The trick that finally fixed my book club's arguing problem

I run a book club in Denver with 8 members and we spent half our meetings fighting over what to read next. Someone suggested we each pick a book for the year in January and rank them 1 to 8. Then we just read them in that order no matter what. It sounds too simple but after 6 months we haven't had a single argument about the next book. Has anyone else tried this kind of system or got a different method that works?

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wadeg925mo ago

That first six months honeymoon is great but we've got 8 people in MY group and by month 4 everyone was grumbling about the books they ranked low getting pushed to late in the year. The REAL problem isn't the selection method, it's that people bring their own baggage about genre or author style and that doesn't get solved by just locking the order in a spreadsheet. I'd still rather hash it out month to month than live with a book I hate just because I happened to rank it low back in January.

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marywells5mo ago

Man, tell me about it. That whole thing sounds exactly like how people get weird about picking a restaurant for a group dinner - everyone has their own hidden rules about what they actually want. It's not the system that's broken, it's that we all think our taste is the "normal" one until someone picks a fantasy novel and the sci-fi guy checks out. You're right @wadeg92, you can't spreadsheet your way out of people being picky.

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