The hard part of distance isn't missing someone. It's that you slowly run out of things to say, because you're no longer accumulating the same days. Video calls turn into status updates. A shared book quietly solves this: it manufactures common experience out of nothing but two people and the same pages.
Why a book beats a show
You can watch a series together too, but a book is better for this specific purpose. It's asynchronous — no scheduling across time zones — and it's slower, so it lasts weeks rather than an evening. You also read at your own pace and in your own head, which means you arrive at conversations with genuinely different reactions instead of the same one.
The point isn't finishing the book. It's having somewhere to put a thought at 11pm.
Set a pace, not a deadline
"Three chapters a week" works. "Finish by Sunday" turns reading into homework and kills it by week two. Agree roughly, then let it drift — the ritual matters more than the schedule.
React as you go, not at the end
A single debrief when you've both finished is much less fun than a running stream of small reactions. The good stuff is mid-book: predictions, suspicions, the line one of you underlined and the other walked straight past. For that you need spoiler discipline, which we cover in how to talk about books without spoiling them.
Pick something neither of you has read
Recommending an old favourite is a different, riskier activity — you're watching someone judge something you love. Discovering together is more equal, and it means neither of you is quietly waiting for the other to reach the good bit. Our guide on choosing a next book works for two just as well as one.
Tools that keep both of you in the same margin
Most of this can be done with any book and a chat thread. It's just better when the reactions live in the book itself. On Arwy you can leave a note on a specific line, and the other person meets it when they reach that line — a small, delayed conversation happening inside the story rather than beside it. It also connects you with strangers reading the same book, which is how a lot of long-distance reading pairs start in the first place.
Read the same chapter, wherever you both are. Get Arwy.