When Millie Keogh ’25 arrived on campus from Colorado, she hoped to join a book club. “I found out there wasn’t one,” she says. So the English major created her own. In 2022 Keogh and Mariel Fulghum ’25 started the Dartmouth Student Book Club. “We’re really good friends,” says Fulghum, an econ major. “We love to read together and talk about books and give each other recommendations. We thought it would be fun to create a bigger group and a good way to meet people.” 

More than 300 students expressed interest, and every month about a dozen meet in person to discuss a book they’ve all read. “It’s a fun, easygoing community,” Keogh says. “Low stakes: Come if you can.” Members suggest titles and the group votes on what to read. “Voting is on the ‘Millie and Mariel scale,’ ”
says econ major Sara Shelton ’26. “One means you will quit the club if we choose it, and a three means that you will quit if we don’t read it.” Two is neutral.

 “We try to choose books that will get everyone in,” says president Lucy McLaughlin ’26. “But it’s hard to convince college students to read more than they have to.” Keogh agrees that reading for fun during the school year can be a challenge. “But it’s a priority for me,” she says. “It relaxes me and helps me find inspiration.” McLaughlin, a history major, tries to read before going to bed every night. “I don’t want to do homework on a Saturday, but I’m more than happy to do a little reading of a fun book. It’s just so nice not to have to read while thinking about annotating things or what I would write a paper on. It ends up feeling like a break.”