Overheard a guy at the library book sale ranting about character-driven plots

He said everyone in his group hated a book because 'nothing happened' but I loved it for that exact reason. Has your club ever split like that over pacing vs. action?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_jake14d ago

My book club had this exact fight over "The Secret History" last year. Two people said it was boring and nothing happened because the big murder is in the first chapter and then it's just college kids walking around being moody. But four of us loved it because the whole point is watching these characters slowly fall apart from the inside, not some car chase ending. We literally had a vote on whether to finish it or not, I think it was 5-4 to keep going. The pacing crowd wanted a new mystery every chapter and the character crowd just wanted to sit in the atmosphere.

gray_roberts14d agoMost Upvoted

Did your buddy ever get stuck in one of those groups where half the people wanted to skim every "slow" chapter for plot points? I had a friend who almost quit a Cormac McCarthy book club because people kept complaining about "no quotation marks" instead of just reading the vibe. They ended up in a side group that just met to talk about the same five chapters for two hours while the other half watched Netflix.