Our club split on adopting a reading schedule vs. free-for-all, and the schedule won hands down
We tried the loose "read whatever, whenever" thing for 4 months and half the group showed up to discuss chapters nobody else had reached, while the calendar version has kept us synced for 9 straight picks. The killer detail was splitting longer books into weekly chunks instead of one big deadline, which dropped our drop-off from 5 people to just 1. Has any other club tried assigning a discussion lead per section, or does that make it feel like homework?