The Book-a-Round: A Cozy, Long-Distance Book Club Idea

Looking for a fun and meaningful way to stay connected with your bookish besties—especially the ones who live far away? Let me introduce you to something my friends and I started doing: the Book-a-round.

What Is a Book-a-Round?

A Book-a-round is part book club, part annotation project, and part care package. It’s a shared reading experience where each person chooses a book, reads and annotates it, then mails or passes it to the next person in the group—until everyone has read and marked up everyone else’s book. By the end, you get your own book back, filled with notes, highlights, thoughts, doodles, and reactions from your favorite people.

How It Works

1. Gather Your Group

Ideally, your Book-a-round circle should include three people (five max). The smaller the group, the easier it is to manage and the quicker the rotation.

2. Pick Your Book

Each person selects a book they’d love for their friends to read. We recommend choosing something short, sweet, and fun to keep the momentum going—contemporary romance is our personal favorite.

3. Get Your Colors Ready

Each person picks a dedicated annotation color—a pen, highlighter, and sticky tab combo that’s uniquely theirs. Use your color for all your notes and highlights throughout the book. This way, everyone’s thoughts are easy to identify.

4. Log Your Start

On the inside cover, write your name, the date you started reading, and your color key. This becomes a sentimental timestamp and helps track your journey.

5. Read + Annotate

As you read, highlight favorite quotes, jot down your reactions, make predictions, ask questions, or leave emojis and inside jokes in the margins. It's like your own personal comment section inside a book!

6. Send It On

Once you finish, send or hand off the book to the next person. Repeat the process until each book has been read and annotated by everyone in the group. We recommend waiting until the entire group has finished their current book before doing the swap, this way everyone always has a book and no one is behind.

7. Return to Sender

At the end of the rotation, each person gets their original book back—now filled with layered conversations and memories. It’s like a literary time capsule of your friendship. The sisterhood of traveling smut if you will.

Perfect for...

• Long-Distance Friends: Stay connected in a unique & creative way this long-distance book club idea is perfect for friends new and old. (Our circle spans the entire country!)

• Trying New Genres, tropes, & more: While you should try to pick books everyone will enjoy, its likely you'll end up reading something you might never have picked up on your own!

• Beginner Annotators: Annotations let you be vulnerable, silly, thoughtful, or chaotic. I struggled a lot with annotating when I started, but knowing it was basically a conversation with my besties helped re-frame my purpose and really get into annotating as a whole!

• A Gift That Keeps Giving: A spin on the book-a-round! Got a friend who loves reading? Get the whole friend group to read & annotate her favorite book as a thoughtful and authentic gift she will treasure for years!

Tips for a Great Book-a-Round

• Keep it low pressure—no deadlines, just general check-ins & NO spoilers!

• Use books that are easy to get into. Think under 350 pages, with good pacing.

• Respect each other’s books: Yes you're writing in them, but some may still say "no" to dog-eared pages or messy foods!

• If you’re mailing books, use media mail to save money (within the U.S.).

Whether you're looking to deepen your friendships or add a new twist to your reading life, a Book-a-round is the coziest way to do both. Try it once, and you might find yourself hooked on the magic of reading with friends—even from miles away.

Current Books in our Book-A-Round...

Have you ever done something like a Book-a-round? Would you try it with your friends?