Oh no I had realized after posting and was trying to stealth edit.
I was too slow 
That’s pretty cool actually
I’m getting better at parsing but sometimes this still happens 
@Naphthalene I got your back
“Selling a fight”, yeah. Exactly what you thought.
にこりともせずに = without smiling
This comes from する + ず ending = せず (without doing) (I first thought it’s from もす, but well nobody can tell and the first fits better)
“As long as Haruhi kept silent while setting down…”
限り in this context shows an extent to which a condition applies, you can translate it as “as long as” most of the time.
お近づきになっとくのもいいかなと = “getting closer to her will be fine” (と is the quote particle, I believe なっとく is なっておく)
一瞬血迷った俺 = losing control of myself for a moment
誰が責められよう = who can blame me
So it’s something like “Who can blame me for losing control for a moment and thinking about getting closer to her [as I have the advantage of sitting right in front of her]”
To comment on your only bolded part that nobody else addressed, じろりと is “目玉を動かし、鋭い目つきで無遠慮に見るさま”
She looks over the classroom, ending on Kyon, who is looking up at her with his mouth agape, who she gives a withering glare, then sits down without even a smile.
You’re not? You haven’t been?
Way back with No. 6 and Autumn Prison I seem to remember some discussion like that…
Which I love~~~ 
@QuackingShoe - this is great! Haha, I picked up on the “or whatever” but I think I lost some of the comprehension even with all the lookup I was doing. Basically, whenever there was a particle I had to look up, if there was a snarky, sarcastic option in the list of possible meanings, I’d choose that one. Because Kyon. XD
Side rant:
Kyon, at least in this prologue monologue, uses a lot of なんて and など and such. This would be super awkward to translate into English literally, because it adds nothing of substance, which is why I just threw in only the one “whatever,” which imo still breaks the flow of the monologue. Really all this does is give Kyon’s monologue a generally dismissive and perhaps unaffected tone, and if one were to try to translate all if this into English that sounds natural and stylish, I think maintaining that tone instead of any particular word choices would be ideal.
Tl;dr I hate all the official and unofficial translations
It’s not that it’s banned. People just tend not to that much.
Well I don’t think there’s really an exhaustive list, it’s something like “topic/focus/restrictive particles”, but it’s unclear what actually surfaces. I think it’s one of those things that are theoretically productive, but in practice, some of them will sound really awkward.
Anyway, it’s a well-known phenomenon, because it kind of puts gerund+auxiliary constructions in a separate category; they’re not tightly bound, but you can’t just shove in any old clause in between the two either (unlike the normal subordinate て clause)…
If you mean the literary form of もする（模する）, I think it would be unlikely, since the rest of the sentence does not sound archaic, plus ずに (instead of plain ず) is modern grammar, so combining the two would sound a bit suspect IMHO.
If you’re confused by the conjugation, IMHO, it’s 責め-られ-よう blame-POTENTIAL-TENTATIVE, i.e., “could blame”. The よう on a potential almost always conveys conjecture (=責められるだろう), or you could say it induces a subjunctive mood, since rare are the cases where it could meaningfully convey volition.
I think the following remark by Shibatani, about the XにYがある possessive construction, is obliquely relevant. 
An interesting reflection of Japanese culture in this regard is that, while a husband can possess his wife, a wife cannot possess her husband in the aru construction
Reading for the first week finished. I still had to grill some of the remaining sentences until I was satisfied though. As always, other people’s questions and answers were very useful.
I actually found the prologue and beginning of the first chapter quite difficult, but then it got a little bit better (dialogue and finally having some context helped I guess?). This is probably going to be difficult overall but I’ll try to keep up.
Full disclosure: I actually saw the anime back in the day when it was super popular (which doesn’t make me feel old at all), but it was so long ago and my memory so terrible that I barely remember anything. Just a few iconic things and like just the one plot-relevant thing, so I’m still probably going to be surprised by whatever happens.
From this week’s reading I was reminded what a charmer ハルヒ is.
