The night my book club turned into a full on courtroom drama over a single comma

We were debating the ending of a thriller last Tuesday at Barbara's house. Someone pointed out that a comma in the third chapter changed the whole meaning of the killer's motive. Next thing I knew, six of us were huddled around my phone pulling up the ebook to check the original punctuation. We spent 40 minutes arguing over it and never even finished talking about the actual plot. Has anyone else's group gotten derailed by a typo or grammar thing in a book?

2 comments

2 Comments

robin_foster115d ago

I once had a book club meeting where we spent the whole night arguing about whether a character's name was spelled with an 'e' at the end or not. Turned out we were both wrong and the author just made it up weird.

andrew91614d ago

Seven times out of ten, I swear people in those groups are just looking for a reason to argue rather than talk about the book itself. @robin_foster1, your story is a perfect example of how we spend way too much time on tiny details that don't actually matter. It's the same thing in everyday life, like when people debate endlessly about the right way to load a dishwasher or which brand of ketchup is better. We get so hung up on being right about small stuff that we miss the bigger picture. Sometimes I wonder if it's just human nature to want to win those little battles even when there's no prize.