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Our club split into two groups over one book, so I started passing out a 5 line summary sheet before each meet | Book Club Debates - Opinions Matter

simon717•21d ago

Our club split into two groups over one book, so I started passing out a 5 line summary sheet before each meet

We burned through 40 minutes of our January meeting arguing about a plot point from chapter 12 that 3 people had skipped and 2 had read wrong, and nobody wanted to admit they were lost. So I started typing up a 5 line recap with page numbers and handing it out at the start, and now we actually get to the argument part instead of the catching up part. Has anyone else tried a cheat sheet like that, or does it kill the vibe for your group?

2 comments

2 Comments

angelar5721d ago

The "5 line recap with page numbers" part is smart, but I want to push back a little on the idea that people skip or read wrong because they don't want to admit they're lost. In my group it was almost the opposite, half of us read the book twice and still walked in with totally different takes, so the recap helped less with gaps and more with getting us on the same page numbers so we could actually find the scene we were yelling about. One thing that helped us more than the sheet was putting a single question at the top, like "did she lie on purpose or just panic," because then even the people who skimmed had something to grab onto. Have you tried adding a question line, or is yours just straight recap?

adam_thompson5321d ago

Does your group have that one person who always finishes way ahead and then can't stop hinting at stuff? Because that's what killed our recaps. We had two fast readers who'd read it twice and would drop little clues during the talk, and everyone else just stopped trusting their own read since the "expert" already knew how it ended. So the sheet stopped being about catching people up and more about keeping the know-it-alls from steering us. What actually fixed it was handing out the question before they could talk, so the fast readers had to sit with it like everyone else. That's a whole other problem than people faking that they read it, which is what I always see in these threads.