This small bookstore in Delhi has grand plans for the city’s readers

The Bookshop Inc.’s newest enterprise builds on this promise of creating a space where chance encounters, not only with books but also with writers, bookmakers and readers become inevitable. “Over the years, so many readers have asked us if we have a book club and if not, could we start one?” says Chaturvedi. Taking heed, the independent bookstore launched three quarterly book clubs, one each for backlist titles (a publisher’s books that are still in print but have been on the market for at least a year), food writing and fiction in translation. “Each book club is a way for us to highlight books that may otherwise go unnoticed and let people discover something they wouldn’t normally pick up.”

The inaugural club gathered in the bookstore’s back garden one overcast Sunday afternoon this February. “We weren’t meeting as strangers,” Swati Daftuar, an editor and organiser of the Annual Book and Bake Sale, who moderates the book clubs, tells me. Members had spent the last month reading in companionable silence and following each other’s progress on a WhatsApp group. “The idea is to create an old-school book club where readers are the main stakeholders,” she explains. Daftuar’s own relationship with the bookstore is especially intimate—she would frequent the shop in Jor Bagh when she started working in publishing and it was here that her now-husband proposed to her one evening after hours.

Though reading is principally solitary, we rarely read by ourselves. Beyond the universe of Bookstagram, there are invisible networks of readers all around us, reading privately in their homes, on the train, in coffee shops, in public parks—“Secretly, they formed circles,” in Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’s words. In recent years, book clubs, which gained new momentum during the pandemic, seemed to have grown in celebrity and number, drawing readers into communities of varied sizes. Chaturvedi notes reading together can be a great way to make a difficult book seem rewarding. The draw is simple, one member of the book club tells me: it is the pleasure of looking up from a particularly moving passage and finding someone to share it with. “It doubles the joy of reading alone.”