I’ll confess to some anxiety going into it because I had no idea how it was going to work out. Five minutes before kickoff I couldn’t even get Zoom to work. It’d been so long since I’d opened the app that a bunch of updates undid me.
But eventually, I got there, as did Simon, Dave W, Robert and Jason C. I think that was just about the perfect size for a first meeting. It meant nobody got lost and the conversation could flow naturally.
We’d all read the book months before, and I had to go to the Wikipedia page to remind myself of the main character arcs. But that possibly helped because it kept the discussion at a nice, general level. We talked about the idea of ‘Covid novels’. King’s ability to capture character through dialogue. The other books in the Mr Mercedes series. And what we were all drinking. (Aeperol Spritz for me).
I’ve got some ideas about how to tweak the process going forward. One obvious thing would be to post a list of talking points before the meet-up. It’d probably be an idea to let everyone add to that list too. So maybe a Google doc?
I’m also thinking that I could broaden the scope to cover movies and TV as well.