Book Club Evolution

I belong to a book club, which, like most book clubs I've heard of, is steadily becoming a non-book club.

I can blame most of this on the fact that we book clubbers insist upon choosing long novels that invariably involve sexual assault (all written by men), and 65% of the members of this book club are intensely involved in upper-year science programs at the University and do not have time to read long books, and 20% of the members of this book club are under the impression that the book club is actually a house party, and the other 10% is comprised of English majors, people who will not read books about sexual assault, and people who don't show up.

The first book club meeting consisted of 6 members, all of whom had read at least 50% of the novel of choice (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was originally and more aptly named Men Who Hate Women, and was over 600 pages long). The meeting lasted 1.5 hours, and primarily consisted of a discussion of the book.

The second meeting consisted of 9 members, 5 of whom had read at least 30% of the book (The Pillars of the Earth, which was over 900 pages and left me with the distinct impression that sex in the middle ages was either horrifyingly violent and non-consensual, or a life-alteringly beautiful experience that generally led to hallucinations of a sort of heaven populated mostly by naked women wearing cloaks made of rabbit fur). It lasted 2.5 hours, and primarily consisted of a discussion over which book we should read next.

The third meeting I attended consisted of 14 members:
1 person who had read the book in its entirety (The Odyssey, which was over 400 pages long and...well, I only read the first 21 pages), and had come with 5 discussion questions and a rant on the discrepancies in Zeus's character,
6 people I had never met before, 3 of whom came ready to party
1 person whom I have known for 2 years and was under the impression she had never met me before,
3 people whom I actually knew (one of whom had read most of the book),
and
3 people who were dead set on turning this book club into a movie club and spent most of the evening discussing the merits of films by the Coen Brothers.

The club lasted 5 hours, 2 of which were taken up in watching O Brother Where Art Thou so that we could at least feel like we had read a version of the Odyssey, the other 3 being mainly taken up by a heated dispute over the necessity of the Raining Frogs scene in Magnolia.

Following this pattern, I can predict that the next book club will be scheduled as a discussion on Lolita, by Nabokov. Of the 25 attending members of said book club, 1 person will have read at least 10% of the novel, 2 will actually know me, 15 will show up ready for a party, and one will bring a keg with them. 7 will advocate that the book club become a movie club. The meeting will last 6 hours, 25 minutes of which will be spent trying to watch the 1997 version of Lolita, until Jeremy Irons becomes too creepy, and 3 hours of which will be spent doing keg stands.

The fourth meeting will involve 50 people, none of whom know me. 1 of these people will know that it is a book club meeting, 15 will be too drunk to know whose house they are in, 20 will soon become too drunk to know whose house they are in, 3 will be strippers, and 5 will get into a fist fight over whether Tarantino films are worth watching. The party will last 7 hours, most of which will be spent doing lines of coke off of the cover of the chosen book (The Fountainhead).