Hot take: most book clubs pick the wrong books for discussion

I've been in my local book club in Austin for 2 years now, and every time someone picks a literary fiction novel that's 400+ pages, the discussion falls flat. People just nod and say they liked the writing style, but nobody actually debates anything meaningful. The best discussions we ever had were with shorter, weirder books like "Convenience Store Woman" or "The Vegetarian." Everyone had strong feelings and argued about the characters' choices for hours. Why do clubs keep picking these long, safe novels if nobody actually argues about them?

2 comments

2 Comments

jana_hart181mo ago

Yeah but I don't know about that, @ivanross. In my experience, long books just let everyone pick a different thing to focus on and then nobody's actually talking about the same story. The short weird ones force you to actually wrestle with what happened instead of just saying "the prose was beautiful" and moving on.

ivanross1mo ago

Long books give people more room to find their own take without getting railroaded by a weird plot.