Hello my fellow book hoes

welcome to this new chapter

I started my TikTok on accident, actually. I started my account to visit bookstores in New York City because grad school was remote and I was never leaving my apartment so visiting bookstores forced me to get out. I started my TikTok for my dear friend Gena, who was living in Virginia at the time and would have come to every bookstore with me if she lived closer. I thought the account was private. I thought only Gena would be following me.

The account was not private.

THE BEGINNING

Overnight, my TikTok account kind of blew up in a very weird way. It didn’t blow up like crazy, but it blew up in a very niche community of bookstore lovers in the city. I thought deleting the app would delete my account when my initial panic set in, but in fact, that’s not the case. Gena very sternly yet lovingly told me that this could be something and to try it out. She’s never steered me wrong before, so enter the new weird life of an internet person who doesn’t want to be on the internet.

The bookstore series continued and carried me through grad school. But when May 2022 came and I’d graduated, I was scrambling for something new. I’d started to treat myself to tickets to author events and I would sit there alone looking around at all these other book lovers sitting on a random weekday night coming together to celebrate literature.

These could be my people, I’d think to myself. I started meeting a few book people at these events and started to nibble on this idea of, “What if I started a book club?”

July 7, 2022 I posted a video. “Join my book club !” was the title and in the video I said, “I want to expand this community to as many of you who are a hoe for a good book as much as I am.”

It received 13k views and 45 comments from people saying they were interested. I maxed out on RSVPs with 40 people in both the Any & All book club and the Femmes book club. Now all I had to do was read the books and then meet with a bunch of strangers in Central Park on a random August weekend and hope they showed up.

They showed up.

THE FIRST YEAR

I got there an hour early for no reason other than I couldn’t sit around my apartment panicking any longer. I got to the park, set down my stuff, and immediately called my grandparents. My grandpa was at COSTCO so my grandma sat with me for an hour while I whispered conspiratorily into the phone about how I was pretty sure no one would show up. People would be insane to show up, right?

Zoë showed up first while I was still on the phone. This Zoë, another Zoë, came over tentatively while I can only imagine I looked insane. I was pacing, on the phone on the verge of tears, and wondering why I had done something so stupid.

“Are you book club?” she asked me, then quickly corrected herself and said, “Are you Zoë from book club?”

That’s how it started.

(Sidenote: Zoë is now one of my best friends. I have crashed in her apartment drunk overnight after she tucked me post-book club events. I one time texted her with no context “I’m concerned about cyber security” because I thought someone was online stalking me. No one was online stalking me. I’d just been awake for 36 hours and one TikTok comment convinced me someone had the ability to read my mind. She pretended this was a normal thing and convinced me to take a nap. She has since moved to Philly. RIP Zoë; gone, but not forgotten. We are still friends.)

Let’s now jump to Friday, November 18, 2022. My parents had just adopted a puppy (his name is Obi and he is the love of my life) and I had a plane to catch at 5am Saturday morning to see the puppy visit and surprise them. But Friday night was our first book exchange event.

Up until this point we’d only had around 40 people attending events at max capacity. We were meeting at a bar in Greenpoint and the event space was beautifully large enough to do more, but we just weren’t there. Book club was only three months old at this point and I was barely aware of the impact. That Friday, I got to work at 8am, and within 30 minutes of starting work I’d severely injured my finger. I spent the majority of Friday in the ER as they attended to the torn ligaments in my pointer finger from where it had been smashed. But my injury was not my top concern.

My concern was that I’d never needed to cap the tickets for an event because of our 40-person vibe. This time, however, I’d posted a video to my TikTok page a week before the event saying if anyone wanted to come to this book exchange, tickets were $5, and hey, here’s the link.

We sold 200 tickets in 24 hours.

To be fair, not every TikTok video does this well. Something about this one must have hit a vein because it reached around 90k views over the course of a night. I woke up the morning after the video was posted and immediately stopped tickets from being purchased. Could the bar even host 200 people? Was I stupid? Was I thinking of this and panicking when I let a clothing rack fall shut on my finger?

I look back at this night as the inception of the “oh this is something” moment.

We had 158 people in attendance that night and I had to get up on a stage to speak with all of them about book club. My introverted ass was not having it as I squeezed through all these book lovers and excited attendees to say, “Hi, welcome, um … thanks for being here,” like an idiot. I didn’t even introduce myself. I just started talking? I was still in my work clothes with my hand bandaged looking like a freaking loser. It was a trainwreck and I was convinced everyone thought so. But all these new people were so invested. People showed up. And then people kept showing up.

