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Vent: I argued against assigning 'The Goldfinch' for months because of its length
Our club in Denver was stuck on picking a book, and I kept vetoing Donna Tartt's novel, thinking a 784-page book would kill our discussion. Then our moderator suggested we just read the first 200 pages for one meeting and see... focusing only on Theo's early life changed everything. Has anyone else tried breaking a huge book into chunks like that?
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morgan_bell9226d ago
Our book club in Austin did this with "The Luminaries" last year. We split its 832 pages into three Victorian-era mystery chunks. It let us really dig into each set of clues and character motives meeting by meeting, instead of getting overwhelmed by the whole plot at once. That structure kept people from dropping out halfway through. We even had a running suspect board like a detective show.
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milest2726d ago
My friend's club tried something similar with "Infinite Jest" and it saved them. They broke it into four sections based on the years in the book, not page count. Each meeting they'd only talk about the new characters and plot lines from that chunk, which stopped everyone from getting totally lost. They said it was the only way they could actually finish that beast of a novel. The key was having one person track all the character names and how they connect, like a family tree for crazy people. Without that map, they would have given up by page 200.
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