狼と香辛料 - Spice and Wolf 🐺 (Advanced Book Club)

Definitely a lurker but reading this series has been a goal since I started learning. I’m in.

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Absolutely adore this series and I have read it in english (most of it) and seen the anime too.

I remember trying it before a while back when I was newer into japanese (still am) and it was incredibly hard at the time.

Maybe I should give it another try now. :thinking:

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I’ve been waiting for a Spice and Wolf book club for the motivation to read it :joy: I’m excited to read the original in Japanese and compare it to the English translation that I’ve already read. I read a little bit of the tenth volume and compared it…and the English translator forgot in the first ten pages two to three sentences of text! :sob:

SOOO I’M REALLY EXCITEDD LESSSGOOOOO YOLO HOLO

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“Forgot”

They probably couldn’t figure out a natural translation and was like まあいっか. :joy:

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Good god this makes me scared for volume one. :durtle_durverted_lvl2:

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You’re gonna love how Holo talks. :wink:

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And then I can clearly tell who’s saying what! そうじゃろう?
It’s 郭(くるわ)言葉?!

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BTW @seanblue have you made up your mind and are planning to participate? :blush:
I was thinking we could maybe have a read aloud session for this club (if there is enough interest), and I would be super happy if I could count on your expertise :bowing_woman:

To add a little explanation for everybody, in such sessions nobody is made to read if they don’t like, and nobody is even made to speak if they don’t like. So you can just drop in silently and listen in, and if you feel ready, you can read for a little while. Everybody determines how much they like to read, and just reading one sentence is totally fine. We take turns among those who would like to participate in the reading and try to split the amount so that everybody is happy. We may also discuss questions regarding language or contents along the way. If the amount turns out to be too much to be covered in a reasonable amount of time, we just stop.


But before we start planning this, maybe we should check back with the participants.
We had a few book clubs with read aloud sessions, and they were run each Sunday at roundabout 2022-09-04T12:30:00Z (this shows your local time). This way we were able to include most people around the world. For this club, I would expect the reading session to last 60 - 90 minutes (with a fair bit of chatting afterwards for those who are interested :wink:).

What if we ran a read aloud session on Sundays?

  • I am not interested in a read aloud session
  • Interested but I’m asleep at that time
  • Interested - time is early but I can manage
  • Interested - time is fine and I’m available
  • Interested - time is late but I can manage
  • Interested but unavailable for other reasons

0 voters

For the weekday, as the time may be throughout the day for quite a few people and many people tend to have some free time on Sat/Sun, we had the best results with a Sunday session, but maybe Saturday works as well?

  • Saturday
  • Sunday
  • Neither

0 voters

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I would like to read the book if I can keep up. The problem right now is that I’m away the weekend the book club starts, so I either need to start early with no place to post questions, or start late and hope I can read it in half a week.

Even if I do join, I’m undecided on participating in read aloud sessions. With advanced book club, the assigned readings can get pretty long, so it can be a bit difficult to get through everything.

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Yes, that’s a fair point. I was wondering about that as well… My understanding is that some of the clubs with longer assignments (Re:Zero?) would just read as much as everybody likes and then call it a day. That would be the preferred option for this club as well, I guess.

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So if it helps you I could get up the thread a few days early (say Wednesday?) and if you start even a bit earlier and take notes up-front, you could post them as soon as the thread is up and should be able to get some answers before the weekend even.

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That’s what I’ve heard as well. We could certainly do that in this case if we want.

That would probably help, yeah. Knowing me, if I wait until Tuesday after the book club starts to begin reading, I will probably not finish in time and drop the book immediately. So I really should start early rather than late. It would be different if it was later in the book club and I was already used to the writing style, but starting a new series is always hard. So if it’s not inconvenient, having the first week’s thread put up on Wednesday would probably help. (I’ll try to start reading even earlier than that so I can post any questions I have right away.)

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OK great! It’s not inconvenient at all, no worries :blush:

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Gotta love Japanese authors using English and not even bothering to get it right.

“Merchant meats spicy wolf” :joy:

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Maybe he’s an exotic kebab merchant?

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Hahaha. I noticed the same thing and wondered if maybe there was an explanation for it… but I think it’s just Japanglish at it’s finest. :rofl:

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I might be intentional, which is what I love about it! I think it ties into the meaning of the title and everything, it’s fascinating. :star_struck:

Here’s an article, but it spoils the plot and the meaning of the title:

Or…maybe Lawrence is just delicious and Holo will eat him :relieved:

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To be fair, a lot of native English speakers make the same spelling mistake too. :wink:

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Also true. :joy:

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As in spoils the plot of the series? Or of the first volume?

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