those who are not satisfied by book groups tend to give two reasons. The minor one is that the books chosen are rarely challenging enough to provide first-rate conversation. The major one is that too few participants in book groups are interested in really exploring the books: rather, for them, books seem to be an excuse for talking about other matters that they’re more deeply interested in, often their own emotional lives. It seems to me that these two complaints may well be related. Just as a purely entertaining work does not require annotation—
