狐笛のかなた (Koteki no Kanata) Home Thread

On to chapter 3!

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Last part of chapter 3!

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By the way, what are we going to read after? Back to 獣の奏者?

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I need a break from this author, personally. Also, I think 獣の奏者 books 3 and 4 are too long for a book club. The first two books combined were 848 pages. The next two are 1072 pages. That’s a lot of weeks at the current pace! And if we read more per week I don’t think the read aloud sessions would work as well, which is most of the fun I think.

We’re open to suggestions though.

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I can totally relate to that! After this book especially…

Regarding suggestions, by now I have improved my reading skills enough to be mostly able to read what really interests me, and I have a hunch that my interests don’t match this group‘s interests too well, so… :pensive:

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Ah, fair enough. People didn’t vote for reading it as a group either.
I guess I’ll read volume 3 on my own, then :thinking:

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It’s not like you read 狐笛のかなた with the group… Just saying.

That’s fair. Personally I tend to like fantasy like this. I even liked this book in the end, even if the middle was slow and the story a bit simplistic.

Maybe we’ll find a book to read together again at some point. :slight_smile:

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I couldn’t :sob: I had the book for only two weeks, and then I forgot when things happened so I was afraid of spoiling people when posting in threads. I am mostly waiting for the post book discussion (but even then, things are getting a bit fuzzy in my memory). On the other hand, I do own 獣の奏者 3, so I could have followed an hypothetical reading schedule.

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Oh, I see! If you join the read aloud sessions, you’d know exactly what to discuss in a given week since we’ll have just reread it. Though I guess you couldn’t really participate in the reading part itself since you don’t have a copy of the book available. :cry:

Yeah, that makes sense. Similar to Nicole, since I can read on my own at a faster pace now, I’m finding it harder to follow along week after week for several months. And like I mentioned, this would be 6+ months per book which is really long.

As I mentioned, I need a break. But I might be interested in reading the first 守り人 book at some point. Definitely not the whole series though, and probably not 鹿の王 since it’s four books. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m just going to try to get a read aloud session going for an upcoming intermediate or advanced book club pick if it’s one I’m interested in.

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Ah, it’s not the fantasy setting that bothers me - it’s more it being so simplistic… (will save more comments for the after-book-discussion :grin:)

I’m looking forward to it :slight_smile:

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But maybe her other books are more like 獣の奏者!

It would be interesting to read some fantasy targeted at adults rather than young teens, but I wonder how painful that might be. :thinking:

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“Painful” + “fantasy” makes me think of Lord of the Rings :rofl:

I almost died during the intro, and I read it in GERMAN, mind you!

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I, err, didn’t feel the book was more simplistic (or not) than 獣の奏者, though. In fact, I could pretty much use the “management needs you to find the difference between those two pictures books” meme.

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I felt like 狐笛のかなた was almost a practice run for 獣の奏者. There are similarities for sure. I just felt like 獣の奏者 had more depth in terms of characters, story, and worldbuilding.

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I feel like that’s just down to page count, though. With more pages, you can just scale the number of details (including the number of factions, give them additional goals/motivations, etc). It’s like looking at a more zoomed in (or zoomed out, depending on which book you take as reference) version of the same fractal :stuck_out_tongue:

For me, the book definitely lacks nuances. What I mean with this is that at least from (top-level) chapter 2 onward, one had a pretty good understanding of who was “good” and who was “bad”, there were no doubts, no inner conflicts, no ambiguities. That (missing) aspect is what I personally would call “depth”, and that’s definitely not related to numbers of pages (i.e. length of narration) but to quality of narration. Granted, Kemono was also a children’s book, and it had lots of simplistic aspects, but in general there was more variation and more surprises. And more characters where it was not obvious from the start how they would behave and develop (e.g. Semiya, but also the Touda-Clan princes, and probably a few others).

Apart from that, what I really find boring is the obnoxious OP-ness of the characters.
“Oh, by the way, of course the foxes can move fast enough to catch an arrow in-flight.”
“Oh, by the way, of course if you get bitten by a fox, the spit is toxic.”
“Oh, by the way, of course the foxes can run day and night without getting tired.”
That narrative is missing the “human element” of being fallible, which makes everything so much more relatable (for me at least). Erin also came across as pretty OP in many situations, but she still had her moments of failure and doubt.

And, last not least, I really dislike when the world lacks logic without that being properly addressed. I know that it’s a fantasy story, and I’m not referring to magic or shape-shifting or these things, but e.g. the foxes being able to remove their poison from a person’s body after it has entered the blood stream? How does this work, do they have a blood filter in their tongue? Things like these just trip me up and make the story boring for me because it feels like “Oh, we need a solution to this problem… By the way, we have this OP character here who has this ability that I never bothered to mention before, but boy does it come in handy right now!” I know the author can do better (e.g. in 鹿の王 she explained all sorts of medical intricacies in every detail possible, and think of her explanations of Erin communicating with Riran in Kemono).

Well, I was planning to write this up only after the club ended, but I couldn’t help it :sweat_smile:
I tried to blur the possible spoilers, but if you think I should blur more, please tell me.

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