I’ve always been a bit suspicious of book clubs. Admittedly, I’ve never been to one – that is, if you don’t count two people on a bus reading a book (a veritable miracle). But then, I wouldn’t, because to me, book clubs are as improbable a plot as David Sedaris trying his hand at chick lit.

Book clubs aren’t about reading. If I had to liken the whole concept to a medium, then it would be drama; a gathering of flat extras around a bubbling pot of words. It’s six characters in search of an author.

First, you have the ringleader – a middle-aged man who read English at university and who exerts his authority by occasionally blurting out, “I don’t agree with you. Wuthering Heights is a post-structuralist exercise in untangling the terministic screens of modern discourse.” His sidekick (usually his poor wife) will agree – but deep down, what she is really thinking is how gorgeous Alec d’Urberville's hair is.

The other characters in this book club drama invariably include someone who attends book clubs because they are a cheaper alternative to therapy, a girl who is looking for a date, and a guy who thinks that his bushy eyebrows grant him an intellectual je ne sais quoi.

I mean, how can you read in such a crowd?

You cannot. Because reading isn’t a collective effort. Rather, it’s an intimate experience; an exquisitely solitary pleasure. Reading is a play with a limited cast of two – you and the book. But when these two come together, it’s a revelation – new worlds are discovered, characters fall in and out of love, villains and heroes commit crimes and reap their contrappasso punishment. The ghosts of readings past conspire with the words of tomorrow and time stands still.

By virtue of being an escape, reading teaches us to be alone. As American literary critic Harold Bloom wrote, reading is: “The proper use of one’s solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”

And yet, for such drama to unfold, we need huge dollops of silence, as thick as sap running down trees and as sweet as an ice cream melting in the spring sun.

If you listen hard enough, there is silence everywhere, even in the busiest of cities. When I’m in Rome, I rabbit to Villa Borghese and hole myself in some quiet corner, hidden from view. It is here that I unearthed Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, a precious jewel which, like de Waal’s netsuke, shone like dappled drops of sun in the majestic shade of the park’s ancient trees.

Chris Abani’s words echoed like a killer’s footsteps as I watched the night covering the quiet Jardin du Luxembourg with a blanket of pending doom. In Istanbul’s Yildiz Park, as I watched the ships trawl the Bosphorus and then take their leave to distant lands, I dreamt of Colin Thubron’s Silk Road adventures and followed Stanley Stewart’s journey among nomads. And Khaled Hosseini’s poetic skies horizoned with South Africa’s giant blue heavens.

Even Valletta has its quiet spots. There, on a step in a street where shoppers fear to tread, I ganged up with Sjowall and Wahloo’s Inspector Beck, Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander and Jo Nesbo’s Inspector Harry Hole to solve the mystery of my fascination with Scandinavian crime fiction, as silent, yet deadly, as a throat slit in the night.

There is no better accompaniment to Charles Dickens than the streetwise banter of Old Mint Street or lower St Ursula Street. Read Nick Hornby’s playful words in Hastings Garden, where the humid silence of a summer afternoon will dampen your laughter. And get in character at some quiet Valletta cafe, where pensioners whispering seemingly innocent sweet nothings will read like a chapter straight out of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series.

Valletta is like a book – beneath the surface of punchy pronouns and vagrant verbs are the silent vowels of a pleasurable read.