My book group meets the second Tuesday of most months in one of the library’s smaller rooms, six or seven regulars, mostly fiction, occasionally something heavier when I’m the one picking and I get ambitious. I picked Discipline and Punish for an ambitious month, thinking a book about surveillance and institutions would feel relevant enough to carry a real discussion, and it did, eventually, just not in the order I expected.

Of the seven people who said they’d read it, two actually finished it. One made it about sixty pages in. The rest, by their own honest admission when I asked directly instead of letting it slide, gave up somewhere in the middle and skimmed the last third the morning of the meeting, which I respect more than pretending otherwise, at least at my table. We spent the first twenty minutes essentially doing a group confession about how far everyone actually got, which could have killed the meeting and instead turned into its own kind of conversation, about why a book everyone agreed was important was also a book almost nobody finished on schedule.

What saved the discussion was the opening chapter, the execution scene, which every single person had read because it’s early enough that even the people who bailed had gotten that far, and that one section carried almost the entire ninety minutes. We talked about whether the historical accuracy criticisms I’d read online mattered to the argument’s core idea, whether the panopticon concept applies to things Foucault never could have anticipated, workplace monitoring software, a phone that tracks your steps, and by the end most people said they were going to go back and actually finish it, which I choose to believe some of them did.

I’ve learned something from picking this one that I should have already known from nine years of watching what actually circulates versus what people say they want to read: a book being important and a book being finished are two completely different outcomes, and a good book group meeting doesn’t actually require the second one, just enough people willing to admit which one happened.

I’m picking something shorter next ambitious month. Lesson taken, if not exactly learned.