Schedule-wise, the book is divided very neatly into 25 sections (which seem to be present in every version), so I apportioned 2-3 sections per week to try to be even at roughly 15 (physical) pages. That works pretty well I think, since it goes right up to the end of the year with the usual between-book break covering new years and whatnot.
That granularity of obvious stopping points makes the schedule very flexible if anyone would like to go slower or faster or whatever (or if anything drastically changes in the months before the club actually starts).
I don’t own a kindle, but the chapter endings are so obvious that I’ll probably go in and remove those columns unless anyone objects!
As a taste of what maybe to expect from the book, the afterward by Kenji Ohtsuki to the previous collection of Ranpo stories I read has a fun list of what he considered 8 charms of Edogawa Ranpo’s writing:
① タイトルのネーミングのウマさ
② イラストレーションとのマッチングの妙
③ ユートピア願望
④ 母胎回帰願望
⑤ ショック！ 残酷描写
⑥ つっこみどころまんてんのトンデモなさ
⑦ ダメ人間の悲喜劇
⑧ レトロおしゃれな東京散歩
or as I roughly translated at the time:
a knack for titles
a strangeness living up to the illustrations
utopian aspiration
returning-to-the-womb aspiration
shock!
perfectly comic absurdity
tragicomedy of hopeless people
strolls through retro-cool Tokyo
All of these were amply demonstrated in that collection, except for the wild illustrations (I think he was talking about the editions that look more like this) and the “utopian aspiration,” which is where he talked about Panorama Island quite a bit. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I’m looking forward to finding out!
I should start doing that again.
I stopped reading at night because I was scared off by the warning… and never got back in the habit. I’m three weeks behind at the moment, I think
Edit: Ah, but only one chapter away from being two weeks behind. Let’s go.
Enthusiasm?
Well, it wasn’t so bad (or at least very short) and nothing similar came up yet, so maybe I should just go back to my previous schedule. At one chapter a day, I should be able to catch up eventually.
