Illustration: Johanna Walderdorff For the past two years, a group of friends and I have gathered each Wednesday to discuss our progress on a famously grueling book, beginning with Infinite Jest and The Power Broker and continuing with Ulysses and Gotham , a 1,400-page history of New York City that often reads like the world’s most tedious Wikipedia article. The Difficult Book Book Club didn’t start as an explicit strategy to wrest our attention from screens, but that’s what it became: We were