Just realized our book club spent 4 months debating the same chapter because nobody wanted to admit they skimmed it

Last week at Beth's house I finally spoke up about skipping those 30 pages of landscape description in chapter 7, and three other members confessed they did the same thing, so has anyone else dealt with a book club where everyone secretly stopped reading halfway through?

3 comments

3 Comments

noah4157h ago

Oh come on man this is a terrible take actually. The whole point of a book club is to have real discussions about the text, not to pretend you read every boring bit. If nobody admits they skipped stuff, you're just lying to each other and having fake conversations. That's not a book club that's a performance. Being honest about skimming actually makes the meetings way better because then you can laugh about it and talk about what actually stuck with you. The landscape descriptions in chapter 7 were legit painful, I don't blame anyone for skipping those. Your club would probably be a lot more fun if everyone just came clean.

davis.dakota2h ago

Yeah I read something similar online actually. Some author was saying most people skim at least a third of any book they pick up. Makes sense to me.

michael_jones2h ago

Wait, is that really what most people do? I definitely catch myself speed-reading through entire chapters sometimes, especially when an author gets too into describing a room or a forest for three pages. My book club actually had this big argument once about whether we could admit to skipping the long battle scene in our fantasy pick, and it turned into the best meeting we ever had.