Noticed my book club went from debating themes to debating page counts

Over the last 6 months, our 12-person club in Portland shifted hard from discussing character arcs to arguing about how many pages a book should be. It started when someone brought up that our August pick was 500 pages and 3 members admitted they skimmed the last 200. Now every selection turns into a fight about length vs depth. Has anyone else seen their group devolve into math arguments instead of story talks?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_daniel28d ago

Man, this hits on something bigger I've been seeing everywhere, not just in book clubs. It's like we're all secretly terrified of wasting time now, so we measure everything by efficiency instead of how it makes us feel. My buddy runs a small bike repair shop and he says people come in asking how long a tune-up takes down to the minute, not if the bike will actually ride smoother. Same thing at the grocery store checkout, folks timing how fast the cashier scans items. So your book club fighting over page counts instead of plot twists, that's just the same impulse applied to reading. We've all gotten so obsessed with "optimizing" our hobbies that we forgot the whole point is to get lost in them, not to clock out.

blake_cooper28d ago

Haven't you heard the one about my buddy's D&D group that spent three hours arguing over whether a campaign should have 6 or 8 sessions before anyone even rolled a single die? It's like the fun got replaced by a spreadsheet somewhere along the way.