Why Audiobook Walking Clubs Are Taking Off

Kelsey Bettis discovered the Fleuria Audiobook Walking Club the way people discover many things they didn’t know they needed: Instagram’s algorithm served it to her. Perhaps, she suspects, the app had picked up on how many romance novels she was reading. Bettis had been looking for ways to be more social, but she was also struggling with anxiety and finding it difficult to connect with people. A walking club seemed manageable. She could talk if she wanted to—or retreat into her book if she didn’t.“The audiobook walks allowed me to be social in a way that didn’t require talking to other people if I didn’t want to,” she says. “I had the option.”Bettis soon became part of the small army of women wearing headphones that gathers at least once a month—sometimes more often—on beaches and trails across Southern California. She ended up going for coffee with some of the women she met on her first walk. “The best part is the connection with other people,” she says. She kept coming back, and eventually began inviting friends, too. There was something irresistible, she says, about watching “a bunch of women mobbing down the beach” while enjoying something they collectively loved.The person res...