Lately I have been tickled by the idea of a short story club.

Book clubs are a long-established tradition, but they have their shortcomings. Books are long and demanding affairs—even if everyone starts the reading month with the best of intentions, by the end of the month half of them will end up not finishing. And for those who do finish, there’s so much in a book to discuss that it’s impossible to do justice to everything the author covered in an hour, minus fifteen minutes at the beginning for chit-chat.

I’ve never participated in a book club, so I’m horribly naïve as to how they actually work in practice, but I wonder if it would be more fruitful to centre a club around the reading of short stories. There are many advantages I can see already:

It’s much easier to count on everyone to finish them. Books take several hours to slog through. You can read a short story on a bus ride, or during a lunch break, or in the ten or fifteen minutes before bedtime.

It’s much easier to discuss them. How do you decide what to talk about in a book, if you have forty-five minutes, split across several friends? Do you just talk about overarching themes and characters? With a short story, it’s easier to discuss smaller aspects of craft (e.g., “I liked this turn of phrase”) without worrying about whether you’re derailing the conversation.

You can be more experimental with your choices. An uninspiring book is a waste of several hours, but an uninspiring short story is only a waste of several minutes. You can afford to choose weirder fiction without risking too much of the club’s patience.

You can read more than one short story per meeting. Two people, or even more, can each select a story to discuss, and the next meeting’s time can be split between both of them. Whether the stories are similar in theme and content or completely different is up to you.

If I were to form a short story club, these are the three desiderata I’d want our selections to fulfil:

Less than some threshold of length. I’m not sure what this threshold would be. I’d like stories that you can read in five to fifteen minutes. The shorter the better. A limit of 5,000 words would permit most of what I call short fiction. A limit of 1,000 words is a little more restrictive, bringing us to the realm of flash fiction. I like flash fiction, though.

Available on the Internet for free. Why fret about buying books or pouncing to reserve the last copy of a hot book at the library when you can just share a link? Paywalls are a gray area.

Standalone. For maximum accessibility, a short story pick ought not to depend on a larger body of work for context. I realise there’s a lot of lovely fanfiction out there, but I’d only feel comfortable allowing it if everyone in the club is familiar with the source material.

A short-list of possible short stories I think I would volunteer for discussion:

“Lena” and “I Don’t Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility”, by qntm.

“Strax” by Alicorn.

“The Witching Hour” and “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis”, by Scott Alexander.

“Utopia, LOL?”, by Jamie Wahls.

“The Egg”, by Andy Weir.

“The Lottery”, by Shirley Jackson.