What we do when nobody finished the book

01The confession round

It came out slowly, in the way these things do. The first person admitted to being about a third of the way in, apologetically, and there was a pause; then the next person said the same, rather more cheerfully; and within two minutes the whole room was laughing about it. Somebody had got to page two hundred and sixty and was regarded as the hero of the evening. Two people had not started. One had read the first forty pages twice and lost the thread on both attempts, which we all recognised.

The relief in the room was worth noticing, because relief means that something had been weighing. People had plainly been dreading the meeting, and several said afterwards that they had considered not coming. A book circle where missing a deadline makes you skip the evening has got something badly wrong, and we would rather find that out in June with a long novel than discover it slowly through people quietly drifting away.

02Talking about the part everybody had read

The evening was rescued by a simple decision: we agreed to talk only about the first two hundred pages, and to stop anyone who ran ahead. This turns out to be a genuinely good way to discuss a novel. You are all in the same place at the same time, nothing is foreclosed by knowing how it ends, and the questions become live ones — what is this book setting up, why has it spent forty pages on a house, is this narrator to be trusted.

Discussing an opening on its own terms also sharpens the reading. We spent nearly half an hour on the first chapter alone, which we would never have done had we all been full of the ending, and three people went home and reread it. One member remarked that we had accidentally rediscovered how the book was originally published, in instalments, to readers who had no idea what was coming. That was almost certainly a coincidence, but it made everyone feel better.

• Agree a page number and hold the room to it.
• Spoilers are for people who finished — and there are none tonight.
• Treat the opening as a whole thing, not a fragment.
• Decide before you leave whether the book gets a second month.

03The four rules we wrote down afterwards

First, any book over five hundred pages is marked long on its slip and, if chosen, is split across two meetings with an agreed midpoint. Second, the person opening the discussion always names a page number in the reminder, so that everybody knows the floor. Third, nobody reports on their progress at the start of a meeting unless they want to; we ask what people made of it, not how far they got. Fourth, an unfinished book can be carried to the following month by a show of hands.

None of this is very clever and none of it is new. It works because it is written in the front of the notebook where the organiser can find it, rather than existing as a vague understanding that four people remember differently. A small circle can run on custom for a year or two, but customs drift, and the drift is always in the direction of whoever is most confident in the room.

04The long novel, one year on

We carried it. The July meeting took it to page five hundred, the walk that year was postponed a fortnight to accommodate the fact, and by September six of us had finished it. Two never did, and say so without embarrassment, which is the outcome we were hoping for. The general verdict was that it was worth the three months and that we would not want to do it again soon, which is roughly what one hopes to say about a nine-hundred-page novel.

The slip for it is still in the jar, folded, with the initials of the member who proposed it and a sentence that now reads rather optimistically. We have kept it there deliberately. Someone will draw it again in a few years, when the current lot have forgotten what June felt like, and the circle will have the argument all over again with a fresh set of people in the room.