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Question about the time my club spent 40 minutes fighting over the word 'said' in chapter 3
We were doing The Great Gatsby at my library branch in Tulsa, and one member, Carol, kept on about how many times 'said' shows up and whether that means the author was lazy. Half the group backed her up and half said it was on purpose, and we never got past chapter 3 that night. I keep thinking about it now because back when I joined in 2011 nobody cared about word counts, we just talked about the story. Does your club ever get stuck on something this small, or do you just move on?
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hannah_wells6d ago
Oh man, the "said" fight is so real. We had almost the same thing with Hemingway last spring, somebody counted every "and" in the first ten pages and read the number out loud like it was a court case. Took us a whole meeting to get off it, and by then nobody even remembered what the opening scene was about. My favorite part was this one guy who kept saying "he did it on purpose" over and over, which, honestly, the irony was lost on him. We finally had to make a rule that we talk about the story for the first half hour before anyone can bring up word counts. How did your group finally get past chapter 3?
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