A friend once asked me, “Why bother starting a book club? Isn’t reading by yourself enough?” Looking at David Copperfield sitting on my desk, I felt a little guilty. A month had passed, and I had barely started the book.

Since Nina is away for the summer, I couldn’t quite bring myself to keep Fallina going on my own. So we cancelled. Then we cancelled again. And again. Week after week.

Of course, I’ve still been reading by myself. But I wasn’t reading the challenging books I had promised myself I would read—like David Copperfield, the book I had chosen for our August read. And somehow, August slipped away.

I found myself asking the same question my friend had asked me: Why did I start a book club?

Why Did I Start Fallina?

For years, I had wanted to find a group of people who shared my love of reading. But I never really found one where I felt I belonged. So Nina and I started Fallina this February. We wanted a book club of our own—something we could build together around something we both love. And for a while, I thought that was enough of a reason. But after all these cancelled sessions, I started to wonder if it really was. Maybe the problem wasn’t that we cancelled some reading sessions. Maybe we had never really figured out why we were doing this in the first place. Not just “we want a book club of our own.”

Why indeed do we want a book club of our own? I’ve been thinking about this question for the past few weeks, and I think it’s finally time to be open and honest about it.

What I’m Really Looking For

I want a book club of my own because I crave deeper connections.

We all have friends. But as we grow and change, sometimes the connections we already have don’t feel like enough. We want to meet new people, find new friendships, and hopefully discover connections that feel deeper and more meaningful. But building meaningful connections in a fast-moving world is surprisingly difficult, especially when we don’t make time to see each other regularly.

We slowly drift apart from people we once thought we’d stay close to forever. We are losing our friends to the world—not physically, but figuratively.

We still meet for food or coffee. We catch up on what’s been happening. We talk about work, relationships, life. But as we each take different paths, our conversations naturally become narrower. Eventually, we may find that we don’t have much to talk about anymore.

And I think that’s one of the things I love about books. With a book club, you never really run out of things to talk about. There’s always something happening in a book. A character makes a decision. Someone falls in love. Someone makes a terrible mistake. Someone goes through something that makes you stop and think. And somehow, talking about a fictional character’s problems often makes it easier to talk about our own.

Maybe that’s what I’ve really been looking for. Not just a group of people who happen to read books. A place where we can slow down, sit together, talk about something that matters, and get to know each other a little better through the stories we read.

What I Want Fallina to Become

I do feel bad about cancelling the sessions. But maybe I needed that break. I needed to step away from Fallina for a moment and ask myself why I wanted to keep doing this. And now I think I know.

I don’t want Fallina to be another thing I have to be consistent at. I want it to be a place I genuinely want to come back to.

Maybe that means we need to start differently. Maybe we need to read fewer books, choose books more thoughtfully, or simply give ourselves more room to have real conversations instead of worrying about finishing a book on time.

I don’t know exactly what Fallina will look like from here. But I know I still want it. Because at the end of the day, I don’t think I started Fallina just because I wanted to read more books. I started it because I wanted to find my people. And maybe, through books, we can help each other find them too.

So here’s to getting Fallina back on track. Slowly. Honestly. And hopefully, with a few more people around the table each time.