Our group had to pick between 'The Overstory' and 'Project Hail Mary' for our next read, and we went with the trees.

The debate got surprisingly heated, with one member saying 'I can't handle another book where the main character is a fungus' before we settled on Powers, and now I'm curious if any other clubs have had a sci-fi vs. literary fiction standoff that actually worked out.

3 comments

3 Comments

kim.zara19d ago

The fungus comment is a classic. My old club had a similar fight over "The Three Body Problem" versus some quiet family drama. We solved it by making the loser our next pick, no questions asked. It stops the debate from getting personal and you end up reading both. The key is to rotate who gets to choose first.

rubys8019d ago

Oh that's a smart system. I saw a book club online that does something similar, they call it a "runner-up shelf." So if there's a tie or a big argument, the book that didn't get picked goes on a special list for the next month. It actually got them to read some weird stuff they ended up loving, like that weird book about the guy who works in a mall and a whale. Takes the pressure off picking the "right" book every single time.

jenkins.reese15d ago

Love the runner-up shelf idea, it's basically a mercy rule for books. My old group tried something like that but we just ended up with a pile of books everyone had already voted against, which felt like homework. The key is you gotta actually commit to reading the weird one next month, not just keep kicking it down the road. Otherwise you're just running a book orphanage, and nobody wants that job.