The narrator's age keeps changing in book club and nobody cares

Last Tuesday at our meeting in the basement of the public library, someone argued the main character in a 1980s novel was a young woman finding herself. But the book clearly says she has a 17 year old son and mentions her 23rd wedding anniversary. I pulled out the paperback and read the exact page. The person shrugged and said it didn't matter because the theme was the same. That got me thinking about how three separate times this year, my group has misread basic details like character ages, settings, or even who did what. We spend an hour debating symbolism but skip over the literal facts on the page. Has anyone else noticed their club glosses over clear plot points just to keep a theory going? What do you do when someone's interpretation is just factually wrong, not just different?

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mitchell.shane9d ago

Is your group also full of people who skimmed the book in the car on the way to the meeting? Last month, my club swore the detective in a thriller was a woman the whole time. The text literally called him "he" about forty times and the author used a male name in every chapter. I finally brought the book and read one line out loud, and the whole room just sat there quiet for a second. Then someone said it was "more interesting" if the detective was a woman and we moved on. I feel like everyone's so scared of being the one who's "wrong" that they'd rather pretend the obvious facts don't exist.