Serious question about marking page 237 in group reads

My book club kept getting stuck on where to pause for debates because everyone read at different speeds. So I started using sticky flags at the chapter breaks instead of arbitrary page numbers. Last month for "Project Hail Mary" I put a flag at chapter 9 and told people to read up to there before our Wednesday meetup. Worked way better than arguing over page counts. Has anyone else tried a different system for keeping the group synced up?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_eric3h ago

Yeah, @paigewood that voice memo idea is actually brilliant because it gets around the whole "but my edition has different spacing" issue that always comes up. Something I don't see anyone mentioning though is how this changes things for people who read on audio or ebook. I had a buddy who listened to Project Hail Mary on audiobook and he had no clue what page 237 even meant because his version was just hours of audio. We started doing what you did with chapter flags but we also would just say "read until after the big twist in chapter 12" so the audiobook people could just note the chapter title. It saved a lot of headaches and nobody felt left out because they couldn't find the right spot.

paigewood4h ago

Oh man, this is such a good point! A friend of mine tried something similar with her romance book club - they were always fighting over page 237 because the paperback and hardcover versions had different formatting. So she started sending out a little voice memo before each meeting saying "read up to the part where the main character finds the letter" or whatever the big moment was. It totally fixed their problem and actually made the discussions more fun because everyone was looking forward to that specific scene. She said it was way easier than people having to check their page numbers against some master list too. I love the chapter flag idea though - that's so visual and concrete!