These Gen Z and millennial readers are reimagining L.A. book clubs

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At first glance, the horde of pedestrians — mostly young women — circling the streets of Santa Monica in late January appeared to be a run club.Indeed, many were dressed for it, wearing tennis shoes and baseball caps to evade the sweltering sun.

Upon closer inspection, though, the clues were visible: the group’s relaxed pace, the bountiful tote bags, the occasional flash of a paperback.This was no run club, but instead the Preoccupied literary social calendar’s Walking Book Club, a monthly L.A.-based event where readers take a 40-minute (or so) stroll with a featured author, followed by discounted shopping at a local bookstore.

January’s pick was Ali Rosen, who was promoting her romance novel, “The Slow Burn,” at one of the more unconventional stops on her book tour.Although these days, as many fan-facing authors know, the “unconventional” book event is becoming increasingly, well, conventional.

Driven by Gen Z and millennial organizers eager to shed the isolation of the pandemic era, events ranging from book crawls to silent reading parties are successfully turning time spent with literature into happening social occasions.Entertainment & Arts Fleuria Audiobook Walking Club inspires L.A.

people to get out and listen to audiobooks as a group while walking along the beach before gathering for conversation at a romance book truck.When Allison Ambili Kumar moved to L.A.in 2023, she said she was “overwhelmed in a good way” by the sheer volume of local bookstores and authors.

But she also noticed that the market was saturated with author panels and conversations while lacking spaces where book lovers could interact with each other more organically.This led Kumar to launch a book crawl, inspired by her reading of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters” by Priya Parker.In Kumar’s book crawls, a traveling party of literary buffs bookst...