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Such a fitting pick for the upcoming season! I bought the book when I first saw the proposal so here’s the table of contents if you need it for scheduling purposes.
You’re a treasure! So the story lengths are as follows:
Story 1
28
Story 2
22
Story 3
18
Story 4
18
Story 5
16
Story 6
12
Story 7
16
Story 8
8
Story 9
14
Story 10
8
Story 11
14
Story 12
10
Story 13
10
Story 14
12
Story 15
10
Story 16
18
Story 17
13
We’ll definitely want to read the first story across two weeks.
Story 2 could go either way; it’s only 15% longer than the average weekly ‘portion’ in the 地球星人 club (as calculated by the number of characters), so I think it’d be ok as a single outlier, but the fact that it comes pretty early on in the schedule might turn people off
There is also the option of combining the 8th and 10th story into a single week, or even jumbling up all the stories and reading them in page count order (to get a nice difficulty ramp), but I am not sure that would be wise. There are a lot of people in the Goodreads reviews mentioning that the stories are ‘interconnected’ (albeit ‘loosely’ and ‘subtly’).
So… poll time!
Are we happy reading the 8th and 10th story in the same week?
Yes, even if that means reading the 10th story out of order
No, I would rather take a week longer and read all the stories in order
Does the book put a ton of blank pages between each story, or is it “story 1 ends on page 34, story 2 starts on page 35”? Ordinarily that wouldn’t matter, but with the nominally-8-page stories it might bring them down to more like 6 pages…
If there’s padding and people are happy with ~20 pages in a week, there’s the option to combine 8 & 9 and 10 & 11, which would avoid either super-short weeks or reading out of order, but it sounds like that might be faster than the usual pace?
PS: I see you haven’t included the 解説 in the schedule
Judging from my Bookwalker copy, which admittedly is probably nothing like the printed copy, there is a whole page dedicated to each story title, and a blank page between title and text. There may be another blank page between the end of the previous story and the next title, depending on where the story ends. So the true length may be 2 or 3 pages less than the one indicated in the contents.
You read that? I read it in a book once, and it took me so much out of the book that I never attempted it again.
PS. Not sure I should vote in the poll, as I’m fine either way.
If we’re considering reading the second story in one week, we could also consider grouping stories 8+9 and 10+11 to keep the order as is. It comes to the same number of pages as the second story, likely less if we take the title page+blank page into account.
I’ve been waiting to see how the polls play out, but there has not been any activity on those for a while, so here’s another proposal! Having a break around the holidays seemed like a good idea and we can use that time to have a poll about stories 12 to 15 (to merge or not to merge?). It’d be a 17 week schedule, but could end up being 15 weeks. Either way, there’d be enough time to have the next IBC poll well in advance of this club finishing.
Week
Start Date
Chapter
Page Numbers
Page Count
Week 1
29 Oct
Story 1 (until 一刻も静止しない)
9-22
14
Week 2
5 Nov
Story 1
22-34
13
Week 3
12 Nov
Story 2
37-55
19
Week 4
19 Nov
Story 3
59-73
15
Week 5
26 Nov
Story 4
77-91
15
Week 6
3 Dec
Story 5
95-107
13
Week 7
10 Dec
Story 6
111-119
9
Week 8
17 Dec
Story 7
123-136
14
24 Dec
Break and poll
Week 9
31 Dec
Story 8 + 9
139-157
6+11
Week 10
7 Jan
Story 10 + 11
161-179
5+11
Week 11
14 Jan
Story 12
183-189
7
Week 12
21 Jan
Story 13
193-200
8
Week 13
28 Jan
Story 14
203-212
10
Week 14
4 Feb
Story 15
215-221
5
Week 15
11 Feb
Story 16
225-239
15
Week 16
18 Feb
Story 17
243-252
10
Perhaps someone with a physical copy wouldn’t mind looking up the page numbers and (in the case of story 1) a suitable end phrase?
Thanks for looking it all up and for leaving out the blank pages! There seem to be 3 of those per story. That actually makes quite a substantial difference. For example, story 10 goes from 8 to 5. Looking at the schedule now (I put the updated version in the OP) I think it’ll be very doable
Not that I’m trying to escalate the situation but if you’re combining 8+9 and 10+11, you might as well also combine 12+13 and 14+15, since those both come out to 15 pages, matching the intended reading pace perfectly. (Actually, I just counted, and it seems like story 15 actually has 7 pages of text, not 5. But the others looked right.)
I agree that it’d make sense to combine 12+13 and 14+15 as well, because it seems silly to go significantly slower than the IBC pace of 15 pages, especially when the alternative is to go only marginally faster. When it looked like the 22 page weeks were going to be ~50% faster than the ‘official’ pace I thought a vote was in order, but now that it turns out that they’re actually 15-16 pages (at most ~6% faster)…
Thought it might also be worth mentioning that a lot of chapters end with a line or two text on the last page, so I think it’s all the more reason to combine chapters.
Break
Because if we do that, we can group as well 12+13 and 14+15.
but if you’re combining 8+9 and 10+11, you might as well also combine 12+13 and 14+15, since those both come out to 15 pages, matching the intended reading pace perfectly. (Actually, I just counted, and it seems like story 15 actually has 7 pages of text, not 5. 