Hobbies that calm you down: Book clubs

A while ago, I wrote a post about how reading can help you against stress. I also wrote a post about how finding like-minded people can really help you out stress wise. In this post I am going to be talking about something that meshes both of those things together, book clubs.

For those of you who don’t know a book club, it’s basically a group of people who read books and who meet up to talk about said books, what they think of the story, what they liked about it, what they didn’t like about it, how they could have written a better book with their eyes closed, that kind of stuff (that last one is a joke by the way!).

There are two different types of book clubs:

1. Single title clubs: Where everyone in the group reads one book at a given time and then they get together and talk about it.
2. Multiple title clubs: Where everyone in the group reads multiple titles at a given time and talks about them.

Before most book clubs could only be formed by people within a community or at least had a way and a place that they could physically meet up with each other. Nowadays however, people can form book clubs with anyone in the world thanks to the internet; and as for meeting and discussing, they can do all of that in a predetermined chat room, or an online forum.

As I discussed in my reading post (put link here), reading by itself is an effective way to deal with stress, so it is safe to assume that being part of a group that promotes reading will help dealing with stress even more. The tricky part is finding a like-minded group, since everyone is different. People will have their own interests and their own genre or genres of books that they will enjoy reading like action or romance or fantasy or science fiction, etc. and so on.

First off, you need to find people who read the same or similar genres to the ones you read; next you need to find out if you get along with them. Just because you like the same things won’t mean you’ll get along. Once you have found some people who fit both criteria you’ve got yourself a nice group of friends (or at least potential friends) and as I said in my like minded people post that can make a world of difference for you.

So if you like stories, you like reading and you like talking about what you read, try forming or joining a book club; you’ll make some new friends and you might find books you never knew about. So have fun, get rid of your stress and happy reading.