Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.
Trigger Warnings
The book gets very dark and explores topics that could be considered disturbing or triggering. I do think that these warnings contain significant spoilers, and that the book is best enjoyed going in blind, so please only read them if you feel you need to.
Earthlings Trigger warnings
Abusive family
Cannibalism
Child sexual abuse
Incest
Manipulation
Mental abuse
Murder
Pedophilia
Rape
Sexual abuse
Spoiler Courtesy
Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.
Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as such.
I won’t be joining this particular book club but as someone who has read this in translation, y’all are in for a wild ride. I might peek my head in just to see people’s reactions. Enjoy!
Excellent! Hopefully I’ll have the schedule up in the next week or so for the paperback, and I’ll count on some helpful e-bookers for percentages/locations.
This schedule is a bit on the fast side so I’d like to open it up to discussion. If we look at recent IBC picks, 君の名は, 博士の愛した数式, and 夜市 fell within a 14-15 page per week average. With コーヒーが冷めないうちに, the IBC didn’t realize it was over the typical length limit until after it had won the poll, so members chose to compensate by reading at a fast (compared to typical) 20.5 page per week schedule in order to finish in a reasonable timeframe. My proposed schedule averages 19.5 pages per week. This seems reasonable to me, but I don’t want pace creep to make the IBC less accessible to people making the jump from the BBC or to other people who have less experience reading who are looking to challenge themselves.
Some mitigating factors:
Text density is on the lighter side
Language is fairly accessible
There’s ramp-up time built into the proposed schedule for the first few weeks
There’s a manga buffer so the two high-paced books aren’t directly back-to-back
This book is on the longer side for the IBC, so a fast-ish schedule makes sense to keep the timeframe reasonable
I have no issues modifying the schedule if several people prefer to slow it down for the sake of accessibility, so please don’t hesitate to vote, even if you’re not certain whether you’ll participate! My biggest goal with the club isn’t to finish a few weeks faster, but to introduce as many people as possible to one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors and hopefully help increase others’ (as well as my own) confidence with reading Japanese novels.
As I have both コーヒーが冷めないうちに and 地球星人 in the bookwalker version I compared the scheduled average number of bookwalker pages per day (on my tablet and with my 200% zoom setting) for both books. I got an average of around 8.5 which seems ok for me, although there is some spread between the weekly tasks, from 11 to 25 book pages.
The first three weeks (11, 17, and 14 pages) comprise the first chapter. The only other way to divide it cleanly (i.e. each week ending at a section break and each new chapter starting with a new week) would be to have a 25-page first week. Even setting clean breaks aside, I figured the better solution would be to have a bit of a ramp-up early-on for folks to get accustomed to the style, and hopefully lessen the effects of the inevitable first-few-week dropout wave. Outside of that, other than one light 16-page week everything falls in the 18-25 page/week range.
That’s fine. I couldn’t see where the actual breaks are as I don’t know the paper book’s pagination. I will skip the current IBC manga, so I will be able to read ahead of the schedule and take a break later on if needed.
The schedule looks great. I’m just not sure about the two weeks around Christmas and New Year’s. There may be even more time to read, or no time at all. I guess either reading ahead or catching up later can solve that potential problem though.
I read the sample in English (much quicker) and I was hooked, so I’m definitely in. Looking forward to it.
Oh, so I was already wondering whether the book does have chapters at all.
Yep, that made understanding the schedule much trickier to me as well. @jhol613 Maybe you could add that information to the schedule? I mean things like “end of chapter x” or “break in chapter y” or something? I find it much more motivating to read a larger amount if I know that there is the end of a chapter to be reached or the like and it would also make the irregularities in the schedule more relatable to me.
Thank you! That adds so much information for me, e.g. why do we have the 25+24 weeks in the middle etc. - looked very random at the start but now that makes perfect sense.
polls
and it would also make the irregularities in the schedule more relatable to me.
