Please note that I have not had a chance to chop the stories into weekly portions yet, so I don’t quite know yet what would make most sense, but it’d be good to know what side to err on
Maybe you can see better what the participants’ common middle ground is if you turn the polls into multi-option ones? Then you can see what the majority would be ok with and not only what they favor.
Is it too late to add a “maybe”, or an “I’m trying to manage my commitments so I’ll say no now but I’m going to buy the book and most likely get sucked into the story and spend my entire weekends reading along anyway” option in the participation poll?
So there’s complete consensus on the starting date: 14 August is acceptable to everyone who voted.
The reading speed is a bit trickier. I think I will have a look at the book and see what makes sense in terms of natural stopping points and let the chips fall where they may. And maybe in the meantime there will be a tiebreaker
I had a look at the novel and it seems like there might be more text per page than in コンビニ人間 or 殺人出産.
授乳 ➝ 105k characters per 240 pages ➝ 437,5 characters per page.
殺人出産 ➝ 75k characters per 208 pages ➝ 360,5 characters per page.
コンビニ人間 ➝ 68k characters per 168 pages ➝ 405 characters per page.
So even if we stick to reading ~15 pages a week, that would be ~6500 characters a week, compared to the ~5000 characters a week we currently read (30% faster).
Another sticking point is the fact that we’re dealing with three separate stories and we’d prefer to keep them neatly separated in the discussion threads. So my proposal is as follows:
This makes for a 17 week schedule. A bit slower than we initially looked at in our poll, but the reading speed is substantially higher than it currently is (24% higher, at an average of 6176 chars a week). So there is a good compromise between seeking to limit the number of weeks we spend reading one book, while making sure the reading speed doesn’t get amped too much, too quickly.
授乳
部屋を出ていった。(4355 chars)
という気がする。(5444 chars)
泡立て始めた。(5361 chars)
end of story. (6637 chars)
コイビト
思えてくる。(5672 chars)
This is in the middle of a paragraph. It’s such a monster paragraph, there is just no way around it.
Sounds good to me. I voted for the faster ones, because I usually can’t hold myself back and start to read ahead… but if it’s faster, then it might happen later.
I guess it’s time to buy the book and check for kindle locations…
Seems like we’re agreed on the schedule then! I added it to the OP. Maybe someone with the physical book would be so kind as to give page numbers for the breaks
I wanted to bring attention to the 18-pages week (to check if it’s intentional because I remember you corrected yourself similar outlier in 殺人出産 ) and then I also noticed 16-pages and 9-pages later and had doubts about them too but not so big doubts as about Week 8 (it would also require more shuffling anyway), so I bolded them but didn’t put the ! mark next to them I’m sorry it wasn’t clear.
Ahhh, that makes sense! Thanks for the quality control!
In week 8 I must’ve confused myself somehow We could move the last paragraph of week 8 to week 9 (so week 8 breakpoint at よくわからなかった, Kindle 1031). That’ll make it a bit shorter (though it’ll still be a bit of an outlier). Or we pick a breakpoint inside of a paragraph right in the middle of the week 8/9 portion.
I also had another look at the third story. I think we could rearrange the breaking points to move the outlier week to a section in which the extra pages are less cumbersome. I won’t go into details why, as that might be a spoiler. This might be a more even distribution:
This looks like full paragraph of dialogue and I don’t see a good stopping point at first glance… But we can use an ever earlier break. I can’t decide, you’re running this club, you pick Below are both options:
Week 8, Option 1
Week
Start
Story
End page
Kindle loc
End phrase
Page count
8
2 Oct
コイビト
109
1031
よくわからなかった
17
9
9 Oct
コイビト
121
1164
end of story
12
Week 8, Option 2
Week
Start
Story
End page
Kindle loc
End phrase
Page count
8
2 Oct
コイビト
105
982
不可能なのだと感じた
13
9
9 Oct
コイビト
121
1164
end of story
16
The 2nd option seems slightly more even, although in the 1st option it’s the beginning of the 109 page, so the change is bigger than it seems.
And the revised end:
I… saw there is some weird thing going on there but I did my best not to look.
I think those last four weeks are a bit more even like this, at least in the way that matters (how long it’ll likely take to read). As for week 8/9, I think it’s pretty arbitrary which one we choose… but let’s go with the second option. It looks a bit better on paper. We don’t want to scare anyone off if they see a 17 page week in the schedule.
Thanks a lot for your help! I’ll fix the schedule in the OP and then we’re good to go
Just checking–are we still planning on starting on the 14th or are we going to bump all the dates back a week due to the unscheduled break in 殺人? I figured I would spam the book club threads a bit so we might alert potential newcomers to the MBC on time to buy a copy.