Serious question, has your book club ever gotten stuck on a single chapter for a whole month?

My group in Portland picked up a dense historical novel last fall, and we spent four entire meetings, from September to October, just fighting over the symbolism in chapter seven. One person kept saying the old oak tree was a metaphor for grief, and another was sure it was about political decay. It got so heated we almost voted to skip it. How do you move on when half the group wants to analyze every line and the other half just wants to know what happens next?

3 comments

3 Comments

ray13611d ago

My old club in Chicago had a two-month standoff over a single Faulkner paragraph. We finally agreed to let the chapter's biggest defender write a one-page summary for everyone.

uma_ellis11d ago

Honestly ray136, that sounds about right for Faulkner. I can picture the whole scene, people just glaring at each other over coffee while someone insists the 80-line sentence about a dusty road is actually the key to the whole book. Letting the superfan write the summary is a genius move, basically a white flag made of cliff notes. Bet that one-page paper had more passion than most PhD theses.

gavinwells10d ago

Two months over one paragraph seems like taking book club a bit too seriously. Maybe @ray136's group just needed an excuse to keep meeting up. Faulkner's tough but not worth that much drama.