Yesterday I was struck by the irony of spending twenty five hours reading a book for a discussion in a book club, and then the conversation falling into a rat hole. A rat hole is a term to describe when a conversation gets sidetracked or distracted.
Of course we discussed themes in the book, but not the breadth of topics. In theory skimming the book would have returned the same thing as reading the book properly.
I’m not discounting the value of reading the book, but rather thinking of the value of choosing a shorter book, rather than a long one. With a short book you read 50 pages per week, and within four weeks you’re done. With Secret of Secrets you read 650 pages, and you spend two hours discussing a book that took 25 hours or more to read.
I’m also struck by how little there was to discuss in a sense. It’s 670 pages, and a thriller, but I feel that there is less to dissect with plenty of other, shorter books. I don’t know whether others feel the same way.
I expected that I would come out of the conversation with a blog post ready. Instead I came back with “Next time we need to read a shorter book”.
Anyone else have that experience?
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