A week ago we started the last chapter in ロジカとラッカセイ volume 1, so traditionally it’s time for a bit of reflection, some statistics and most importantly… a ton of polls!
Polls
- I finished it
- I’m still reading and I plan on finishing it
- I don’t plan to finish it
- I never even started
- ★★★★★
- ★★★★☆
- ★★★☆☆
- ★★☆☆☆
- ★☆☆☆☆
- Unsure
- 1 - No effort at all
- 2 - Minimal effort
- 3 - Moderate effort
- 4 - Substantial effort
- 5 - So much effort my head might explode
- I don’t know
- I have read harder manga/books than this one but I still need to click a poll option
- This was my first book club
- I had joined the Absolute Beginner Book Club before
- I had joined the Beginner Book Club before
- I had joined the Intermediate Book Club before
- I had joined the Advanced Book Club before
(Select the highest that applies.)
- This was my first manga
- I had read other manga, but only easier ones than this
- I had read other manga or books around this level
- I had read other manga or books that are harder than this one
- I didn’t like the manga after all
- The manga is still too hard for me
- Reading took longer than I thought
- I fell behind
- I didn’t like how book club works
- I didn’t understand how the book club works
- The threads were too hard to follow
- I didn’t feel like I was part of the book club
- Other problems with the manga
- Other problems with the book club
- Personal problems that have nothing to do with the manga / book club
Stats
Participation
First, let’s look at the participantion in general. The X-axis are the weeks:
Surprisingly enough, the drop of people reading (the yellow line) trend seems rather mild this time. At least from the ABBC I’m more used to a very sharp drop at the beginning.
And it makes me happy to see that we kept ~67% of readers that started the first chapter up until the end! Looking at the last mangas read here, the BBC seems to have a pretty good track record of people staying, but this is even a bit higher than usual. 
Oh, and ignore week 5 - that’s was the second week of a split chapter, and it seems lots of people decided to just read it completely in week 4.
Mood (among participants who haven’t read anything harder)
Next, let’s see what the mood was like. First in total answer numbers per category, then in percentages:
Pretty green. I think this might be alright for a BBC. For an ABBC I’d want to see more “I’m struggling, but I manage” (since reading your first book is hard!), but even the newer readers at the BBC have already one or more books under their belt, so it’s not that much of a puzzle anymore. But then again, this was on the easier side for a BBC book, so maybe it was a tiny bit too easy.
As a side note, it’s nice that neither the mood nor the participation changed much (or at all) when we made the shift from ~14 pages to 23+ pages per week between week 5 and 6.
New vs experienced participants
And lastly, “new participants” vs “experienced participants”. This one is completely based on who participates in my “For our new readers: How are you doing so far?” polls, and who clicks “I have read harder manga/books than this one but I still need to click a poll option”, so it’s probably wildly inaccurate - I assume there are some new readers and a much higher amount of experienced readers who are completely ignoring this poll.
The inaccuracy is also quite clear from the total numbers going up several times…
Here I don’t have any good data to compare it to. My ABBC Ruri Dragon club (whose stats you can find here) had a much higher “new participants” percentage, but I’d assume that mangas in the BBC range are more appealing to experienced readers in general.
(And of course we get the unsurprising “Newer participants drop the book club more likely than experienced readers” trend.)
Offshoot Bookclub
- Yes
- Maybe
- No
- July 22
- July 29
- August 5
- August 12
- August 19
And here we are. Thanks a lot for voting for my nomination and for participating in the book club! ロジカとラッカセイ is very dear to my heart, and I’m glad I got this opportunity to share it with you and to give it just a tiny bit more of the spot light that feel it deserves. I’m looking forward to continue to read it with you in the offshoot club!
Wow, thank you for all the data! It’s really interesting to see a visual representation of participation over time, and it’s definitely nice to see more people sticking around than usual!
This Manga in particular was really interesting in my opinion, I quite enjoyed the story, the humour, and the twists. I’ll definitely join the offshoot club if I have the time when that starts.
One thing I think is interesting is rojika walks a line between slice of life and more fantastical stuff, so the vocab you encounter is more varied than the average school or irl setting (which is where a lot of the stuff at my level sits right now)
Thank you @TobiasW for all the stats and for organising the club!
Actually, if I may ask, what did you use to generate all those graphs?
Google Sheets
Looking back at that first line graph, I should have guessed from the colour scheme XD
With 19 voters voting 100% for a start on July 22nd, can we assume that it’s going to happen?
Yeah, let’s just do that at this point! There haven’t been any votes for a while either.
You’re up for being the one in charge of the threads and the schedule again, or looking for a volunteer to replace you?
There’ll just be one long thread per volume (with posts per week that we’re continuing to the next part), and I’ll make them
Ah, makes sense for an offshot cool, looking forward to reunite with Rojica and Rakkasei and everybody!
Looking at the next volume suggests two possible schedules for me:
“Let’s power through chapter 10”
| Week | Start Date | Chapter | Pages | No. of pages with text |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | 9 | 12 | ||
| Week 2 | 10 | 34 | ||
| Week 3 | 11, 12, 13 | 23 | ||
| Week 4 | 14 | 27 | ||
| Week 5 | 15 | 15 | ||
| Week 6 | 16 | 20 | ||
| Week 7 | 17 | 26 |
“Let’s split chapter 10 in two”
| Week | Start Date | Chapter | Pages | No. of pages with text |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | 9 | 12 | ||
| Week 2 | 10 | 16 | ||
| Week 3 | 10 | 18 | ||
| Week 4 | 11, 12, 13 | 23 | ||
| Week 5 | 14 | 27 | ||
| Week 6 | 15 | 15 | ||
| Week 7 | 16 | 20 | ||
| Week 8 | 17 | 26 |
- I’m fine with reading chapter 10 in one week
- I’d have trouble reading chapter 10 in one week
(Anonymous poll)
So it’s non-negotiable that we have to read chapter 17 before chapter 16? 
In fact, let’s read the whole thing backwards
I’ve been sitting at chapter 14 for like a month, so maybe I’ll just wait at this point.
Yeah, back when I read it I took a break around that point too (although for me it was right after chapter 14):
(the page numbers aren’t completely accurate because I used percentages)
Maybe this can be another indication, here is the character count per chapter:
| Volume | Chapter | Characters |
|---|---|---|
| ロジカとラッカセイ２ | 9 | 763 |
| ロジカとラッカセイ２ | 10 | 2944 |
| ロジカとラッカセイ２ | 11 | 934 |
| ロジカとラッカセイ２ | 12 | 592 |
| ロジカとラッカセイ２ | 13 | 388 |
| ロジカとラッカセイ２ | 14 | 1558 |
| ロジカとラッカセイ２ | 15 | 863 |
| ロジカとラッカセイ２ | 16 | 1371 |
| ロジカとラッカセイ２ | 17 | 2804 |