海辺のカフカ - Kafka on the Shore 🏖 (Advanced Book Club)

If it interests you I actually know several books with audiobooks :smiley: I like to listen+read when I can as I feel like it gives me more bang for my buck (no stopping to look up kanji readings, constantly hearing the proper stress/pitch/etc in sentences, more emotional context if the acting is well done).

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That would be great !!! I am looking for audio book to train my listening abilities :blush:

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So I don’t know your taste in books, so here’s a bunch that I’ve read/listened to and found faithful enough to the text:

Collapsed to not derail main discussion
  • ロクヨン (audible) (3 sources on where to buy here) – this book is on the harder side, I wrote a review of it that’s visible on the 2nd page I linked.
  • 頭のいい子を育てるおはなし366 (audiobook.jp) (buying options here) - I haven’t finished this but it definitely fluctuates a LOT in difficulty with some stories being dead simple and others clearly taking advantage of the fact that native children are…native :sweat_smile:
  • スマホを落としただけなのに (audiobook.jp)(buying options) - check the review first - it’s a relatively dark story. Also someone else on the forums is reading it and the audio quality bothers them a bit, but doesn’t bother me. Proceed with caution if audio quality is something you’re sensitive to.
  • 永遠のゼロ - (audiobook.jp) (buying options) - war stories, lots of war vocab but grammar is easy.
  • 神様に一番近い動物 ~人生を変える7つの物語 - (audiobook.jp) (buying options) - a series of short stories. difficulty varies a bit depending on which one you’re reading.
  • 夏へのトンネル、さよならの出口 (audiobook.jp) (buying options) - light novel, high school romance and time travel-ish.
  • コーヒーが冷めないうちに (audiobook.jp) (buying options) - very chill slightly sci-fi human drama about a coffee shop. I loved it, other people thought it was vapid (which is fair, it’s not breaking any new ground in human experience). It is to date the easiest audiobook I’ve ever listened to though, so I recommend it for training listening .
  • かがみの孤城 (audiobook.jp) (buying options) - on the easier side, but a big time investment. I adored this book and most (but of course not all) of the people who have read it enjoyed it. Human drama, fantasy.
  • 世界から猫が消えたなら (audiobook.jp) (buying options) - also reasonably easy human drama with fantasy elements.
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Quick heads up to everybody that we are starting this book in one week! :tada:

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I didn’t have anything else to read at hand while waiting for something yesterday, so I went and read the intro chapter. Seemed very doable. Unique word count seems to be pretty high, though. Part of it may just be a lot of words I’m used to seeing in kanji popped up with hiragana once in a while.

Here is a .csv of all the words I scraped from JPDB with the frequencies (password is wanikani, the csv is the attachment):

I’ll probably add the meanings when I have time to make it importable to Anki. (I’ll have to do it manually, since the site is pretty scrape-unfriendly; missing classes, id’s, no separate kana reading).

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Aaaand we are goooo! :star_struck:

Unfortunately I spent all my edits today for moving the book club threads, so the OP needs to wait until tomorrow or so… :sweat_smile:

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Here is week 2!

This week we still take it easy at 26 pages. From next week we’ll reach our cruising altitude of ~45 pages!

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Here is Week 3! We’re now flying at a cruising altitude of ~45 pages/week. Enjoy the ride!

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Ok so back then I promised to evaluate the schedule once again. So far we had a little ramp-up phase into the book, and starting from this week we are at slightly less than 50 pages which will be our cruising altitude if we decide to stick with the 12-week-schedule that you can currently see in the OP. Other options are 13 weeks (which reduces the speed from week 9), 14 weeks (which reduces the speed from week 7) and 15 weeks (which reduces the speed from next week).

Looking at the current participants poll, it looks like everybody is reading along fine so far (but of course this is only the first week at full speed, so this might not say too much). On the other hand, I really wonder how much sense it would make to reduce the speed as late as 7 or 9 weeks into the book because by then everybody will have settled in (or dropped out) anyway, I guess… The last option would mean to reduce the speed from next week and extend the club from 12 to 15 weeks, but given the ease of the book so far (Murakami is not that difficult to read altogether but sometimes he likes lots of uncommon words, so I was actually expecting some more difficulties with this book) and given the fact that we are the Advanced Club, I don’t really see a good reason to stretch this book out that far.

BUT as I promised to run an evaluation of our schedule, here it is :slight_smile:

  • Stick with the 12-week schedule
  • Switch to 13-week schedule (from week 9)
  • Switch to 14-week schedule (from week 7)
  • Switch to 15-week schedule (from week 4)
  • Erm… what were we talking about?

0 voters

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I haven’t finished this week’s reading but that is 100% me not prioritizing time well + continually getting interrupted while reading lately and nothing to do with the length of reading or difficulty. I think the current speed is plenty doable.

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:point_up::point_up: Basically the same for me! :point_up::point_up:

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OK thanks to all who voted, we’ll stick with the 12-week schedule going forward! :tada:

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Curious to learn how the story continues to unfold? Don’t hesitate and read on now!

(and as a quick reminder: We’re reading three chapters this week - chapter 7, 8, and 9!)

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Welcome to Week 5! We’re back to 2 chapters a week which will be our standard reading speed going forward.

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So a spoiler of a thematic warning that would be problematic for me came up on another forum here; if anyone reading this thread has read the book before (in any language) could you let me know which chapter this occurs in? I’ll probably read the book but skip that section as I’ve done that before with English books containing similar scenes.

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I don’t know if this is the exact part they are referring to, but in this week‘s part, in chapter 10, there was some mention of not very nice things done to cats. To be more specific, one character talked to the other about people cutting off pieces of cats‘ tails with scissors.
This was repeatedly mentioned throughout the second half of the chapter, so it’s quite difficult to say which parts were safe and which weren‘t. I could go look for specific page numbers if you wanted me to.
And as I said, there might be more scenes coming up later in the book as well. Can’t say for sure.

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I just did some googling as this is something I’d also be keen to avoid and looks like it’s chapter 16 where people say the very bad scenes of that nature are.

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Sounds like a recurring theme which does not bode well for me :sweat: Skipping one chapter and reading the cliff notes is doable for cases when the author, for whatever reason decides to insert it for character development/etc but something more central to the plot will make me a bad book club contributor and also leave me feeling like I didn’t really “read” the book. I’m going to think on it but I might bow out from this club.

Edit: I’ve decided to bow out after also looking at some English reviews of the scene in question.

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Sorry to see you go! But I fully understand of course.
Didn’t even know things like these would happen in this book! I mean, Murakami is „famous“ for including weird scenes, but I was expecting them rather in the realm of sexual human interaction…

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At the end of this week, we will be crossing the half-time mark! To celebrate this, I will give you some extra time to enjoy this week - next week’s thread will not go up before Sunday night.

jkjk, I’ll be on post JLPT holidays :sunglasses:

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