I’ll add to this, that what gets picked is rarely about what the people feel appropriate for their levels, and more about what interests them, which is incredbily easy to see from the two cute fests that were picked at the same time… and god, am I glad they did
Because of this, the difficulty jumps around a ton, and only really drops back down, when there’s a decent push towards getting an easier book into the reading list.
The other cute fest being the current ABBC? I may have to join in 
The artstyle reminds me somewhat of このはな綺譚 or maybe 狼の皮をかぶった羊姫 which are both diabetes-inducingly adorable so I’m interested already 
Absolutely. This one is so sweet, that I felt my heart give out in the middle from sugar overdose.
For what it’s worth, I think this is pretty normal and I’m not sure I heard of anyone approaching native content for the first time with ease, in a way that didn’t feel it was incredibly tough at first. For me, I had a few false starts with the ABBC and a lot of things helped me. Here are some ideas for the Even More Beginner Than Absolute Beginner Book Club.
I’m not saying you have to do all of that. These are just things that helped me finally get there.
For what it’s worth, I’m totally with you on that one. I picked up Happiness on my own in parallel, another ABBC read, and felt it was way easier than Ruri. There are only about 3k chars in a whole volume of Happiness. I felt like in one week of Ruri, I had more longer sentences than in the whole book of Happiness. So Happiness feel way easier for me and if I compare the two, I would put Ruri at a way higher level.
On the other hand, because of the voice acting video, I was happy that Ruri was in the ABBC and my first read, helped a lot identifying things what are characteristic of speech and such.
Oh wow, that was quite informative and very interesting. Did you write a web crawler that fetches all the thread replies and poll answers? Thanks for the effort!
Regarding the week 5/6 mystery:
Just my guess, but I suppose what the graph is not showing is the answer to “I finished this part already”. Looking back at the weekly polls, there was a sharp drop from week 5 to 6, which leads me to assume that “people just continued on reading Chapter 1, and then waited until Chapter 2 begins”? Your guess about the correlation between happiness of people versus thread replies might also have an effect here… After all, week 4 and 6 were the interesting fire-spitting weeks, while week 5 only featured the long car discussion that was a bit hard to follow as a beginner.
Oh, and I noticed that in the ABBC Home Thread Ruri Dragon is not listed under “previous picks”.
I did actually buy all Happiness volumes already and will dive into that one in a few weeks probably 
Ah, that’s my bad, I forgot to update that while editing that post. I’ll get that corrected.
Which reminds me, I should probably check if the Master List is up to date.
I wish I could write a web crawler faster than doing it by hand 
Glad you like it!
I guess, maybe? But I think the bulk of most threads are questions and answers, and those would have to go in the respective threads anyway. I’m not sure there’s any actual reason behind the drop.
Looking at the levels on Natively (L15 vs L19) I’m not surprised. The ABBC usually reads from L14 to L22, so Ruri is slightly above the middle there, while Happiness is one of the easiest books we ever read.
Yes, I think it’s too bad that the Master List of Book clubs doesn’t include the Natively level / link, I went on and looked them all up manually so now I will start reading them all starting from the lowest one.
I’m away from home at the moment but when I’m back I will ask on the thread over there if it’s okay that I edit the list and add the Natively levels and links in, I feel like it’s a big help when trying to choose what to read next.
And here I am wondering how はたらく細胞 with L28 got picked for ABBC 
I need to continue on that one. Put it on hold when I had to prioritise real-life things (and decided to do my WK queue and Ruri Dragon only which started at that time). But now things are done, and I learned a lot of useful vocab and body-kanji around WK level 30s. Should be much easier now.
I’m currently at Lesson 33 of MNN (N4) and was able to finish it in a week. I’m really invested in the story and the characters. Let’s hope the mangaka hinting at good news in 2024 on his Twitter account translates into the end of the manga’s hiatus.
Anybody who’s following the ABBC thread already knows the good news, but for those that don’t: Ruri Dragon will finally come back! There’s even a concrete date for the magazine releases:
If I understand correctly, during March 5 new chapters will be published in the Weekly Shōnen Jump, and from April 22nd there will be a new chapter in every other issue of the the digital editions of the Shōnen Jump magazine.
For us that means that as soon as physical non-magazine versions are announced for the usual book stores we’ll start planning the offshoot book club for the second volume here. There’s no announcement for that yet, but I’d assume it’s only a matter of time considering that they already seem to have enough content for a whole new volume!
Welcome back, Ruri! 
Excellent news! Sadly from what I’m seeing though, from April 22nd onward it will actually be a digital exclusive, so not published simultaneously with a physical edition. But I’ll still be looking forward to physical volume releases!
Is it? It says デジタル版週刊少年ジャンプおよび少年ジャンプ, so literally “digital edition Shounen Jump and also Shounen Jump Plus”. I assumed that meant “digital and also regular physical Shounen Jump”.
edit: Ah, I missed the ＋ after the second 少年ジャンプ.
Yeah, was just about to point it out. As long as there will still be physical volumes released eventually though I can’t be too sad about this, especially when I read primarily digitally in the first place and get physical later.
Fixed in my post, thanks for pointing it out!
This is Shonen Jump’s app’s name
Looks like the new volume is gonna be released on Sep 4th - thanks for the ping on Discord, @anon99047008! 
For the offshoot club: How long will y’all need to get physical copies after it releases? Are 6 weeks enough?
I got an email this morning from manga republic. Pre-ordered it right away.
Btw, can I get an invite to the discord?