-week discussions) would better accommodate your schedule than time-specific meetings.

Which format do I like? Some clubs use forums (text-based, asynchronous), others meet via Zoom or use apps. Do you enjoy live video discussions, or are you comfortable posting on a message board? Different platforms also have different vibes: for example, Reddit and Goodreads groups are large and open, while something like the BookBrowse forum is more intimate and curated.

What topics interest me? Pick clubs that read genres you love. If you’re into literary fiction and global voices, a club like BookBrowse’s or a well-moderated Goodreads group might work. If you prefer sci-fi or romance, seek a genre-specific group.

How important is community? Do you want a tight-knit circle where people get to know each other (like BookBrowse’s club bookbrowse.com), or are you okay with a larger anonymous crowd? The former can be cozy and supportive, while the latter means more opinions and variety.

Do I prefer free or paid? Most online book clubs are free. Note that BookBrowse’s forum is free to post, though some clubs (like Oprah’s or Reese’s) might have behind-the-scenes perks or require purchases. Ask if the club’s costs matter to you.

Consider these as a self-assessment checklist. For example:

• ✓ I enjoy discussing books with others and want in-depth analysis.
• ✓ I can commit to regular participation but prefer flexibility in when I contribute.
• ✓ I prefer guided questions and facilitation over a completely open chat.
• ✓ I like encountering a variety of genres and authors in one group.
• ✓ I value friendly, respectful conversations and a diverse community.

If you checked off many of those, a structured, discussion-based club (like BookBrowse’s or a tightly run Goodreads/Reddit group) will likely appeal to you. As one BookBrowse member puts it:

“I love the depth of discussion in our online book club. It feels like a global literary salon where everyone’s opinion matters.” – BookBrowse member

That quote reflects what many members seek. Once you’ve identified what matters most to you, you can return to the list of clubs above and see which ones match your preferences.

Conclusion + Next Step

Joining an online book club can enrich your reading in unexpected ways. The best ones are curated and thoughtful, providing structure (like reading schedules and moderator questions) and a real community for discussion.

Your next step? Browse a few clubs and see what sparks you. For example, BookBrowse’s Online Book Club is free and open to all – you can sign up to get notifications about upcoming discussions. Their unique six-week, asynchronous format with professional moderation creates an environment where everyone can participate at their own pace while still enjoying structured, in-depth conversations.

Or check out a Goodreads group or Reddit community that piques your interest. You might also peruse BookBrowse’s Reading Guides to pick a recommended book and use its discussion questions in any club.

Whatever path you choose, the rich, discussion-based environment of a good online book club is waiting. Dive in, and enjoy talking books with others who share your passion!