I recommend focusing on individual scenes, such as for chapter 1:
| Scene | Pages |
|---|---|
| Hori in class | 3 pages |
| Hori cleaning/picking up her bother | 2 pages |
| Miya bringing Hori’s brother home | 5 pages |
| Hori at school the next day | 5 pages |
| Miya visiting Hori | 4 pages |
| Back in school | 5 pages |
| …etc… |
Skim through a scene covered in a prior week.
Do you understand what is happening based on your previous reading and from reading the discussion thread?
What issues do you find hinder your understanding?
Are there too many vocabulary lookups?
Is there too much unknown grammar?
Do you find dialogue where you know the vocabulary and recognize the grammar but can’t discern meaning from it?
By routinely identifying the material you struggle with and tackling it (with help from the discussion threads as needed), you’ll start growing your ability to recognize more complex dialogue. It takes time, though.
If all else fails, it’s okay to set this one aside and (and already mentioned) pick up a prior ABBC pick.
レンタルおにいちゃん was my best recommendation for first-time readers before finding Ookami-chan. It’s not something I’d recommend outside of the WaniKani book club discussion threads, but it’s a fairly grounded story that has a smooth difficulty progression.
からかい上手の高木さん has the advantages of 1) short chapters, 2) a recurring story pattern, and 3) extremely minimal story progression (the chapters are not even in chronological order). It’s easy enough to get through a chapter (short), but you can also skip over more complicated chapters without missing anything (with the intent to go back to them when you’re further along).
それでも歩は寄せてくる has short chapters (typically eight pages long). There’s a recurring story pattern. But unlike 高木, the story does progress over time, so you don’t really want to skip difficult chapters.
あしたは土曜日 is another I’d recommend, as it has very short chapters (five pages long), and it’s fine to skip any that are too difficult.
It’s really difficult to find material that meets the following two criteria:
- Easy enough for a first-time reader.
- Engaging.
Something like Ookami-chan likely wouldn’t be engaging for more seasoned readers. But when first starting to read, simply being able to understand material can make it more interesting than it would otherwise be.
Then there’s the blind spot that a more seasoned reader can have. When I nominated Mitsuboshi Colors for ABBC, I didn’t anticipate how much of a struggle it would be for some readers. (Granted, I did spend time deciding if it was better suited for ABBC or BBC before nominating it.)
It also depends on the people reading along from one book club pick to the next. You could probably have the same book club read at the same pace on three different Japanese-learning forums and have very different experiences on each forum.
There’s probably still a lot of room for improvement in the nomination and polling processes.
One recent change added a nomination poll option to exclude more experienced readers from the rating. (And in the BBC, there’s consideration to remove user ratings and stick with Natively scores.)
However, it’ll take time to see what impact that has on selections.