{"id":57030,"date":"2026-05-13T18:29:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T16:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/?p=57030"},"modified":"2026-05-13T18:29:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T16:29:56","slug":"a-twenty-five-hour-investment-for-a-book-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/a-twenty-five-hour-investment-for-a-book-club\/","title":{"rendered":"A Twenty five Hour Investment for a Book Club"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> &lt; 1<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minute<\/span><\/span>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m also struck by how little there was to discuss in a sense. It&#8217;s 670 pages, and a thriller, but I feel that there is less to dissect with plenty of other, shorter books. I don&#8217;t know whether others feel the same way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I expected that I would come out of the conversation with a blog post ready. Instead I came back with &#8220;Next time we need to read a shorter book&#8221;. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyone else have that experience? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> &lt; 1<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minute<\/span><\/span>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13583,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[255],"tags":[671,7703,977,49],"class_list":["post-57030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-swiss-walks","tag-books","tag-discussions","tag-reading","tag-social"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57030"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57031,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57030\/revisions\/57031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}