BookWalker has a 20 page preview. I could be mistaken, but I think it goes up to the second page of chapter 2.
So for anyone who reads digital and isn’t committed yet, that would allow for joining in on week one before committing either way.
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The first album slaps, btw
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Bocchers book club? Imma try
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By the way is this true? I know it has been discussed in the IBC but I wasn’t aware that we intended to do that for the IMC.
IMO even if we go for 13 weeks we can wait for the next poll, it’s not that long by book club standards. And with all the other clubs and off-shoots, it’s not like there is any shortage of things to read…
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not to take away from everything the book club will be, but there’s a great youtuber that reads through manga and bocchi is one of them
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Here is the preliminary vocabulary sheet:
This is my first time making a pre-populated sheet for IMC. Previously, I’ve made these only for ABBC, where it’s expected that many readers won’t know extremely common words (and one time for BBC, where fantasy words were more common).
We probably don’t need the most common words on the sheet at the IMC level, but I’ve left them in because I don’t have an easy method of removing them.
Disclaimers:
- This list is based on running manga page images through OCR (Mokuro), which will have some mistakes.
- This text goes through a text parser (Ichiran), which may have some mistakes.
- English translations are from JMDict. I didn’t run the results through censoring, so there may be some sketchy alternate English meanings for words that don’t apply in context. Feel free to clean these if you see any.
- English translations lack context, so one word may have multiple English meanings. Feel free to clean these up as you see them and understand which meaning is correct from context.
- The “rate” column shows how frequently words appear in this volume. This can be useful if you like to stick unknown words into Anki as you go or want to pre-learn some words during the next few weeks.
- ✭ = Word appears two or three times.
- ✭✭ = Word appears four or five times.
- ✭✭✭ = Word appears six or more times.
Once we’ve committed to a schedule, the spreadsheet can be separated into weekly tabs (or optionally into per-chapter tabs, even if two chapters are read in one week).
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@seanblue covered most of this question, but to address this last little bit: yeah, it follows pretty closely. There are some tweaks (for starters, some parts of Bocchi’s coughcough character design show up more in the manga than the anime), and a couple of events are reordered, and I haven’t checked if the dialogue is word-for-word the same… but aside from that, it’s pretty close. 
Actually, one contrast I planned to make in the second post but forgot was an observation of the density of text in Bocchi by comparing anime adaptations with past IMC picks. Fullmetal Alchemist’s first volume covers four episodes of its first anime adaptation (only the first one - Brotherhood condensed the first two chapters into one episode, and didn’t adapt the second two). Delicious in Dungeon’s first volume covers three episodes.
Bocchi’s first volume covers eight episodes of the anime. For someone with crippling social anxiety, Bocchi can certainly be a motor mouth. Though granted the anime includes time for them to actually play music, whereas in the manga it generally happens between panels.
Maybe I shouldn’t make this comparison. Gonna scare people off. 
It’s not difficult, just dense. Noone’s having complicated philosophical discussions - it’s just regular dialogue - but there’s a lot of it. Yonkoma manga tends to really pack in those speech bubbles compared to free-form panelling.
There hasn’t been any formal discussion, but I get a definite feel of “we’ve got a full list of nominations and everyone’s got a backlog of stuff they want to nominate, so we need to get through the existing ones quick smart”.
Most excellent. Thank you muchly.
But aye, I’m aware it’s probably overkill, but with the text density that you’ve been pointing out, I fear that doing it by hand might take a while.
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Fun comparison:
If you take all the words from ぼっち・ざ・ろっく！ and count only the first occurrence per chapter, you get about 3,400 total.
The manga ひとりぼっちの○○生活, the first volume has a little under 2,700 words…counting all repeats. (And it’s some pages longer, at that.)
Lesson to take from this: if you fail to keep up with ざ・ろっく, go to BBC during the next vote and pick ○○生活.
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Both manga are fantastic, but I actually prefer ひとりぼっちの〇〇生活. But yes, seriously go vote for it in BBC next round!
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Now I feel compelled to go back and watch the first 8 episodes…
I’m not really scared by how hard it is. I’m mostly scared about whether I can get myself to read on a regular schedule. I’m hoping since I’m keeping up with ダンジョン飯 then maybe I can just keep going on inertia.
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Oh I missed that. No I don’t see any reason to do that. If the club runs for 13 weeks there is no overlap with the next book. I plan on running the “next book poll” around 6 weeks before the “next book” start date, which will depend on when this book ends.
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Stoked for this!
I have no idea if I would actually like this kind of manga, but I’m stoked to find out! 
And thank you @Belthazar for the explanation of yonkoma!
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Welp, just done finished checking the vocab sheet entries for chapters zero and one, so we’re all good to go for the first reading… in five weeks’ time. 
Getting the impression from votes in the poll and from suggestions in the thread that the best reading speed might be “one chapter per week, until we decide we’re ready to speed up”. I guess I’ll check how we’re feeling every odd-numbered week.
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For anyone still planning to buy, Amazon’s and BookWalker’s sale (half off) ends in a day.
I never did see that sale make its way over to Kobo…
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Less than two weeks to go.
Schedule and vocab sheet are now in the first post.
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Reading only 8-10 pages per week for an intermediate club seems crazy to me. I wonder if a majority of people would have voted for the same pace from 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 if you’d given that option in the poll.
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I would have personally. I thought that the two chapters/week pace was a bit intense for me. I would prefer something in-between but obviously that would be even more annoying.
I agree that if you compare with the IBC then it’s a lot less intensive but at the same time it’s still significantly above the BBC in terms of difficulty. So overall I think it’s reasonable if this club is effectively the “missing link” between the BBC and the IBC.
I think reading at a relatively slow pace for a couple of weeks and then polling to see how the readers feel about it is the best approach though, for any book club frankly. It can be hard to gauge the difficulty of a book ahead of time.
EDIT: also I think that going too fast is detrimental to having discussions about the plot in the club, especially for a 4koma where you have effectively a bunch of short stories that are more or less connected together. A lot can happen in 20 pages…
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As the offshoot clubs are piling up, I am quite happy with the slow pace proposed!
And if we do find it too slow, it is never too late to decide to change the pace and adjust even after the club has started.
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I get that, but my concern is having a 120 page manga take a quarter of the year to read. I’m not saying the club should tailor to people who only read 1-2 books at a time, but tailoring towards people reading 10+ also doesn’t feel fair to those relying on the IMC as their bridge club, which imo should mean a steady supply of manga of various difficulties and styles.
For the record, I’m not even planning to reread the manga (I’m more likely to continue forward with volumes 5-7) and I’m happy to have the club read such a fun manga. I just wish some balance like 8-10 weeks could be found instead of 13.
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