After a chance encounter with the previous organizer in a local coffee shop, Casey Brenner was handed the reins to the local branch of Silent Reading Club, but the group quickly expanded and transformed until it came into its own as the FoCo Reading Club.
“Fort Collins is such a literary community,” Brenner said. “We have the creative writing program at the school, and we have local publishers and so many indie bookstores, and I was, like, there are readers in Fort Collins, and I’m going to find them, and I’m going to make them be my friends.”
When Brenner first started to host the group, she said there were 10-15 regular attendees, but after she began advertising through her Instagram, those numbers began to rise.
“Every once in a while I’ll do a post that will gain some traction, and then there will be 10 new readers showing up to reading club, and that’s been really cool to see,” Brenner said.
Now the club’s most attended meeting at Equinox Brewing on the first Wednesday of every month gathers over 50 people consistently. Recently, the club has also been meeting the last Saturday of every month at the Front Range Village mall.
Brenner said it is thanks to places like these that the reading club can thrive, even with an unknown number of people showing up, spreading out and reading.
“My one and only rule is … support the business in some way somehow,” Brenner said. “Whether it’s buying a snack or drink or even (a) review. That first half an hour, just do something that supports this business and just hang out and mingle and meet.”
The FoCo Reading Club also hosts many special events, many of them in partnership with other book-related businesses, such as their trivia nights with Chekhov’s Gun mobile bookshop. This and many other events were created thanks to conversations held during their monthly meet-ups.
“We do a bookmark swap the first evening meetup of each new season,” Brenner said. “And that happens just because we were sitting at a table and somebody had a receipt as a bookmark and somebody else had three bookmarks.”
Whereas traditional book clubs are based on reading the same material and speaking about it in depth, the FoCo Reading Club is simply a place to gather, read and chat about anything or everything book-related.
“I don’t enjoy that (book club) structure whenever it comes to reading,” said Chloe Saccol, a member of the club. “Just being able to enjoy reading with like-minded people who also enjoy reading but not having to do the extra little bits was definitely a bonus.”
Saccol also mentioned the relaxed environment of the club allowed her and other less outgoing people to step out of their comfort zone without being forced to converse.
“It’s unstructured, which I think just makes it easier for people to feel comfortable,” Saccol said. “And I know that there was someone I had met at one of the previous meetings, and they were new to Fort Collins … so this was their way of just trying to meet new people.”
Brenner said that people come to the reading club for various reasons and with many different activities, some of which are not book-related.
“You just get time to talk about anything that’s coming up for you and your reading past, present (and) future,” Brenner said. “We’ve had people sit with their headphones and listen to an audiobook; we’ve had people bring graphic novels; we’ve had, I think, somebody (who) showed up and did their taxes once.”
Another club member, Leah Colasuonno, explained one way the club broadened her reading horizons is with different books or genres she may not have organically found while looking for new books to read.
“From the Fort Collins Reading Club, I found out about the ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ series last summer,” Colasuonno said. “And I’ve now read that series three times since July of last year.”
Another aspect of the reading club is the newsletter that Brenner sends out on the first of the month. It includes a collection of bookish events happening in Fort Collins and catalogs the books that are currently being read in the club. All of this to continue her pursuit of sharing the love of all things books in Fort Collins.
Saccol said she was able to take advantage of the more relaxed environment to rediscover her passion for reading after she had been less involved with the hobby as she once was.
“(The reading club) definitely helped get me out of that slump where I … hadn’t been reading,” Saccol said. “Definitely helped just to spark that love that I already had.”
Reach Maiya Kreamer at life@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
