There’s a distance from the date on the calendar to the manuscript in your head. And there’s something called “the gap” in between. The gap is full of unknown day-to-day effort. When you look at the number 80k and realize it isn’t just a number, it’s a mountain with no rope and no gear and […]

It’s happened to you, I’m sure: the moment in your book club when someone asks, “Who read up through Chapter Four?” and half the group stares at their feet. What’s wrong isn’t that people aren’t interested; it’s that they’re being unorganizedly. If you join a club to talk about ideas, you don’t want to start […]

In that way, a book club chat group before meeting day are full of silent panic: here’s one person with some tired emoji comment and another talking about how they figured out the ending on page two-hundred. It is pressure-inducing. No one knows if you’re all keeping pace with each other. Can we realisticly read […]

One of the biggest pitfalls with any book club is bad time-keeping. The host wants to ask some good questions about novel’s theme and protagonist’s moral ambiguity. But halfway through, they’ve gotten three people to talk. Everyone else in the group look at their watch and keeps smiling politely. What happened? No one accounted for […]