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.

The book we actually finished, for the record, took us five months to get through, which for something under three hundred pages is a genuinely embarrassing pace if you look at it as a reading project instead of whatever it actually is. Some weeks we didn’t touch it at all, just talked through whatever had happened at the clinic that week, a bad outcome one of us was still carrying, a client who’d said something ridiculous at checkout. Other weeks we’d get almost to the end of a chapter before somebody’s phone buzzed with the front desk needing help, and we’d just pick back up wherever we left off the following Thursday like no time had passed.

What finally got that one book across the finish line was, weirdly, the ending being bad enough that we couldn’t let it go. We disagreed hard about whether it earned its last twenty pages, one of us thought it was the whole point of the book and the other two of us thought it was a cop out, and that argument alone stretched two extra Thursdays past when we’d technically closed the cover on it. I’ve had book club conversations before, back when I tried an online one briefly years ago, that never got anywhere near that heated, mostly polite agreement and moving on to the next pick. This was not that. This was three people who see each other five days a week getting genuinely annoyed at each other over a fictional ending, and somehow that felt better than the polite version ever did.

We’ve started three books since then and abandoned all three, not out of disagreement, just drift, somebody’s out sick for two weeks and the thread of it goes cold. I’ve made peace with that being the actual shape of this thing. It was never really about finishing books. It’s about there being a reliable, low stakes reason for the three of us to sit in the same room on a Thursday and not talk about work for half an hour, even when, especially when, we end up talking about work anyway.