“It provided a place for people to be able to get out of the house and meet up with a group-and not be forced to make awkward happy hour conversation, but to sit quietly for an hour and then chat about books,” de la Mare says. Guinevere de la Mare and Laura Gluhanich founded this club in 2012 as a potential outlet for introverts. The club will complete the book on March 30. In the first week of the book club, dozens of readers from Mexico City to Ann Arbor sent in pictures of their reading chairs. “Its relevance lashes you across the face,” Stephen Metcalf wrote in the LA Times on Monday.
The Seattle-based publication The Stranger is hosting a reading and discussion of Albert Camus’ The Plague, a Nobel Prize winner written in 1947 in which an epidemic sweeps through a town on the Algerian coast. The science fiction author and journalist Cory Doctorow arrives on April 1. The Quarantine Book Club will continue twice a day for as long as people remain at home, with proceeds going to the authors as well as Monteiro and Hall’s design studio. Monteiro says that over 200 people paid the $5 admission on Tuesday to listen to the graphic designer Aaron Draplin and ask him questions the conversations have often extended past the books and toward the world at large. “So you get on here and you talk to somebody who’s really good in their field.” They’re bored, they’re freaked out,” Monteiro tells TIME. Readers have also been finding curious similarities between the novel’s plot and current events: But this book is the opposite: it’s a long retrospective to history.” “If you are reading news or social media every day, you tend to get agitated and panicky. She chose the novel in part because she hoped its pace and length would serve as a perfect antidote to the frenzied news cycle of the moment: “It’s a book that requires a lot of patience and support from each other,” she says. Li has been startled by the level of engagement: “I thought maybe five to ten people would read with me,” she says. A Public Space representative estimates that 3000 people are participating across the world, from Pakistan to Brazil to Norway.
The group has been reading about 15 pages a day and are 100 pages in. “In these times, one does want to read an author who is so deeply moved by the world that he could appear unmoved in his writing.”
“I have found that the more uncertain life is, the more solidity and structure Tolstoy’s novels provide,” Li wrote in her introductory post. The author Yiyun Li is currently leading a pilgrimage through the novel on the independent publisher A Public Space’s social media channels.
While it might be an ideal time to finally crack open Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the 1,200-page epic is a daunting task to take on alone.
Meanwhile, TIME books editor Lucy Feldman offers some tips about how to start your own community around reading. Here are some of the most notable book clubs that will continue to offer online events going forward.