Rosella is reading In cold blood by Truman Capote. She is not alone, reading with her there are six other people, all women, aged between 52 and 58: Stefania, Benedetta, Cinzia, Carlotta, Stefania and Simona. They met at work and between a meeting and a coffee from the machine they discovered their common passion for reading. From there it was a short step to the idea of creating a reading club.
A literary club for team building
Twenty years have passed since Rosella and her friends met for the first time. Since then the club (they always called him that) has become a pleasant way to see each other, talk, get to know each other better and better do team building: “We thought we’d carve out a moment in which to discuss something more than everyday work life.” – says Rosella, who works in a Public Administration agency.
«We all love to read, so we thought we’d share the reading of a book and meet once a month to comment on it. We were colleagues or had been. Some of us no longer work in the same place but the friendship remains, consolidated by years of frequenting, of which the reading group is one of the forms».
Reading groups, PDE research
Reading groups are numerous and discrete constellations. There is no inventory, counting them all is a difficult task. The PDE, the Editorial Promotion Society at the service of independent publishing, tried who launched a call to arms months ago. The results were surprising: over 800 groups have been registered so far, the majority of which are in the north. If on the one hand, therefore, the Eurostat data portray a nation that reads little (Italy is the penultimate among the EU countries), the clubs scattered throughout the peninsula demonstrate the exact opposite.
Reading is not a solitary experience
Reading, it is well known, helps you identify with someone else’s story and dig into your own inner world, in search of emotions that come naturally to share.
Reading groups in the library. (Getty Images)
That’s why from north to south, in homes, libraries, parks and bookstores, every month people of all ages meet to read essays, classics, little-known authors, books of emerging genres published by small publishing houses, giving rise to interesting exchanges of views, as Giovanni Solimine explains, bibliographer and President of the Bellonci Foundation: «Reading is not necessarily a solitary experience. Reading is an activity that is sometimes carried out alone but it is still a way to communicate, to come into contact with other eras, other environments, other lives, giving hospitality to the characters of a story. If this activity is carried out together with others, the experience is enriched and everyone enjoys the emotions that arise from reading others. That’s why the reading groups are very successful.” concludes Solimine.
Shared reading promotes sociability
The group is an incentive to read, to open the mind and to increase the community of strong readers. Shared reading also helps you get out of a comfort zone and to question one’s own tastes, choosing texts that one would not choose individually.
Not only that, it also serves to encourage social relationships: «An advantage is, certainly, giving reading a social aspect. We also became friends, in a certain sense. We worry if someone is missing, that’s it.” – comments Raffaella Lops, who is an editor by profession and after years spent working on books from an editorial point of view, he felt the need to have direct contact with readers. In 2021 he founded, together with his colleague Marzia Grillo, the reading group that meets at Tomo, an independent bookshop in Rome: «One of the group’s strengths is the transversality of ages. A fiercely uneven group. The disadvantage is that you have to finish books that you would sometimes leave behind.”
Keyword: flexibility
The longevity of Rosella’s club proves that To keep a reading club lively you need to be flexible: «Ours is a fairly free club, not formalized by rigid rules. We started by seeing each other once a month but it also happened that a month and a half passed between one meeting and another. To read twenty years together you have to adapt to everyone’s times and moments. The only rule we respect is to finish the book, no matter how long it takes.”
Flexibility also concerns the choice of genres. It is not easy to reconcile everyone’s tastes, unless the group is deliberately monothematic: «Ours is a group that reads contemporary fiction. More than a thematic journey, we are interested in reading books that take a look at world literature. – comments Raffaella Lops – In the end, however, it is always a struggle over which book to choose each month. The criteria also vary from time to time.”
The beauty of reading in a group is also this: discovering that you have the same tastes or the existence of a book that you would never have read. And having it suggested by someone else is a form of enrichment.
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