Update: our book club fell apart over a banned word in chapter 4

Last week my group of 8 met at Carol's place in Maplewood and someone brought up the word "moist" used in the romance scene. Honestly I thought it was a joke at first, but two members refused to discuss the chapter past that point. Ngl, it got ugly fast. Three people said the author should've picked a different descriptor, two said context matters, and one slammed the book shut like it insulted her grandma. We spent 45 minutes on that single word and never got to the plot twist. Last month we had a similar fight about a character eating salad in a diner, so I'm starting to think our group has a pattern. Has anyone else had a club derail over something this small, and how do you even recover from it?

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jade_lane1919h ago

Laughing at myself here because my group once spent two whole meetings arguing about whether a character would realistically order a flat white or a cappuccino... and I was one of the people who had strong feelings about it. So yeah, I get how a single word can just derail everything, especially when everyone's already a little cranky from reading the same book. Honestly, the salad in a diner thing sounds kind of funny now, but I bet it was brutal in the moment. My only tip is to pick a book with zero sensory words next time, maybe a manual on lawn mower repair, and see if that helps... or just accept that your club is really about arguing over tiny stuff and not the books at all.