人間失格 (Advanced Book Club)

Yeah, but it’s also one of my favourite books, so as long as i can get through it, i don’t care how hard it is. I’m also learning a lot. And reading the translation side by side helps (though i also recognize some mistranslations and differences).
It’s also not like i don’t have any reading experience, I’ve played some games and read parts of mangas. So far, i’m enjoying it a lot :slight_smile:

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Btw, I don’t think that bringing up something commercial is strictly prohibited as long as it’s more or less related to the topic? I see resources being linked all the time.

Guidelines only say:

We ask that you be mindful of the content that you’re posting and make sure that it is something members of the community would be interested in checking out. This includes job postings, downloads, sites, and content that isn’t Japanese-language based.

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This.
I’d prefer not to extend randomly/ disregarding break points, but otherwise I’m okay with any pace.

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I said this but then did not follow up :woman_facepalming:

Also, I am officially an idiot as I killed the book type poll AGAIN AAAARRRRRGGGHHHH :sob:


Although this being the advanced book club, we are currently going significantly above the envisioned pace :wink: and I think I would like to correct this somehow, it’s just quite tricky with this book… I’d like to wait one or two more days to see where the majority of readers is at.

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As expected, the schedule topic is difficult… Some want to stick with the original schedule and are afraid to lose momentum if the schedule gets dragged out too much, some want to stick with the original schedule but don’t mind if it gets extended, others would definitely prefer an extension. I can relate to all of these viewpoints. And the numbers are all very close together :flushed:

Therefore I suggest to proceed as follows:

  • Let’s keep chapter 2 as-is (i.e. two weeks with 18 and 16 pages resp.)
  • Let’s extend chapter 3.1 by one week to break down the big chunk of 22 pages, i. e. we should hopefully end up at 3 weeks with 13-ish pages each
  • Let’s stick with chapter 3.2 for the time being (i.e. let’s keep it at two weeks) and let’s check back around the end of week 8 to see whether we need another extension or whether we are good

This way we will introduce an extension of one week for now, and we can see how everybody gets along with that over the course of the next few weeks. I hope this is something everybody can more or less accept as a compromise?

Could anybody with a paperback copy maybe help us along in finding suitable breakpoints for chapter 3.1? That would be great :blush:

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My proposition:

#1
どこへも、訪ねて行けない。(just before 堀木。in a separate line)
Kindle loc 984, 58%

#2
それが自分の日常でした。(just before the poem)
Kindle loc 1151, 68%

#3 end of the chapter, obviously :wink:

@miwuc how does it look page-wise in your paper version?
i know there is also a natural break after 「そんなら、社の近くですから」, but I’m against it, because just before the break there is a new character introduced, and I’m afraid it will be easy to forget who she was during the 7-day rest :wink:

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#1 starts on page 78 and ends on page 88. about 10 full pages.
#2 ends on page 103. about 15 full pages.
#3 ends on page 116. about 13.5 pages.

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So that means the first week is an easy one (so people can maybe catch up a little :sweat_smile:) and the other two weeks are pretty regular regarding our ideas for “hard” books. That sounds very good, thanks to you and @Aislin for your efforts! I will update the schedule in the OP.

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Here’s Week 5 which will take us to the end of Chapter 2:

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Let’s dig into chapter 3! This week is a chill week at 10 pages to allow everybody to catch up or to catch some breath:

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I realised that I had muted the reading section in WK, because it was getting a bit spammy. But I forgot I would miss all the BC threads I was part of :sweat_smile:. So I got a bit confused of the schedule, and am a bit behind. Fortunately my vacation just started, so ample time to catch up o/.

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We pick up the steam a bit more and proceed to the middle section of chapter 3.1:

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Sorry for the delayed post - I was out travelling for two days, but I figured y’all are old enough to already start reading without the thread if you felt the need :wink:

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Here’s to our penultimate week of reading:

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Aaaand here it is, the final week of this book! Hats off to everyone who made it this far :slight_smile:

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We made it! :tada:
Kudos to everybody who read with the club and shared their thoughts, and extra big kudos to @Aislin who tirelessly provided us with lots of interesting background information! That has made this book club extra special for me :bowing_woman:

Satisfaction Poll Time!

Have you read 人間失格?

  • I finished it
  • I’m still reading and I plan on finishing it
  • I don’t plan to finish it
  • I never even started it

0 voters

If you read the book, how would you rate it on a 5 point scale? (1: hated it, 5: loved it)

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Unsure / Didn’t finish

0 voters

If you read the book, how would you rate its difficulty?

  • No effort at all
  • Minimal effort
  • Moderate effort
  • Significant effort
  • So much effort my head might explode
  • I don’t know

0 voters

Participation Statistics

We had a bit of a dip around the middle part, but other than that, there were many comments up until the end, and once the readership had solidified, it remained stable throughout. I think this is a very good result, compared to the small size of the group and the difficulty of the book. You all rock! :muscle: :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Ooh polls~ :sparkles:
And that’s a pretty solid graph. I’m slowly working my way through now, and @Aislin’s info posts are always something I look forward to when I finish a part. :slight_smile: I’ll try to remember to adjust my rating when I finish, but no promises.

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I’m still reading, my rating is from when i finished the book in English 7 years ago or so.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find much time to read, and also there is so much new vocabulary in it that it doesn’t quite fit into my current habit of adding all new common vocab to Anki and learning it right away or soon, it would just fill up my deck. But at least my Anki word frequency inserter script is handy for that.

Also, the sentence structure and length is so complex, it really doesn’t seem to be made for one of your first books in Japanese. But I’m dedicated to it :smiley:

I’ll continue reading and hopefully make more progress soon, and continue reading and writing in the threads.

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The graph is really good. I’m a stats nerd so… I love stats.

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Just a postmortem on why I didn’t finish the book: I was studying for JLPT N2, and this novel didn’t seem like it helped. The sentences are so long and complex, sometimes stretching 8 lines or so.

These sentences don’t make for good example sentences for flashcards.

Take the vocab 身につく, which I encountered both here and in Final Fantasy 7 (a video game). Which example sentence is better for a flashcard? :wink:

And there was too much new vocabulary that I wanted to learn, a lot of rare words too.
This book is above N2 level, and doesn’t seem to help with reading speed either :wink:

The current book Spice and Wolf seems like a much better fit for me, it’s so nice to read!

All that being said, I actually love these long sentences (similarly as in Proust), and I’m definitely looking forward to finishing the book in the future, when my abilities have improved and I’m not focusing on a JLPT level that doesn’t benefit much from it. I’ve read it in English before, and already loved it.

To those who finished it, congratulations, and I hope you enjoyed it at least a bit, it’s a classic (which influenced many other works)!

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