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Our club kept picking 500 page books and nobody would finish them, so I started tracking the real numbers
I've been in a book club in Columbus for about 4 years now and for the longest time we kept doing the same thing over and over. Someone would suggest a big buzzy 500 or 600 page novel, everyone would nod at the meeting, and then three weeks later only 2 out of 9 of us had actually cracked it open past chapter 4. Our discussions turned into the same 2 folks basically giving a summary to everyone else, which is not a debate, it's a lecture. So back in January I started keeping a simple spreadsheet of every pick, the page count, and how many of us finished, and the pattern was pretty stark. Anything over 400 pages, our finish rate sat around 25 percent, but books in the 250 to 350 range hit 80 percent, and the talks were way better because everyone had real opinions to argue about. The tricky part is I don't want to be the page count police and squash someone's passion pick, so I'm trying to figure out how to bring this up without it feeling like a rule. Has anyone else dealt with a club that keeps swinging too big and how did you get folks to mix in shorter stuff without a fight?
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charles44227d ago
Honestly the "page count police" fear is doing a lot of work here and maybe it should not be. My club went through this same thing and we never made it a rule, we just started doing one short pick between big ones, like a 300 pager after a 600 pager, and nobody felt blocked. But your numbers are also kinda selling the big books short. Some of our best talks came from a 550 page book where only 4 people finished, because the 4 who did had real stuff to say and the others still showed up with thoughts from the first hundred pages. The problem might not be length, it might be that 3 weeks is too tight for a 500 pager. Give the big one 5 or 6 weeks and see if that finish rate moves before you decide length is the villain.
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