Found a trick to get my book club to actually finish the pick

My book club kept showing up having read maybe 20 pages of our pick, so last month I assigned everyone a specific chapter to summarize in 3 sentences each. Now the whole group reads their chapter just to avoid looking silly, and we actually finished The Martian in two weeks. Has anyone else tried breaking up a book into assigned chunks for their club?

2 comments

2 Comments

jesser7911d ago

Wait, that's actually kind of brilliant but I can see it backfiring too. My book club tried something similar with The Goldfinch a few years back and one guy got so obsessed with defending "his" chapter he spent the whole meeting arguing about a minor character's motivation. The rest of us felt left out because we didn't read that part as closely. We ended up having to scrap the whole system and go back to just everyone reading whatever they want, which is messy but at least nobody's getting into petty turf wars over pages. Your mileage may vary though, especially with a shorter book like The Martian where the chapters flow pretty quick.

mark36111d ago

Assign each person a different chapter and watch the meeting turn into a collection of lonely monologues nobody else can follow.