Our book club almost broke up over a 12 page novella, and one dumb rule fixed it
Back in September our group of nine in Columbus nearly fell apart because two people kept filibustering every meeting about a 700 page fantasy series nobody else finished, so three members just stopped showing up. I got fed up and tried something simple. Each person gets 5 minutes to talk, no cutting in, and you can only argue about the text itself, not the author's tweets or the movie. We ran it on a short novella first to test it, and the meeting lasted 70 minutes instead of our usual three hours. Has anyone else tried a hard time limit like this, or did it backfire on your group eventually?