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Vent: the guy at my Tuesday night book club said my pick was 'too short to count'
We were at Dana's place in Portland arguing about whether novellas belong in the rotation, and he said anything under 200 pages shouldn't get a full discussion slot. I get the point about page count, but a 90 page book hit harder than the 600 page one we spent three weeks on in March. Anyone else run into this rule in their club, or is it just us?
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paulperry7d ago
The "too short to count" rule makes more sense than people want to admit, because a full discussion slot costs everyone the same thing no matter how long the book is. If you get one slot a month, you have maybe 10 to 12 slots a year, and blowing one on a book people read in a single sitting means somebody else's 400 page pick gets pushed to next year or dropped. The 600 page book that fell flat is a bad example too, because that is a problem with the pick, not the page count. Short books also make it easy to show up having skimmed, and then the talk turns into a 20 minute chat instead of a real meeting. Most clubs that stay alive for years run on some kind of limit like this, even if nobody says it out loud.
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