Ours started the way most good things in a condo do: over a shared desire to read more. A year and some change later, we are still meeting monthly, and the club has never once had a theme.
That absence has turned out to be the whole point.
Why No Theme Works
Most book clubs pick a genre, an era, a mood. Ours hasn’t. We finish discussing one book and pick the next on the spot, based on whatever someone happens to be excited about that month. It sounds like a small thing, but it changes what gets read entirely. There is no gatekeeping, no “that’s not really our kind of book.”
I gravitate towards history, memoir, politics. Left to my own devices, I would rarely land on fiction. This club has pulled me back into it, book after book, and I have been glad every time.
The other thing a lack of theme does is keep the group honest about who gets to belong. We have men and women, twenties and way beyond, and many of us are immigrants or transplants to Toronto. We’ve naturally kept choices accessible and inclusive.
How It Actually Works
There is no facilitator, no reading schedule. We meet monthly, in person, in the building’s Cave (a common space with comfy furniture and a golf simulator). Between meetings, we use a Slack channel that lives inside our building’s community space: half book discussion, half whatever article or interview or unrelated tangent someone found that reminded them of a line in the book. It keeps the conversation going in the gaps, so by the time we sit down together, we are picking up a thread rather than starting cold.
Here are some of my favourite reads from this passed year.
A Great Country
This one turned into a proper conversation about class and the mechanics of chasing the “American Dream.” It’s written by a Canadian author, and what struck most of us was how universal the family’s struggles were: teenagers, work stress, the ordinary friction of a household. What set this family apart was how much of their difficulty came specifically from being newcomers trying to integrate. For a group made up largely of immigrants and their children, that distinction was not academic. It was recognisable.
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus
The debut novel from Toronto author Emma Knight. Despite the title, it has nothing to do with octopuses. The main character, born in Toronto, travels to Edinburgh for university with her best friend, following the same path her now-divorced parents once took. What she is really doing is trying to reconstruct the story of her parents’ relationship from the fragments she has been handed. It was a fun read, and a reminder that the best debut fiction often comes from writers with a sharp eye for the small details that shape us.
Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I’ve Cried About
Isabel Klee’s memoir set off one of our livelier nights, mostly because it forced everyone to recall how strange it is that lockdown was six years ago. The book moves through the awkwardness of dating, the isolation of Covid, job troubles, and the way our relationships with pets end up carrying more emotional weight than we tend to admit. What made it work as a group read was how easy it was to step into her shoes. Nearly everyone could relate to one piece of the story.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
The premise alone was enough to generate the evening’s conversation: a cafe where you can travel back to a past conversation, on the condition that you return to your seat before the coffee gets cold. We spent most of the discussion on what we would each choose to revisit, and whether going back would actually help the relationships in our lives or simply confirm what we already knew. This book carried a lot of whimsy in it’s pages.
The Pattern
What I come back to is this: the lack of structure is the structure. No theme means no one has to conform to a genre to fit into the group. No assigned facilitator means the conversation goes wherever the book (or the Slack channel) takes it. And a group with real differences in age, background, and life experience means every book gets read four or five different ways before we’ve even finished talking about it.
If you’re thinking about starting something similar, my advice is embarrassingly simple: don’t over think it. Pick a book, pick a date, and let next month’s choice come out of this month’s conversation.