My book club spent 45 minutes arguing about a single sentence on page 87

We got stuck debating whether the author meant the porch light as hope or just a lampshade, and I timed it at 47 minutes before someone googled an interview where he said it was literally just a light. Has anyone else had a simple detail derail your whole meeting like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric_price7d ago

Oh man, we once spent a whole meeting debating if a character's sandwich order said something about their personality. Turns out the author just really likes writing about food and it meant nothing. That porch light thing is hilarious though, I bet someone was super confident about the hope angle too.

irisross6d ago

My book club hit a similar wall over a character who kept touching a specific necklace. Half the group swore it was a symbol of her dead grandmother, the other half thought it was just a nervous habit. We were stuck until someone suggested we just read the next chapter to see if it came up again. It didn't, and we moved on, but now we have a new rule: if we spend more than ten minutes on a detail, we table it until we finish the book. Saves a ton of time and stops the guessing games.