Start a two-person book club.

“A few years after graduating, my best friend and I wanted to revive the kinds of literary conversations we’d had in college, even though we now lived half a country away from each other rather than down the hall. The inaugural pick for our two-person book club was Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father. We checked in with each other’s progress over the course of a few weeks, texting brief thoughts here and there, then hopped on the phone to discuss the book in-depth. It felt a lot like a regular book club, except we chose all the books together, and we never had to worry about someone who didn’t read the book monopolizing the discussion—if either of us wasn’t finished yet, we’d just postpone the call. These conversations gave form to our long-distance friendship and reminded us of the reasons we became friends as freshman English majors in the first place.”

“I remember reading Things Fall Apart aloud in the car when I was in high school. My mom had picked me up from cross-country practice and we were going to pick up my brother at a friend’s house. She had started the book herself earlier. As she drove, she began telling me about Okonkwo’s problems with his children and wives, and we decided to read more of the story to pass the time, stopping along the way to discuss parts of it.”