Welp, just in time for * checks notes * the second chapter of this and the first of コンビニ人間 
Yeah, being dropped into a prologue, you have no idea what you’re going to be facing so you need to really understand what you’re reading entirely. Once you’re in the story, you have context for guessing what comes next. One of the several reasons I usually think prologues are the hardest part~
I didn’t thought that I’ll enjoy reading the first chapter this much, I never watched the anime and I have zero background about it, I am absolutely, very curious about Haruhi.
this book is very different from the previous book I read and I love it! long sentences are bit confusing but I enjoy struggling, I feel that im learning xD
There few parts I didn’t understand well thu, I need to reread it and my other questions got answered in other replies!
Good to hear, feel free to ask your own questions!
Well, the next several sentences are pretty straightforward.
I try. I’m not great at it. Others tend not to try.
Aye, I noticed that. Boo.
No wait, I’ve only just finished the first page of this reading…
I mean, I like the tone
I-I’ll have something small to say about next week’s reading!
And probably more as we get into sections I haven’t read before.
In particular I find the exchange on page 34-35 really funny.
どっちなんだよ。
Edit: Whoops that’s week 3 neverminddddd
For the record, I think I read the prologue and most (?) of chapter 1 when I was trying to vet it for the club (badly, apparently). In addition to skimming random sections to see if anything crazy jumped out at me.
I feel like I remember people talking about the story every now and then during the last two books I read with the book clubs(the girl who leapt through time and Kino), at least 
Maybe it depends partially on what kind of story it is and how much trouble people are having with it? For something like this week’s reading, there’s not really much going on yet, so it’s kind of hard to discuss the overall plot. I imagine the same goes for something like Aria, where most chapters are pretty episodic. (they’re still fun though, it just usually doesn’t feel like there’s a lot to discuss about them beyond mentioning the events and maybe giving some commentary on them)
That said, I can admit that I do say things that pretty much amount to “I read it. I liked or disliked it” if I don’t feel up to writing something more elaborate than that but want to show that I still am participating 
I imagine most people do it for such reasons and not because they don’t feel like trying.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have more in-depth discussions either though, I guess I just wanted to offer my viewpoint on why it may not always be easy to.
To be honest, I probably just wrote this because I’m annoyed at people saying I’m not trying when I already am doing my best when it comes to stuff completely unrelated to this. it’s honestly more that I’m annoyed at those words in general than that I actually disagree… but I guess I ended up writing a lot anyway
Just to put in something related to the actual book, I can say that I actually like the writing style. While it makes things a bit harder to read, it also make pretty mundane things feel way more exciting somehow 
Oh, and I guess I’m looking forward to being able to discuss the plot after we’ve read a bit more of the book
Awww…
The fan-translations I read were pretty good and had a lot of his attitude in the tone - maybe not quite as much as I think there is in the Japanese, but certainly matching his character in the anime. (At least, how he’s presented in the subtitles.)
@seanblue - Re: book club talk: That’s really sad. 
One of my favorite things is how sometimes Kyon will respond to a character’s speech in narration, and especially when the character then responds verbally to Kyon’s narration. This style is carried over into the anime (and enhanced, actually, if I recall), and is one of my favorite parts of the series generally.
Aye, it’s carried over by having Kyon sit offscreen or with his back to the camera most of the time, so that you can’t see if his mouth is moving or not.
This is how I feel. Practically nothing has happened yet so there isn’t much to comment on. I think I like the writing style so far but don’t want to form an opinion on anything less than a chapter into the book.
Plus a lot of people here seem to know the story and characters very well already which makes it a little awkward for me personally if I were to say anything about the characters/plot this early on. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just kind of like how someone might tend to keep quiet and observe when joining a new group, for example.
Not exactly a spoiler but probably just me reading too much into a comment earlier in the thread:
I also get the impression that things may not be as they seem just based on something someone said earlier and would rather not have anything spoiled unintentionally.
I did wonder toward the beginning of this week’s discussion how the story will go further, since I also do not know anything about it.
By the way, I’m glad @Belthazar asked about the mommy and Santa thing. I didn’t know the reference and thought he was still talking about 園長先生 from the previous sentence. And I was mildly wondering why his mother would kiss them, but anyway, it didn’t really matter. I’m glad it was clarified though