PSA: I stopped forcing my book club to read classics and now we actually finish the books

For years I picked all the heavyweight classics for my group. Moby Dick, War and Peace, things like that. We all loved the idea of reading them, but by week 3 nobody had gotten past chapter 5 and the discussions were just people apologizing. Then last January I put a contemporary mystery on the list, and every single person finished it and showed up ready to talk. Now we mix in one classic every four months and fill the rest with modern stuff, and attendance is way up. Has anyone else had to shift their group's reading style to keep people coming back?

2 comments

2 Comments

elizabeth_king3d ago

Has anyone in here thought about how the classics are basically written for a different kind of reader than most of us are now? lol, I love stuff like Jane Austen but the pacing is so slow compared to what we're used to with modern thrillers and such. It's like our brains have been rewired by Netflix and TikTok, so sitting through 500 pages of descriptive scenery just feels like homework. Your group probably has way better conversations about the modern books because everyone actually remembers what happened. I bet if you tried a modern book that's really dense and layered, like something that still makes you think, people would finish that too.

river_scott3d ago

@elizabeth_king nailed it about the Netflix brain thing because my group tried a "fast" classic like The Great Gatsby and even that felt like pulling teeth compared to a twisty thriller. We got so distracted arguing about whether Daisy was actually dumb or just playing dumb that nobody finished the last 50 pages.