We decided to continue the book as spin-off club in an informal manner, which means we don’t have a fixed schedule, and everybody can read at their own pace. All discussion will take place in this thread. Please note clearly which interview you are referring to in your comments, and make extra sure you use spoiler tags!
For your orientation, here is a list of the interviews and their respective lengths:
Section
Page Count
日比谷線 - 北千住発中目黒行き Intro
5
1. 平中敦
8.5
2. 市場孝典
9
3. 山崎憲一
16
4. 牧田晃一郎
12.5
5. 吉秋満
19
6. 片山博視
9
7. 松本利男
11
8. 三上雅之
4.5
9. 平山慎子
15
10. 時田純夫
7
11. 内海哲二
10
12. 寺島登
8
13. 橋中安治
8
14. 奥山正則
7.5
15. 玉田道明
10.5
16. 長浜弘
7
17. 宮崎誠治
12
18. 石原孝
12
19. 早見利光
14
20. 尾形直之
12.5
21. 光野充
14
22. 片桐武夫
10
23. 仲田靖
10
24. 伊藤正
8.5
25. 安斉邦衛
6
26. 初島誠人
8
27. 金子晃久
11
28. 大沼吉雄
8
29. 石倉啓一
13
30. 杉本悦子
10
31. 和田吉良 / 早苗
17
32. 和田嘉子
27
目じるしのない悪夢
0.5
No. 1
5.5
No. 2
5
No. 3
9
No. 4
4
No. 5
5.5
No. 6
7.5
No. 7
3
No. 8
2
Vocabulary List
Discussion Rules
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Are you planning to read アンダーグラウンド with the book club?
The book is very long (780 pages) so my idea is to read only a part of it in the book club (and then maybe finish it as a spin-off club if people are interested). It mainly consists of interviews (with eyewitnesses, I guess) that are related to the events on the numerous affected train lines.
Here is an overview of the book’s chapters:
Chapter
Start Page
Page Count
weeks’ estimate
はじめに
6
16
1 week?
千代田線
22
111
4 weeks?
丸ノ内線 - 荻窪行き
133
114
4 weeks?
丸ノ内線 - 池袋行き／折り返し
247
35
1 week?
日比谷線 - 中目黒発
282
95
3 weeks?
日比谷線 - 北千住発中目黒行き
377
359
目じるしのない悪夢
736
44
The page numbers are estimates derived from the BookWalker ebook, but I think that a few pages more or fewer should not affect us too much.
One possible option would be to read everything up to and including 日比谷線 - 中目黒発. That would be around 370 pages, which is a good size for an ABC book club, I think. Also, if Murakami is as easy to read in nonfiction as he is in his fiction books, we should be able to read this at a rather high speed after an initial ramp-up phase.
I’ve added a tentative weeks count above, but this is just a very rough sketch, and we’d need to have a closer look later on.
The upside of this approach would be that we get the full impression for most of the lines and directions as we will read all the interviews of each section, but the downside would be that we completely omit one of the lines. So maybe it would be more interesting to mix and match the interviews across all the lines?
I don’t know if I’ll be able to fully commit to reading along with this, but if I were, I wouldn’t want to jump between parts. (sounds like a tracking-spreadsheet nightmare keeping track of that ) I’d prefer a linear approach, reading the first 370 pages sounds good. I suspect most people will end up reading the whole book if they’ve gotten that far in, but voting and picking and starting a new book in parallel sounds good, to not let the gap in-between polls get too large.
I’m already pretty familiar with the events as I’ve read the series on Satori Reader about it (and plenty on Wikipedia while I was at it!), but if someone is not, I could also be worried that not reading the book in the “normal” order doesn’t give the proper introduction to what has happened.
In any case I would definitely prefer to read the book linearly with the club, and then continue on my own if I like it and the club stops
Thanks for your opinions! I’m also in favor of reading the book linearly; but I wanted to throw out a different option in case people thought that would be a good idea. Apparently not
I had some time today and looked through the book in order to find out about its structure. Turns out that it has a very uniform pattern in which each chapter starts with an intro, followed by a number of interviews. I tried to find a suitable breakdown and came up with this:
Again, the page counts are just estimates from the BookWalker pages.
This schedule starts with a short ramp-up and then hovers around 35 pages per week, which puts us at an average speed of ~33 pages. Of course, we can always change our pace throughout the book club if we feel the need to.
What do you think about this schedule?
I will let this poll sit here for quite some time as we still have a long time to go until we start, and there’s no need to finalize the schedule way ahead of time.
You can vote for at most 2 options (I trust you can figure out which options work well together and which don’t )
Also, the end of this book club is approaching soon and since the official book club only covers the first half of the book, I’d like to ask whether you’re interested in continuing to read the other half as well:
I’m just past week 11 now. Planning on trying to finish it before the next ABC starts, it’s doable even with one story a day (even though the last part seems to be very long)
I thought of doing the same but… not 100% sure it will work out. The second part is just as long…I think I will end up having both this and マスカレード・ホテル overlap.
Happy to see that y‘all would like to continue reading! For the schedule and threads, I‘d like to switch to a more free-form style with a single thread and no weekly breakdown; instead, I think I‘ll assign numbers to the individual sections for easier reference, so that we can discuss in one thread and still know what belongs where (which might be a bit hard to tell from the names alone). My rationale here is that we are a very small group and I think we can manage with one thread.
What do you think?
Your proposal (one thread, no fixed schedule) works for me
I‘d like to propose something else (please explain)
I’m not against having only one thread but the only thing I don’t like with I’m a bit afraid that I will post three times in a row before anybody comments (again) and then can’t post anymore.
One idea could be that we can have a home post, that way we can write whatever in it? Either a list of check boxes of the interviews read or a list in summary tags of them. That way it’s easy to find if something has read a specific interview and wants to read others’ thoughts? The downside is that you don’t get a notification if there is an edit, but that’s maybe also fine, otherwise I would spam you guys once a day!
For me, I am 100% edit-driven when reading the forums, so I would probably not read your comments as much in that case… but I don’t know about the others, so maybe I’m the outlier here.
I’d be very happy to read your comments once a day
) I’d prefer a linear approach, reading the first 370 pages sounds good. I suspect most people will end up reading the whole book if they’ve gotten that far in, but voting and picking and starting a new book in parallel sounds good, to not let the gap in-between polls get too large.
and since the official book club only covers the first half of the book, I’d like to ask whether you’re interested in continuing to read the other half as well:
