St. Louis Book Club Mistakenly Treats Instagram Prompt As Binding Parliamentary Motion

It began, as so many modern quandaries do, with a flicker of light on a small glass screen. The Tuesday Evening Literary Society, a stalwart congregation of St. Louis bibliophiles not unfamiliar with Robert's Rules of Order, convened last month to discuss the Good Morning America Book Club selection, a whimsical YA retelling of 'Little Women' set in a dystopian cupcake factory. The meeting's chairwoman, one Brenda Fitzpatrick, opened the floor not with a gavel, but with her smartphone, reading aloud an Instagram post from the book club's official account that urged followers to 'slow your scroll' for books they've read.

Now, to an outsider, this might seem a harmless, even gentle, suggestion. A nudge towards mindfulness in a rushing world. But to the assembled members of the Society, a body that once spent six weeks debating the proper filing system for a pamphlet on local birdlife, these words were not a suggestion. They were, by a swift and unanimous voice vote, immediately adopted as a standing rule of the assembly. The literalists had seized the helm, and the ship was henceforth destined for glacial waters.

What followed was not so much a discussion of the book as a meticulous, painstaking deconstruction of the act of reading it. The phrase 'slow your scroll,' applied with bureaucratic rigor to the physical turning of pages, has resulted in a pace of analysis that would make a glacier appear impatient. A single sentence is now subjected to hours of scrutiny. A paragraph can consume an entire evening. The word 'the', on page four, sparked a two-day symposium on definite articles that concluded with a minority report questioning its necessity.

The meeting has not adjourned for twenty-one days. Cots have been brought into the community center's main hall. Family members deliver provisions to the door—sandwiches, thermoses of coffee, and, poignantly, fresh batteries for reading lamps. The stakes, as they say, have been escalated. What began as a simple misinterpretation has blossomed into a full-blown organizational paralysis, a monument to the human capacity for taking a good idea and following it straight off a cliff with a sort of serene, unblinking dedication.

The internal logic is a marvel to behold. A faction led by a retired schoolteacher argues that any acceleration of page-turning constitutes a 'fast scroll' and is therefore out of order. Another group, the textual purists, insists that 'scroll' implies a continuous rolled document, and have subsequently tabled a motion to have the book disbound and pasted into one continuous sheet of parchment, a proposal currently stuck in a sub-committee reviewing adhesive safety protocols. The book itself, the retelling of 'Little Women,' is scarcely mentioned. The process has completely consumed the product.

It is a peculiar kind of folly, this. Not the loud, brash folly of a man betting his farm on a horse race, but the quiet, diligent folly of good citizens following a rule to its most outlandish and logical conclusion. They are, in their own minds, upholding the very principles of careful consideration that a book club is meant to embody. They have mistaken the map for the territory, the instruction manual for the journey. And so they sit, week after week, in the humming fluorescent light of the community center, slowly, painstakingly, not quite reading a book, but performing a perfect and tragic imitation of what they believe reading a book should be. One might say their understanding of the assignment is not without its flaws.