Kimura, a drunken hit man plotting revenge for his young son. Prince, a junior high school student who hides a demon-like heart behind his honor student face. Lemon and Tangerine, a highly-skilled duo with secret orders from a boss of the underworld. And finally, Ladybug, the unlucky and timid assassin. In the cars of the high-speed Tohoku Shinkansen, predator and prey overlap…
I’m torn- I’ve traditionally preferred physical but I’ve had to use an e-reader for the past several months and I’ve gotten too used to the convenience. It would probably take me ages just to get used to looking up kanji by radicals again.
Hi everyone - I hope you’re all excited to read マリアビートル . We’re starting in 8 days, so I figured it was a good time to talk about the schedule.
The book doesn’t have numbered chapters. Instead, it has a break every time it changes to a different character’s perspective, which happens about 50 times. This gives us a lot of flexibility in how we break things up. I’ve worked out two possible schedules which would each have fairly consistent page counts week-to-week:
Option 1: 12 weeks, with an average of 47 pages per week. This speed is towards the upper end of the ABC’s recommended 30-50 pages per week.
Option 2: 14 weeks , with an average of 40 pages per week. This would let us take things a bit slower, but would also make this one of the longest clubs the ABC has done (which might be annoying for people who aren’t participating).
I’ve spent too much time staring at a long list of page numbers and can’t make a decision, so I leave it to the people
Which schedule should we use?
12 weeks - 47 pages per week
14 weeks - 40 pages per week
Other
0voters
Once we’ve selected a schedule, I’ll post the exact page numbers & dates.
And I voted for the faster one because I feel it may be more likely that I read to the end if we cover more ground (= hopefully
more interesting things happening) each week.
Since it will be my first novel book club (as opposed to the dictionary club I am joining right now, too), it is really only a guess, though.
That said, I am perfectly fine with the slower pace as well.
I’m confused by the “character” column in the schedule. I have the digital version so no page numbers, but from what I can see there are multiple characters in each week’s reading. Could you maybe provide the last words of each week’s section so we know where to stop?
That’s a good idea! Since I’ve already read this week’s part, the sections are: 木村, 果物, 天道虫. Stop before 王子. eta: Ah, or without any spoilers, this week’s part is three sections.
Ah, I see, thanks! So the idea is that the character mentioned in the schedule is the first section of that week, and presumably didn’t appear in the previous week at all?
I don’t think there’s any guarantee that a different one of their sections didn’t appear in the previous week, but yes: this week the first section is 木村 and we stop before the first section of next week, 王子.
Sorry, I was going to ask how we should handle the schedule for ebooks, but I totally forgot
The “Character” column is just the first character in that week’s reading. They could definitely appear in the previous week (and there are even a few cases where we’ll start with the same character multiple weeks in a row).
I’d rather not look up the last words in each section because of the potential for spoilers. Would listing the number of sections each week be good enough? It should also be a pretty consistent 6-7% progress each week, I think.
Listing the number of sections is helpful, but I think it may still be easy to lose track later on. It’s not a spoiler to list all sections (just the names), is it? So we have the full sequence at least.
With last words there’s usually not enough to be a spoiler, but I know I have avoided stopping at a specific section in the past because the last words were too revealing, so I get that.
I’d probably rather not know all the sections listed in order, but maybe it could be spoiler-blurred? Having the list available seems like the most concrete solution.
I know virtually nothing about the book except that it is in the same series as „AX“ which I bought a while ago but have not read yet, and it would be great to get to know as few information in advance as possible.
Same goes for the „last words“.
Do not know whether this takes too much time, though. I certainly do not want to increase the workload…
