この本を盗む者は 📚 🪄 (Advanced Book Club)

I think the highest I’ve rated on Natively is a 41? Which I’ve probably underrated some short stories :sweat: But it’s hard to feel like something is truly ‘hard’ when it’s only 5-10 pages long.

That said, if it turns out to be the case I’ll likely DM Brandon about it and reference this discussion and see what can be done.

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I don’t know. It does feel harder than 薬屋のひとりごと (level 37) as @seanblue said and about the same as 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 (42, but I think that’s a bit of an overstatement; I would drop it to 40 max personally). So 38-40 seems about right to me (for the part where I am).
That was not my impression of the content of the first week, though. I don’t really know what to do about a book where the difficulty varies a lot (take the max? the average?).

Anyway, it has been a while since the last time I read something in Japanese and it made no sense to me (and even forced me to look up words, the nerves! :joy:). I’m referring for instance to the part where the 満艦飾の旗 overflow and start covering the roads and, despite the kanji making me think we were talking about ship flags, it felt more like some kind of plant… finally looking up 満艦飾 I ended up getting the point, but still. There are a few more “wait wut” moments for me in this part so far too, but I just accepted that anything goes.

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I personally go with the average, although sometimes the variation between sections is HUGE (I read one story with two narrators - one spoke polite, direct, Tokyo Japanese and the other one spoke rough, macho, dialect Japanese. :sweat_smile: ) but at that point I give my averaged rating and leave a review explaining what’s up. A number alone is never really ‘enough’ imo, especially when it comes to books with few ratings.

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By the way, since I have the paper version, I just fixed the page numbers of weeks 1-4.

(For page count, I didn’t count the blank pages between chapters)

Edit: wait, is the page number based on a different edition? Just looking at the last chapter start, there’s a 20 pages discrepancy :sweat_smile: I have the hardcover version (~340 pages)

Edit edit: oh I see that was mentioned already. Okay, I’ll keep the edits then. In fact, I can probably do the rest as well. (Done)

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Week 4 is open, we continue on to finish chapter 2 :male_detective: :books:

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Bit late but I added all the remaining percentages.

Edit: also added a bunch of names to the Special Readings table

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Thank you so much!!

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Just to update, I dropped the book for now. I got through about 40% of week 3’s assignment, but nothing was happening, I got bored, and I was still getting annoyed at the writing style being overly descriptive. There’s only so much text I can read about stuff like the town and the food she’s buying when it has no relevance to the plot. I get annoyed at overly descriptive books even in English, but at least in that case I can just roll my eyes and keep going, whereas in Japanese it drains my energy and grinds my reading pace to a crawl. If I had kept going I probably wouldn’t have finished until May and wouldn’t have read any other books in the meantime either, which I wanted to avoid. For now I started an easier book as a “reset” if you will, and once I finish that I might pick up something harder again (but hopefully more exciting).

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Little thing I just noticed from the table of contents: each chapter has a title one character shorter than the previous one, so the る at the end of the lines form a neat little diagonal line…

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Okay, I tried (not very hard) to resist, but I ended up reading the whole book. That means grading time!

I didn’t particularly think about average or max difficulty, just feeling… and the book dropped to level 39, smack in the middle of my initial estimate :joy:
That still feels high considering the overall difficulty of the book, but considering how we are front loaded with the first chapter, it’s probably appropriate.

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