October 13, 2025
I suspect that book clubs are in fact not possible (clearly not entirely true, but close enough as a first approximation), because they’re trying to solve an impossible problem. That is the problem of closing the gap/confusion between “I want to read this book” and “I want to have read this book”; two clearly very different things that we mix up all the time.
The first disappointment with books and reading hits when we discover that buying the book isn’t enough (even though we feel slightly superior to those who haven’t, at least until shame hits us). We discover that reading does not, in fact, happen by itself, nor by osmosis. Otherwise, all the knowledge from countless unread copies of “Design Patterns”, “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture”, “Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests” and “The Art of Computer Programming” that are found collecting dust on people’s bookshelves, or that are inert binary strings in Kindles that haven’t been charged in months or even years, would have seeped into our brains and enriched our field - but alas! It is not so.
Even if we do want to read the book, or at least think we do, enough to actually open it, there is the problem of stamina and perseverence. That is, how do we get further in than the first ten pages? How do we keep going? We want to read the book, there’s nothing wrong with the first ten pages, all good pages, yet we can’t seem to sit down with the book consistently and frequently enough for it to constitute a reading. We lose our thread and it unravels. The few words we have read scatter in the wind, having left no imprint in our memories, and so we have to start over. But when we do, the process repeats itself. We simply can’t seem to allocate the necessary resources in terms of time and energy.
And so we reach for a magical solution, a deus ex machina, the book club! Which will surely provide the context and community and commitment and the push required to read the book, with the added enjoyment and enrichment of stimulating discussions and friendships to boot!
But unfortunately there’s one thing that the magic of book clubs doesn’t solve, and that is the problem of the pages. They don’t go away. If you’re going to read a book, you somehow have to read it. This is the great disappointment with book clubs. It is exactly the problem we needed book clubs to solve for us, and they just don’t deliver. We come to book clubs with a desperate hope, that they will somehow let us do the thing without actually having to do the thing. (The same hope, in fact, that AI vendors are selling.)
In reality, book clubs turn out to be something very pedestrian, somehow business-like, not magical at all: it replaces our own undisciplined, piecemeal reading bouts with scheduled meetings, homework, and a burndown chart!
This is very rational of course. If you read a chapter a week, eventually you will have read the whole thing. One piece at a time. As industry thought leaders will tell you, this is how elephants are eaten as well. And if you can eat an elephant that way, surely you can consume a book too. The logic is inexorable. But! It creates an additional problem, which is one of synchronization, allocation, and commitment. This is the cost of joining the book reading machine!
I don’t know about you, but I have problems committing to a single online meetup. I will enthusiastically pledge to participate in an event a month from now, because my calender is free a month from now. It has not yet been filled, as it were, with life. I have no competing concerns or commitments, no-one needs me for anything, there are no curve-balls, I’m not exhausted, etc. A-month-from-now me is twenty and unattached. On the day of the meetup, things look different. A conspiracy of reasons for not attending will have gathered in the shadows. I probably have an attendance rate of less than 50% for the meetings I register for, maybe more like 25%.
Now say I’m joining a book club setting out to read a book that has fourteen chapters. Am I committing to fourteen online meetups about a single book? Each week, for fourteen weeks? Surely it’s too much to ask to have people allocate time every week. Each month, for fourteen months? That’s over a year! Biweekly meetings? We’re still looking at twenty-eight weeks, over half a year. But maybe we can read two chapters at a time? Maybe, but now the chore is doubled for each meeting, and seven meetings is still a lot!
This is an aspect of elephant-consumption that’s often overlooked as well: it’s elephant for dinner every day for a very long time. Chances are I’ll miss the second meeting. I won’t blame you if you do too.
I realize this is disappointing. I’m disappointed too! But it just doesn’t work. The same old problem of stamina and perseverence reappears in new form. I think we expect too much from book clubs. Book clubs aren’t magic. Or if they are, it’s not because they make the pages go away.