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That trick where you skip the first 50 pages of a slow novel saved my book club pick
We were stuck on this literary fiction that dragged through setup for 80 pages. I told everyone to jump to chapter 4 and suddenly we had a real debate about the plot instead of complaining. Has anyone else tried gutting a book's intro to get the discussion moving?
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nora5351mo ago
My last book club did this with a 600 page historical novel, we skipped straight to the part where the main character finally leaves the farm. The first 90 pages were just her milking cows and thinking about the weather, seriously. I read somewhere that some editors actually cut intros down by half because readers drop off in the first few chapters. Once we hit the war scenes and the family drama, everyone had opinions. We ended up going back to the beginning later just to check if we missed anything important, and we really didnt. Book clubs should be about the story, not the homework.
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