A reading community is different from a book club. The book club meets monthly and reads the same book. A reading community is the looser network of people who recommend things to each other and respond to each other's reading over years. This community can be in-person or online or some combination, and it operates on a longer timescale.

The reading community I've been part of longest started as a physical group and migrated to an online forum. What's survived the migration is the shared vocabulary — we have years of common reading that we can reference, writers we've all spent time with, arguments we've been having across multiple books. A new book either enters into that shared vocabulary or extends it.

This kind of community is the context that makes individual books most alive. The book exists in the conversation, not just on the shelf.