Any rowdies heading to the back room of Brooklyn’s Soda Bar for some mid-week carrying-on last Wednesday night were in for a surprise. In the large, living-room-like space—ringed by a mismatched assortment of couches, cushy chairs, and coffee tables—there was a civilized silence. Near the center of the room, a cellist, illuminated by an overhead light, played a selection of classical hits (“The Blue Danube,” “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”), but she was there merely for ambience, and none of the twenty or so patrons were paying her much attention. Each person sat alone, sipping a drink and reading a book.

This was New York’s third monthly silent-reading party. The events are organized by Jamie Burns, a tall, slim young woman who was wearing turquoise leggings and a red cardigan. Partiers bring whatever books they like, stay as long as they want, and aren’t allowed to speak to the other people in the room. Burns got the idea after reading about similar parties run by Christopher Frizzelle, the editor of the newspaper the Stranger, in Seattle. “I always wished I could go,” she said. “I work from home, and I’d like to read in my spare time, but I also just really need to get out of the house.” Burns has been able to find free venues so far, and she pays the musicians out of her own pocket. (At the previous meetings, they had a harpist.) She arrives to the parties with a big blue Rubbermaid tub full of Ikea lamps, which she sets up to supplement the dim bar lighting, and futuristic clip-on lights, which she scatters among the tables.

This is a literary social gathering for people who don’t like readings and discussion groups. You read what you want and, Burns said, “if you don’t want to mingle, and you just want to come and read and leave, that’s fine with me.” (After the allotted three hours, when the rule of silence was lifted, few stayed.) She thinks people show up because “there’s an energy to being in a room with other people. And being out and reading is better than staying home and planning to read.”

There were around twenty readers in attendance on Wednesday, many of whom stayed for the whole evening, and all but four of whom were women. Eyes wandered—to observe newcomers, to read the spines of other people’s books, to stare at the middle distance—but they snapped back to reading if they made contact with other drifters. Two people who knew each other exchanged a greeting of big, exaggerated, silent smiles, then sat in different parts of the room. When the woman next to me accidently bumped a coffee table with her foot, her eyes looked startled and she whispered “Sorry!”

A brave few ordered sandwiches, and were impressively deft in arranging their bodies for simultaneous eating and reading. This was clearly not their first rodeo. A tall, handsome bartender, who served drinks with some swagger at the front bar, kept his eyes down when he delivered the orders in this room.

My reading for the evening was an Agatha Christie novel that I’ve been dipping into but need to finish quickly for a book-club meeting I’m supposed to attend. At first, I wasn’t optimistic about getting through many pages. (Or percentage points, rather—I was reading on a Kindle, one of only two I saw in the room. I felt a little gauche.) My fellow readers were punctiliously silent, but that didn’t make up for the fact that I was sitting five feet from a cello playing “Habanera,” from “Carmen,” which mingled weirdly with the bumping tunes coming from the main bar. Every once in a while, Burns circled the room and took pictures of our reading with her cell phone. Well aware that my natural posture of repose is more slumping troll than pensive nymph, I got caught up wondering if I could pull off a not-posing pose. But gradually my attention settled, maybe because it had to; I was here to read, and couldn’t gracefully do anything else. So read I did.

All of the attendees I talked to—from the woman intent on W. G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz,” in the corner, to another reading Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” who was there with her mother—said that they became interested in these parties because they seemed to offer a chance for undistracted reading. This was superior to their apartments (too noisy), libraries (too institutional), and parks (too unpredictable). But the thing they seemed to value most about the event was what one man, reading Russell Hoban’s “Riddley Walker,” called “a mild peer pressure” that made them uncomfortable about looking at their phones.

Not that we didn’t check our phones. We did, but quickly and covertly. We tried to look a little hassled by the nasty things as we stuffed them back into bags and pockets and turned once again to our books.

Photograph by Jamie Burns.