Nineteen Years of Half-Finished Books and Full Glasses

Every December, six women converge on whoever's house is warmest, usually mine, and discuss a book most of us have only half read. We call ourselves a book club. My husband calls it "your friends' annual reunion." He's not wrong, but he's not entirely right either.

The Book Is the Alibi

Here's the thing nobody says out loud when you start a book club at thirty-two: the book was always a pretext. We chose The Hours in 2006 because Marcy had a copy on her nightstand and none of us wanted to admit we really just needed a standing excuse to see each other. The book gave us permission. It gave the evening a shape. It gave us something to argue about that wasn't our jobs or our kids or the slow weathering of our own expectations.

Nineteen years later, the pattern holds. Last year we read Demon Copperhead — four of six finished it, which our treasurer (we don't have a treasurer, but if we did, Marge would be it) declared "a record." The year before, we attempted Lincoln in the Bardo and I'm fairly certain only Diane finished, and she spent forty minutes trying to explain it to us while we drank her good bourbon and nodded like students.

And yet.

What a Once-a-Year Club Knows That a Monthly One Doesn't

A monthly book club runs on momentum. Ours runs on something closer to geology. We see each other rarely enough that a year of living gets compressed into one long evening — the job that ended, the parent who declined, the kid who came back home, the marriage that didn't. The book sits in the middle of the table like a candle.

There's a version of this that sounds sad. It isn't. It's the same reason I reread old favorites: you're not really there for the plot. You're there to find out who you've become since the last time you met.

Long friendships and long reading lives turn out to have the same rules:

• Slowness is not failure. Some books take a decade. So do some conversations.
• Abandoning is allowed. We've quit three books in nineteen years and no one was fined.
• Showing up matters more than finishing. The woman who read forty pages still gets a vote.

The Unfinished as a Way of Life

I used to feel a low-grade shame about the unfinished books — mine and the club's. I'd apologize when people asked what we were reading. "Oh, we're behind," I'd say, as though reading were a bill.

Somewhere around year twelve I stopped apologizing. A book you return to once a year, for twenty years, becomes a different object than a book you read in a weekend. It becomes a logbook. The margins fill with the years. When we finally discussed Stoner — took us three tries — the copies we passed around had grocery lists from 2014 in the back pages and a phone number someone needed and lost. The book had become a joint diary none of us meant to keep.

Maybe that's the real craft lesson hiding in this not-very-serious club: attention doesn't have to be continuous to be real. We live in a culture that measures reading in sprints and friendship in frequency. Our club measures both in decades.

Tonight's Assignment

Next month we meet again. The book is Crossing to Safety, which Marge chose because it's "about a friendship, so it's thematic." At least two of us will not finish it. One of us will show up having read something else entirely and defend it. Someone will cry about the part with the sled, and someone else will pretend not to know what she's talking about.

The book will get maybe forty minutes of genuine discussion. The rest will be the actual work of the evening: nineteen years of showing up, one December at a time, whether we've finished the book or not.

I've started it twice. I'm not worried. I've got all year — and, God willing, all the years after that.