the.com/book club
Where adults gather to discuss wine, gossip, and occasionally the book.
means A regular gathering of people who have (ostensibly) all read the same book and meet to talk about it together.
from A plain compound of 'book' and 'club' — 'club' coming from the old sense of a group of people 'clubbing together,' pooling money or interest for a shared purpose. Reading circles and literary societies have existed for centuries, but the casual, social 'book club' as a recurring home gathering became a widely recognized cultural fixture in the 20th century, especially as women's reading groups and later televised book clubs (like Oprah's) popularized the term.
- actual read rate
- roughly half finish the book, studies suggest
- origin
- traces to 1800s women excluded from male reading societies
- real function
- scheduled socializing with a guilt-free literary alibi
- oprah effect
- her picks once sold over a million copies each