Pro tip: How I got our club to actually finish a 500-page classic

Our group in Boise kept dropping books like 'Moby-Dick' after two meetings. Last month, I suggested we read just 50 pages a week and use a shared doc to post one burning question. We finished 'The Count of Monte Cristo' in ten weeks, which never happens. Anyone else have a method for tackling long books without losing people?

3 comments

3 Comments

tessac2515d ago

That character tracking idea is brilliant for a book like that. My old group in Portland did something similar with "Middlemarch," which also has a huge web of people. We each picked a character to basically be the expert on, and it stopped everyone from getting the side characters mixed up. Our meetings turned into us explaining how our person's story fit into the bigger picture. It made a book that felt like homework into a group puzzle. We actually looked forward to putting the pieces together each week.

lily_schmidt5315d ago

Yeah that "group puzzle" thing is exactly it. My cousin's book club did that with a big family saga and it turned the whole book into a game. You stop dreading the reading.

rowan42215d ago

Heard about a friend whose group tackled War and Peace by assigning each person a different character to track. They said it made the huge cast way less confusing and actually fun to compare notes. Maybe that focus on just one thread could help other groups too.