The Common Reader: Book of the Year Suggestions
The Common Reader is our annual shared text, a single book we read together, discuss, and return to throughout the year. Have a book you love, or something you believe is worth exploring as a community?
Submit your suggestion below and help shape our 2026 selection.
The Common Reader: Our Shared Book of the Year
Nearly half of Americans do not read a single book in a year.
Not because they don’t want to, but because modern life is crowded, time is scarce, and reading, once a daily ritual, now often feels like a luxury.
The Ladies’ Literary Club hopes to change that; gently, locally, and with a book we all hold in common.
The name “Common Reader” comes from Virginia Woolf, who celebrated the everyday reader, the person who reads out of curiosity, pleasure, instinct, or longing. The person who is moved by books without needing credentials or scholarly purpose. She believed the common reader, not the critic, is the true center of literary life.
We honor that reader in all forms, the communal reader and the solitary one alike.
The Common Reader is our annual tradition: choosing one book, fiction or nonfiction, to read across the year. It becomes a shared thread across our community, a steady rhythm through the seasons.
But not everyone reads in a group.
Not everyone wants to meet, talk, or compare notes.
And that is not just welcomed —> it is celebrated.
Many women read alone, in the quiet corner of a busy life, in bed after the house sleeps, in stolen moments on lunch breaks or late afternoons. For them, the Common Reader becomes an anchor, a structure, a gentle map to follow independently.
The solo reader is a full participant, not an afterthought.
She is one of the pillars of why we do this, because reading does not require a crowd to be meaningful. It requires only a book, a mind, and the willingness to wander.
And so the Common Reader is free and open to the public.
Anyone may nominate a book. Anyone may join the reading, whether in small circles, large gatherings, or entirely on their own. No membership is required.
On this page, you are invited to suggest the book you feel is worthy of our shared attention; something moving, challenging, beautiful, or necessary.
Once the selection is announced on January 1, 2026, this page will transform. You’ll find:
the official Common Reader selection
a printable reading schedule for both group and solo readers
optional prompts and reflections
recommended companion texts
dates for small-group meetups (optional, never required)
larger public discussions
quotes, insights, and notes added throughout the year
links to local bookstores and libraries
We are building this with care, knowing that community can look like many things: a full table of women talking, or one woman reading quietly, with a whole world opening in her hands.
Thank you for helping shape our Common Reader tradition.
Submit your nomination below and join us, together, or alone, in the book we will hold in common next year.