The book exchange started at 7:30pm and was supposed to go until 11:30pm, but by 2am people were still at the bar laughing and talking and building friendships. I was one of the first people to leave my own party because my dumb ass had to race home, throw stuff into my suitcase, and then Uber to the airport so I could see this new puppy spend the weekend with my family.

From LaGuardia, I sent an email to these 158 people explaining things far more eloquently than I had on that stage. I sent a link to our Instagram, our Geneva group chat, and our Eventbrite saying if people wanted to join a book club … we had six.

Tickets sold out for December for all six book clubs.

THE BOOKSTORE

So now here we are.

We’ve accumulated around two thousand people coming to a book club or event since the beginning. We’ve celebrated one whole year of book club and hosted nearly 100 events. Oh, and throughout this entire time, I was still working full-time at the same job I hated.

September 11, 2023 I fell down the subway steps, broke my elbow, and fractured it in three places. My boss asked if I was going to come in the next day when I texted from the ER at 2am after being there for almost five hours. September 12th, I was hosting an author talk and refused to wear the sling because it didn’t go with my fit (look up the photos and you’ll see what I mean; there was no way I was going to wear that dress with that sling). Two days later I hosted a book club dinner party (I did wear the sling; everyone got made at me and made me wear it). And the day following that I hosted another massive book exchange.

I had this moment of clarity where I would rather have died than go to work while in so much pain but never once did I question whether or not to do these book club events. I went on medical leave at work and then two weeks later I put in my two weeks notice. It was time to move on, but move on to what?

A few months before the one-year anniversary of book club I started floating around the idea of opening a bookstore. I mentioned it to a few people to gauge their reaction and each person responded positively. I kept mentioning it and even started raising money for it. At our one-year anniversary party, over $600 was presented to me from a group of book hoes who had created their own little fundraiser as a gift. I cried on stage in front of 150 people. It was hideous.

I kept saying I was going to start working on this bookstore project, but then I’d always be at work, or tired from work when I got home, or working on book club things for 10+ hours on my days off. My insomnia was the worst it had ever been since my senior year of college and I was getting around 2-3 hours of sleep a night, if that. Something had to give, and my two-week notice did not come as a surprise to anyone.

So here we are. With more time on my hands, I’m tackling this bookstore head-on. I’m going to document this journey both here in blog form and on TikTok as a video diary series. My hope is to find a place that feels like a home away from home for all book hoes to come and enjoy. It’ll be a used bookstore with cheap and loved books. We’ll have a coffee and wine bar, and lots of plush and comfortable seating for relaxed reading. Book clubs and events will meet here and hopefully, over time, other book clubs will use us as their hub to host their own communities.

All proceeds from paid subscribers will be going towards our bookstore fundraiser. I’ll be honest, I have no clue what I’m doing but I’m excited to feel insane in this exciting, spiraling way as this adventure unfolds.

What to expect from this Substack

There will be a few focuses on this Substack if there are specific things you’re looking for.

Free subscribers will receive reviews of book club books and insights into the conversations we had at book club. Paid subscribers will receive all other content including behind-the-scenes of book club since our inception, recaps of events and other opportunities, and access to the bookstore journey.

My grandma is in her final stages of life and we’ve been going back to Ohio to see her as much as possible since her stage-four terminal cancer diagnosis in July. On one of our first visits, my brother was running errands when he stumbled upon a stationary store with my mom. He got me this tiny, cute journal. It’s very professional-looking. It also, on the cover, says Zen as Fuck. I’ve started using it for all notes on book club when working, and I’ve decided this is the vibe I’m going to take on going into this.

A lot of elements right now feel out of my control in life and in the bookstore and book club. This isn’t exactly what I planned my life to look like when I studied art history and archaeology in my academic career. But when I look back at that little girl who couldn’t be pulled away from a book regardless of the events happening around her, I think this call to literature and love of reading has always been calling. It was just time for me to answer.

So welcome to this adventure, and I hope you enjoy where this journey takes us.

In the meantime, I hope you’re reading something good. Or, if you’re reading something shitty, I can’t wait to hear you talk all about it.

From one book hoe to another,

Zoë

If you’d like to join our Instagram to see photos from our book clubs and events and stay connected, you can find us at @nycbookhoes