The Reading Group That Never Finished a Book

The record

Founded 2014. Meets monthly, second Wednesday, at Ruth's unless Ruth is away.

Books chosen: ninety-four.
Books finished by all members: four.
Books finished by at least one member: sixty-one.
Books finished by nobody at all, including the person who chose it: nine.

On the nine

The nine are a source of pride and are discussed more than the four.

The most celebrated is a 2017 selection of eight hundred pages of Central European history chosen by Gerald, who had read a review, and who abandoned it on page forty, and who did not admit this until the meeting, at which point it emerged that all seven members had abandoned it and that four of them had abandoned it on page forty, which caused a degree of hysteria that Ruth's neighbour mentioned afterwards.

What actually happens at a meeting

Ninety minutes.

Minutes 0–8: arrival, coats, the business of who is driving.

Minutes 8–20: the book. This is the entire literary content and everybody knows it.

Minutes 20–34: whether the book was any good, which is different from the book, and which is where the actual disagreements happen. Fenella and Marcus have disagreed about whether a book being enjoyable is relevant to whether it is good since 2015 and neither has moved a millimetre.

Minutes 34–90: everything else.

On minutes 34–90

This is the group.

It is where they learned that Priya's mother was ill in 2019, and where they organised, without ever calling it organising, a rota of driving her to appointments that ran for fourteen months.

It is where Gerald, in 2021, said the thing about his son that he had not said anywhere else, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, and where nobody made it into a moment, which he later said was the reason he had been able to say it.

It is where Marcus announced he was leaving his job, and where four of them told him not to, and where he did anyway, and where all four of them have subsequently agreed he was right.

The proposal

In 2022 a new member — Delphine, who lasted five months and who was, everyone agrees, perfectly nice — proposed that they choose shorter books.

The logic was unanswerable. They were not finishing the books. A hundred-and-eighty-page book would be finished. Therefore, more literary discussion.

The group agreed. They chose a hundred-and-eighty-page book.

Six of the seven finished it.

The meeting was a disaster.

Why

Because with everyone having finished it, the book discussion ran to fifty minutes.

Fifty minutes is a real discussion and a real discussion produces winners and losers, and by minute forty Fenella and Marcus were not enjoying themselves, and Ruth had said something to Gerald that was slightly sharper than she meant, and the whole thing ended at eighty minutes instead of ninety with people getting their coats in a particular way.

Priya said in the car park: "Well, that was horrible."

The finding

Nobody has ever written this down but everybody in the group understands it.

The unfinished book is the mechanism. Eight to twenty minutes of a book that nobody has finished produces a conversation in which nobody can be authoritative, nobody can win, and everybody has to be provisional — and that is the exact temperature at which seven people who are not otherwise close can then spend an hour telling each other things.

Finish the book and you have a seminar.

Delphine

She left in the spring, amicably, for reasons unconnected.

She said at her last meeting that she had enjoyed it but that she had expected "more about the books."

There was a pause.

Then Gerald said, "Yes," in a tone that Fenella has described since as "the single most Gerald noise ever produced," and the group moved on to minute thirty-four.

The current selection

Nine hundred pages. Translated. Chosen by Ruth, who has read the first fifty and has already said, in the group chat, that she is finding it hard going.

Four members have replied to say they have not started.

Two have replied with photographs of the cover on a bedside table.

Marcus has bought the audiobook and has said so, which has opened a separate and enormously enjoyable dispute about whether that counts, now running since Tuesday.