The Essay
Ontario runs one of the healthiest reading cultures in the country. Book clubs fill restaurants near Bloor and Yonge, community rooms in Mississauga, back tables in Ottawa, bookstore corners in the east end of Toronto. Readers arrive. Facilitators prepare questions. Strangers argue about a chapter and leave as something closer to friends.
Entrepreneurs stay home.
Toronto Startups Book Club still lists 137 members on Meetup. Those members held one meeting, on 12 September 2016, at the Ryerson Student Learning Centre. Nobody scheduled a second. TorontoStarts, a startup community operating since 2015, launched a StartUP Book Club with a full monthly reading list and a promise of mentor-led discussion. That list runs from The Lean Startup in September 2020 to Outliers in June 2021, then stops. The parent organization still runs podcasts, investor drinks, and coaching. Dust covers the book club.
Non-fiction Book Club Toronto tells the opposite story. Its roster holds 2,049 members. Its organizers have run 344 meetings. Members gather monthly near Bloor-Yonge station, pay a five dollar refundable deposit, read the whole book beforehand, and hand the floor to a volunteer facilitator. A second branch meets in Mississauga. On 13 August they take up Marina Nemat's prison memoir of Tehran. On 22 September they take up Ezra Klein on polarization. Nobody in that room needs a business reason to read.
BookNet Canada has measured the appetite. A third of Canadian readers attended an in-person book club at least once in 2023. Another third joined an online group. Membership among Canadian book buyers doubled from seven per cent in 2018 to fourteen per cent in 2019. Reading itself keeps climbing: by 2024, forty-three per cent of Canadian readers opened a book at least once a day, moving books ahead of exercise on the daily leisure list.
Something kills the founder version, and it is not a shortage of readers.
Diagnosing it takes one honest look at the calendar. A general book club asks a reader for four hours and a five dollar deposit. A founder book club asks an owner for four hours, a five dollar deposit, and the quiet admission that the business needs counsel. Owners pay the first invoice. Owners dodge the second.
Research recommends the second invoice. Four scholars, led by Alaric Bourgoin of HEC Montréal, surveyed 109 chief executives of major Canadian organizations and interviewed 46 of them in depth. Their finding overturns the cliché. Loneliness at the top does not grow out of a shortage of company. Loneliness grows out of the weight of the decision itself, sharpest during a crisis, when a leader looks to the board and the senior team and finds nobody able to carry the load.
A networking room answers the wrong question. Adding people to a lonely leader's calendar adds people. Handing that leader a book adds a third thing to the table, an object neither of you owns, a text you can both point at and disagree over without either of you losing face.
Keith Oatley spent a career at the University of Toronto proving that point. Fiction, he argues, runs as a flight simulator for social life. Writing in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2016, he compressed it into six words: fiction is the simulation of selves in interaction
. Readers of literary fiction get measurably better at reading other people. Oatley and Raymond Mar of York University had already built the case in 2008, arguing that narrative abstracts and compresses the social world into something a mind can rehearse.
A book is the cheapest peer advisory board ever built. Leaders already pay thousands for the expensive version.
TEC Canada, acquired by Vistage in May 2026, sells confidential peer advisory boards to more than 1,600 Canadian chief executives through 75 chairs. ELO runs peer advisory groups for Christian executives from coast to coast. Those rooms work on one mechanic: a circle of outsiders examines one owner's decision, out loud, without flinching. Books deliver the same mechanic for the price of a paperback.
Nobody in Ontario runs that room. Building it means dropping the word club. A leaders' reading room is a decision rehearsal, held monthly, over a book nobody at the table wrote, among people who each carry a payroll.
Twelve doors sit below. Six open onto live rooms in Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, and Mississauga. Six open onto rooms full of Ontario leaders who read constantly and never call it reading. Two more stand boarded shut, and I have kept them visible on purpose. Walking through these doors this year, I carry one question into every one of them: what would you build, if the book handed you the blueprint?
Readers enter these rooms. Authors leave.
