6 Ways to Find Bookish Friends

For so many reasons, bookish friends are among the very best kinds of friends there are. For the extroverts among us, books present an endless supply of conversation — from what you’ve been reading lately, to how a movie compares to the novel it was adapted from, or what your favourite local bookstore is. If you feel a little socially anxious, “what are you reading?” is an easy way to springboard into conversation. And if you love companionable silence, what better way to achieve that than by sharing a sofa or a stretch of beach, each quietly turning pages and caught up in your own worlds?

But what do you do if you don’t have any bookish friends? Maybe you’ve just moved to a new town, or maybe all your friends are getting married and moving to the suburbs, or finding parenthood too overwhelming to have time to read. Or maybe you have friends already, but you aren’t sure how to figure out which of them are into books — you know, like, really into books, the way people who read Book Riot are.

Never fear! This is problem we can solve together.

1. Hang out in a bookstore.

If you go to your local bookshop enough, you’re bound to start bumping into the same people after a while. And sometimes the bookshops have events to help you make friends, too — the bookstore where I work has book clubs you can join…