The Break Room Book Club That Never Reads the Book

Started this with two coworkers back in the winter, one of the vets and one of the other techs, the pitch being we’d pick a book, read a chapter or two a week, and talk about it over lunch in the break room on Thursdays. Reasonable plan. Eight months later we have finished exactly one book out of the four we’ve technically started, and we still meet basically every single Thursday without fail.

What actually happens is we get maybe fifteen minutes into whatever we’re supposedly discussing before it turns into something else entirely, a weird case from that morning, somebody’s terrible dating story, an argument about whether a client’s dog actually understood the word “no” or was just responding to tone. The book becomes this loose excuse to sit in the same room together for half an hour, which if I’m honest is probably the actual point and always was, we just needed a reason that felt more structured than “let’s hang out,” because none of us would’ve scheduled that on our own.

I used to feel a little guilty about it, like we were failing at the thing we set out to do. I’ve mostly let that go. The one book we did finish, we finished slowly and messily and argued about the ending for two separate weeks after we were technically done with it, which is a better outcome than most books I finish alone in one clean pass and then never think about again. There’s something to be said for a slow, interrupted, mostly-derailed read shared with two people you like, over a fast solo one that leaves nothing behind once it’s over.

We’re supposedly starting a new book next week. I give it even odds we actually open it before Thursday.