My book club hit exactly 50 members and it got weird fast

We started with 6 people in my living room last January, just chatting about mysteries. Last month we crossed 50 members and had to move a debate about The Maid to a church basement. The argument got so heated over the hotel plot twist that someone brought out a whiteboard to diagram the timeline. Has your group ever gotten too big for its own good?

2 comments

2 Comments

jones.grace20d ago

Honestly, I'm stuck on the "had to move to a church basement" part. That's already a red flag that nobody's talking about. 50 people arguing about a hotel maid in a church basement sounds like the plot of a horror movie, not a book club. My old group hit 30 and we had to rent a room at the library. That's when people started showing up just to talk, not to read. They'd dominate the whole time and the actual readers just sat there. I bet your "whiteboard timeline" argument was probably more about someone wanting to be right than about the book. Maybe the real problem isn't the size, it's that you lost the people who actually cared about mysteries.

evan_morgan8120d ago

Yeah, you nailed it with 'showing up just to talk, not to read.' That's the hidden killer nobody sees coming. Once a book club gets past 30 or 40, it stops being about the book and turns into a social club with a book shaped excuse. The quiet people who actually finish the chapters and want to dig into clues get drowned out by the loudest voices. I've seen it happen twice now, once in a library and once in a living room. The ones who really care about mysteries just stop coming, and you're left with a room full of people who want to argue about the maid's backstory like it's a real crime.