Can this London singles book club help me find The One?

The first thing I noticed was the men. They lounged on chairs with a book in hand, sipped wine at the bar, and stood by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. No, this wasn’t one of my more PG-rated sexual fantasies; I was at the launch of a book club where everyone was single. From the moment my Instagram algorithm alerted me to this event – which it did repeatedly, for weeks on end – I was in. I am a self-confessed book obsessive, as well as a romantic who has watched Notting Hill too many times, and finding someone with the same taste in books feels like shorthand for finding someone with the same outlook on life. I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking to share his copy of One Day.

I’m not alone, and companies are starting to cotton on. Foyles is running a book-themed speed-dating event for Valentine’s Day, which has been sold out for weeks; there’s a popular bookshop meet-up run by the company Bored of Dating Apps in New York; and, on the dreaded apps themselves, there has been a noticeable uptick in men asking, “Tell me about the book you’re reading” on their profiles.

“I think the event was popular [...] because reading is cool again,” says Kristin, who helped organise the event at Bard Books in collaboration with the dating app Thursday. “With everything being online, people are having a major return to the analogue, they want something tactile.”. As I walked into the warmly-lit independent bookshop in Mile End, I too assumed that everyone would be a fellow book nerd, ready to wax lyrical about their colour-coded bookshelves. Or, at the very least, to discuss the key themes of the set book, Keith Ridgway’s A Shock.

I was wrong. The first man I met at the bar, a 20-something project manager called Kieran, said he was “not a big reader”. Still, at least he had read the book. Over the course of the night, three separate men told me they hadn’t opened it, and asked me to summarise the plot. If these men had little interest in books, why were they there? Kieran wanted a reason to finish a book, but he was also tired of the dating apps where people are often looking for something casual. He thought people at the book club might be looking for “more of a connection”. I respected this more than the man who told me he wanted a subject to bond over, despite not having opened the book.

Over the next two-and-a-half hours, I flitted about the room, meeting about half of the 30 singles who had flocked from all over London to be there, most of whom were in their late twenties or early thirties. Yet mingling had its challenges. The event revolved around sitting at one of the handful of tables and discussing the book prompts that had been printed out. I had arrived a mere 10 minutes late but, by the time I’d ordered a glass of red wine, all of the seats had been taken. Some people stayed at their table all night, so it was like a game of Musical Chairs, waiting for someone to go to the loo or grab a drink at the bar so you could nick their seat.

When I joined my first table, I pulled up a stool and asked the group of four men and two women, “So, what did you think of the book?” A woman in her late twenties replied, “We’ve moved on from the book,” and the reception felt as frosty as the February evening. Once introductions had been made, however, the atmosphere defrosted and we had pleasant chit-chat – but there were no sparks. This is the issue with any in-person dating event: you get caught up in conversations with people you don’t fancy but, unlike on the apps, you can’t just walk away – or talk to multiple people at once. I found it hard to even look around the room at other men, for fear of looking rude, so I only spotted the most gorgeous man in the room 15 minutes before he grabbed his coat. I joined his table but got pulled into a conversation by another man who, admittedly, had brilliant taste in books but, unfortunately, wasn’t my type.

Bard Books aims to run this event once a month, and everyone I spoke to said they’d go again. I’d be up for it too, although I’d definitely bring a friend for moral support, as I envied the two single women giggling at the bar all night. Most of the women brought a friend, and my favourite conversation of the evening was my debrief with two of them on the walk back to the station. We skipped the small talk and dove straight into the audacity of the men who hadn’t opened the book, horror stories from previous in-person events, and why Britney’s memoir destroyed our opinions of Justin Timberlake.