Lake Travis library’s ‘Bring your own book’ club connects readers from across the region

Rachel Matthews did not know anyone affiliated with the Lake Travis Community Library when she signed up to participate in a different kind of book club over Zoom.

Matthews, who lives in South Austin, has been attending meetings for about three months now. Unlike a traditional book club, where everyone reads the same book, during this bring-your-own-book club, or BYOB, anyone is welcome to come and talk about what they have been reading with the group.

“My to-read list is up to something like 47 titles now,” Matthews said. “It's great, getting exposed to things that I would never think of looking at myself.”

Sarah Traugott, the youth services librarian, facilitates the group’s weekly meetings at 2 p.m. on Fridays. She said the concept for the group came about before she came onboard at the library as a way to create new online programming in the early days of the pandemic.

“We're just a bunch of really eclectic readers so we can cover anything from historical fiction to romance to politics and current events. It's a really interesting collection of titles and thoughts and ideas about them,” she said. “It's not as prescriptive (as a traditional book club), you're not told what to read, you figure out what you want to read and then you share those opinions with others who are just as interested as you are.”

Traugott said the group’s members are very honest about titles they like and dislike, and often pick up books that other members recommend. She sends out an email each week to those who join in on the Friday call with a list of all the books mentioned and a summary of what people thought about each one.

“That helps everybody kind of keep track of titles in their minds as they plan their reading journey,” she said. “We have a lot of prolific readers, people who read three, four or five books a week and then we have other readers who just read one book a week and they just want to share it, or maybe they work on one book over several weeks. ... We definitely get an honest opinion both ways.”

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Carol Black, the president of the library's board, was an early member of the group. Black said she has been part of book clubs her whole life but she loves BYOB because it introduces her to books she never would have read otherwise. She recently read "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, which is a collection of fictional short stories about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the Vietnam War.

“I would have never, ever found that book,” Black said. “I did not know what soldiers go through, your heart is just with them. ... It’s really great to hear from other people about books that I've never heard of or that just browsing in the library I never would have picked up.”

Hannah Moutran, who also lives in Austin, found the group because she volunteers at the library’s onsite bookstore. She’s dropped into group meetings a few times and said she enjoys discussing books with people of different ages and life experiences.

“This is such a different group than I would normally be in,” she said. “Most of the women are a lot older than me. I'm not sure that I would have ended up in a book club with them if it weren't for doing it through Lake Travis.”

Moutran said she feels “embraced” by the library community and enjoys the group members’ candor, both positive and negative, about the titles they have tried.

“With reading, I think there's a part of me that likes that it’s a solitary activity. But it's nice to be able to connect with people over it,” she said. “A lot of times you read a book and you have things that you want to say, and you can post a comment on Goodreads or something, but it's not the same as doing it in person.”

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Several times the group has attracted visitors from outside Austin, including a man in Pennsylvania who Zoomed in a few times, and a 10-year-old boy from Russia who joined for a few months, Traugott said.

“He was not very clear about how he found out about it, but he said on the internet. He did come for about 10 weeks in a row. He always had a book that he was talking about, and he would listen very politely to everybody else's books from the week,” she said. “We have a core of five or six members who come all the time and then we're occasionally joined by other people who are interested and they can drop in and drop out as they choose.”

The plan is to keep the meetings on Zoom for the foreseeable future to make it accessible to people who can’t make the trip out to the library’s building in the middle of the day, and to ensure members feel safe attending with the pandemic ongoing.

Matthews said that all readers are welcome, no matter how much they read or in what format they prefer to absorb their books.

“Some of us read physical books. Some of us read ebooks, some of us listen to audiobooks,” she said. “It doesn't matter what you like to read. If you read young adult stuff, great come anyway, if you read you know, I read mostly like travel and kind of escapist stuff. There's room for whatever genre you enjoy.”

She said the group has become a part of her weekly routine and that talking about books help keep her brain active and engaged.

“Especially right now when a lot of us are feeling somewhat isolated still, online communities and Zoom communities have become such an integral part of my life,” she said. “Finding a new one and being accepted immediately as a reader and getting ideas of things that keep me thinking that's what I need right now.”

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Lake Travis library’s ‘Bring your own book’ club connects readers