Odette and I aren’t in a formal book club, we’re really just two people who read a lot of the same things and text each other about them, but she runs it like one anyway, with one rule she’s genuinely serious about: no looking anything up, no reading ahead about an author, no checking what a confusing plot point means, until we’ve both actually finished the book. Her logic is sound. Half the pleasure of reading something difficult together is arriving at your own half formed theory before anyone hands you the official one, and she’s not wrong that Googling a plot twist mid-book kills something real.

I have broken this rule at least four times this year that I can specifically remember, and every single time it’s for the same reason: I hit a passage that’s clearly doing something with the physical object of the book itself, a printer’s note, a specific edition detail, something that isn’t really plot at all, and I can’t help myself, I go look it up immediately. It’s not spoiler territory in Odette’s sense, I’m not learning who dies or how it ends, I’m learning which print run had a typo on page forty that later editions fixed, or whether a particular cover illustration was the artist’s choice or the publisher’s. She considers this a violation regardless. I consider it a technicality. We have never actually resolved this disagreement and I don’t think we’re going to.

What’s funny is that she’s better at holding the rule for herself than I am and worse at forgiving me for breaking mine. If I text her mid-book about an edition detail she’ll answer, because she’s curious too, she just won’t initiate it. I think the honest difference between us is that for Odette the withholding itself is part of the enjoyment, not knowing yet is the good part, and for me, five years into a job built entirely around figuring out a physical object’s history, not knowing an answerable fact feels less like suspense and more like an itch I have full ability to scratch and am choosing not to for no reason.

We’re currently three chapters into something new, and I’ve already caught myself with a browser tab half open twice, and closed it both times mostly out of guilt rather than actual restraint. I’ll probably break the rule again before we’re done, she’ll sigh about it in the group chat, and neither of us will actually change anything, which at this point I think is less a flaw in the system and more just what the system has always actually been.