Forget the posh country club, the trendy night club or even the bargain-friendly Sam’s Club. In this crazy, COVID-altered world, it’s all about a different kind of club: the book club.

The age-old practice of gathering together to discuss literature, often over a beverage and some tasty snacks, is taking off as people recovering from the isolation of pandemic quarantines seek out human connection. But these aren’t your grandma’s book clubs. Bay Area readers are meeting at local breweries, discussing books in their living rooms via Zoom and debating plots and character development on Instagram, TikTok and book club apps. There are silent book clubs, where people meet up to read quietly together, and musical ones, where musicians perform pieces inspired by the same book. And there are clubs dedicated to nearly every niche interest you can imagine, from bicycling to Taylor Swift.

“A few years ago, if you talked about book clubs, you’d think about elderly women getting together and drinking tea,” said Oakland librarian Erin Sanders, who co-hosts the library’s “We Bike” book club, where readers meet online to discuss cycling memoirs and books about urban planning. “But it definitely has more cachet with younger readers, I think.”

Searches for book clubs on Meetup.com, the global event platform, have skyrocketed in the past few years — jumping from 465 in 2019 to 1.7 million this year, according to the company. In the Bay Area, there are 65 active book groups on the platform.

“Book club popularity is definitely growing,” said Anna Ford, co-founder of Bookclubs.com. “I think COVID … and the fact that we all have learned to live virtually and do more things online is fueling some of that growth. But I think the bigger thing is that COVID isolated a lot of us, and people are looking for authentic, meaningful connections.”

Ford launched her platform in 2019 as a tool to help people manage their book clubs. As the host of a large book club herself, she found herself drowning in emails from members asking what they were reading or when the next meeting was scheduled. Bookclubs.com, which is free, lets clubs manage their reading and membership lists, poll people on what to read next, add meetings to members’ calendars and post questions and discussions on a message board. There are more than 300 Bay Area clubs on the platform and 25,000 world-wide.

Demand for the service spiked during the pandemic — they now have more than 10 times as many clubs as they did pre-COVID.

And while book club members generally share a love of reading, many aren’t really doing it for the literary discussions. More than a quarter of Bookclubs.com users say they joined a club primarily to meet people and socialize, Ford said. Among younger users — ages 18 to 34 — that number jumps to more than half.

Jabril Rollins can relate. The 32-year-old moved to Oakland from Los Angeles in the middle of the pandemic, while everything was shut down, and was at a loss for how to make friends. So he logged onto Meetup.com and started “Books and Brew,” with the idea that people could join him at a different East Bay brewery each month to talk about a book.

“Really, this book club is just a way to trick people into coming to hang out with me,” Rollins said.

And it worked. Now, about 20 people come to each meeting, and some of the members have turned into friends. They even started a second off-shoot club where they read the entire Harry Potter series.

It’s the same with Giovanna Baldassarre’s San Jose-based book club, which has been meeting every six weeks for the last 15 years.

“We have developed a friendship and camaraderie that is hard to describe,” she said in an email.

In other book clubs, the point isn’t to socialize. Adobe Books, a used book store in San Francisco, hosts one of the Bay Area’s several “silent book clubs.” People meet there once a month, briefly introduce themselves and share the book they’re reading, and then shut up and read in each other’s company.

“It’s nice to just be around people without having to interact with them so much,” said Prasant Nukalapati, who runs the club. “Not everyone is so extroverted.”

Nukalapati started the club to encourage people to get together in-person. He also runs a more traditional book club, but it moved online during the pandemic and stayed there — leaving him hungry to see people in real life. Online meetings can get weird, he said, especially when new people join and don’t turn on their cameras or don’t read the book.

Oakland’s Bushwick Book Club is the polar opposite of a silent book club. The organizers pick a book and invite musicians to read it and then write and perform a piece inspired by the reading. November’s book was Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” as a belated celebration of Banned Books Week.

“It makes it really enjoyable to be part of the event, because you never know what someone else is going to have taken away from that book,” said organizer Claire Calderon. “The musical conversation that comes out of it is so rich and so varied.”

Book clubs have become so popular that several apps, websites and subscription services have popped up in recent years with the sole purpose of helping people talk about what they’re reading. When Padmasree Warrior launched the Fable app two and a half years ago, she was hoping to promote reading as a way to ease anxiety, stress and loneliness.

“People are looking for fun solutions to take care of themselves. Meditation is hard,” said Palo Alto-based Warrior. “Reading is a lot easier.”

The app provides curated book recommendations and a range of virtual book clubs hosted by regular people, social media influencers and celebrities. Sean Astin, who played Samwise Gamgee in the “Lord of the Rings” movies, hosts a club — they’re reading J.R.R. Tolkien. The “Bookish Swifties” club reads books that relate to Taylor Swift songs. The app’s largest club — dedicated to “spicy romance” books — has 17,000 members.

Social media also has spawned giant book clubs, and celebrities from Reese Witherspoon to Emma Watson have launched virtual clubs with massive followings. When Watson chose the relatively obscure novel “Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars” by trans author Kai Cheng Thom, it caused chaos for the book’s distributor — Berkeley-based Small Press Distribution.

“They completely wiped us out super quickly, and that book was out of stock for months,” said Grant Kerber, publicity and marketing manager.

But the upside is, essentially the whole world is now a book club.

“Books are getting cool again,” Rollins said. “With TikTok and YouTube and Instagram, they have BookTok and BookTube and Bookstagram. It’s easy to learn about books, and you just see them everywhere. And it’s easier to read more.”