My book club in Portland tried a "no rules" meeting and it was chaos

We decided last month to let everyone bring whatever book they wanted and just chat without any structure, thinking it'd be fun and free-flowing. Instead, three people got into a heated argument about whether audiobooks count as reading, and Karen spent 20 minutes describing her cat's favorite novel. Has anyone else had a book club experiment go totally off the rails like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

beth_hart683d ago

Did Karen actually think everyone wanted to hear about her cat's favorite book, or was she just trying to change the subject from the audiobook fight? lol I've been in a book club for two years and we tried a "free month" once where we all just read whatever we wanted from a genre list, and it was a disaster because nobody agreed on what counted as romance versus women's fiction. But honestly, the audiobook thing always gets people heated because some readers get really snobby about it, and I've never understood why listening is less valid than reading with your eyes. What was Karen's cat's favorite novel though, I have to ask.

roberts.jordan3d ago

Wait, Karen's cat has a favorite book? That's honestly the most important question here because now I'm wondering if it's something deep like War and Peace or just a book about fish. But yeah, I totally get the audiobook thing being a whole battlefield. Some people act like reading with your ears is cheating or something, but I've been doing audiobooks during my commute for years and I get just as much out of them as the print versions. The whole "you didn't really read it" argument falls apart when you realize blind people have been using audio forever and nobody tells them they didn't read. Plus, the narrator can make or break a book, so if anything, audiobooks add an extra layer of art to the experience. I think the real issue in that book club fight was probably just people wanting to feel superior about their preferred format, not anything about actual comprehension.