Buddy reading, without spoiling it for each other

What a buddy read is, and what it is not

A book club has a date. The date is a deadline, and the deadline is what holds the group together: the section is read by Sunday, or you sit there with nothing to say. Between two people there is no such pressure, and that is both the appeal and the problem.

The appeal: you read whenever you want. Nobody has to keep an evening free, nobody arrives late, and nobody reads the last forty pages on the train so they can join in.

The problem is the reason most buddy reads quietly stop: without a deadline there is no occasion to say anything. And whoever does say something risks giving the other person away.

Between two people the question is not when you meet, but when you read each other.

The three usual workarounds

People reading the same book in pairs usually settle on one of these, and each one costs something:

• You agree on a section and only write once you have both finished it. This works, but it costs an agreement per section, and those stop happening after a fortnight.
• You write straight away and write vaguely. What is left at the end is a thread full of hints nobody can place any more.
• You wait until the end. That is no longer reading together, it is a conversation about a book you have both half forgotten.

All three share one thing: a person is doing work that a rule could do. They have to keep track of where the other one is, and decide what they are allowed to write.

By place, not by time

The rule that solves it is a simple one: a thought belongs to the place where it was written, and becomes visible once the other person gets there. Not before. How fast either of you reads stops mattering.

That inverts the usual order. In every chat and every social network, time decides who sees what: whoever wrote last is at the top. For a book, time is the wrong measure. The place is what counts.

In practice that means three things:

• Both of you can write the moment something strikes you. Nothing gets lost while waiting for the other one.
• Neither of you has to remember where the other person is.
• Reading faster is neither punished nor a punishment.

The place decides, not the clock.

Why chapters and never pages

For a place to mean anything, it has to be the same place in both of your books. Page numbers are not: a paperback, a hardback and an ebook all count differently, and an audiobook does not count at all.

Chapters are the same in every edition of the same work. Saying you have finished the seventh chapter says something the other person can act on, whichever copy they are holding.

One detail is worth the trouble: finished means finished. Someone on the third page of chapter seven has six chapters behind them, not seven. The difference is exactly one chapter of spoiler, and it catches everyone, every time.

How to start one

A buddy read needs very little, but these three are worth settling before you begin:

• Which book. The easiest is one you both wanted to read anyway, rather than one of you recommending it to the other.
• Whether you meet at the end, or whether the reading itself is the shared part. Either is fine, but it should be said out loud.
• How you write. A thought left at a place is a different thing from a message in the evening, and doing both at once gets muddled.

At Wir Buchverliebten the second point is the only one you really have to decide. Start on your own and your notes are public at the place you left them, so whoever reads the same book later finds them exactly there. Start as a pair and you invite the other person, and everything stays between you. Either way the place decides who sees what and when, and neither of you has to think about it.

The only thing you really have to agree on is the book.