Here is a suggestion for scheduling, based on the 30-50 pages pace that’s the nominal club standard, and on the Hayakawa bunko paperback edition’s page counts. This book has five parts, each of which has subchapters, so I have kept the breakpoints at part and subchapter boundaries. This is most awkward in part I, which gives us a couple of shorter weeks at the start. The formatting has multiple blank pages between parts, and I ignore these in the page counts.
Week
Stopping point
Pages this week
1
end of Part 1 ch 3, p30p38
28
2
end of Part 1, p63
24
3
end of Part 2 ch 3, p115
49
4
end of Part 2, p154
39
5
end of Part 3 ch 4, p201
45
6
end of Part 3, p239
38
7
end of Part 4 ch 3, p281
39
8
end of Part 4, p324
43
9
end of Part 5 ch 3, p360
34
10
end of book, p396
33
That mostly seems reasonable to me – we get a more relaxed start for people to find their feet with the book, and the biggest week (week 3) is immediately after the smallest week, so there’s the option to read ahead a little if 49 pages is a big commitment for a week.
There aren’t many other options (unless we drop the idea of having each end-of-part match up with a week boundary) – there’s an alternate split of weeks 1 and 2 as 20/32 pages, or a big 52 page starting week, but I don’t like either of those as much.
Thank you for your hard work! Looks pretty good to me as is. If there are no complaints I think we can just run with this. Or I’ll make a short vote of the alternative options.
Less than a week to go until we start! Everyone got their books ready? Here’s a bonus anki vocab deck for the book. Includes words that have frequency of 2 or more.
Unfiltered deck has about 5k words since I didn’t really do any filtering. Haven’t checked all the cards so it can be a bit rough, but should be of some help. There’s also a “nokana” version with all the hiragana/katakana words removed (since those are usually pretty obvious or easy to look up).
On my side I have given up on this book a while back already… I don’t like to drop books, and it’s the first time I do in the book club, but it was really a huge drag for me. I figured it was not worth torturing myself over. But I’ll be curious to read the opinions of people who make it through.
I considered dropping this quite a while ago, but stuck to it and got to 66% because I’m determined to finish things. I think I’ll take a break and probably give up on this one though. It’s taken such a huge effort to continue reading, I haven’t been enjoying the book, and I need that time to work on other aspects of Japanese.
I just got to the start of this week’s reading Week 8’s reading as I was away for a week, and intend to finish the book, especially as the club’s schedule makes it less daunting for me and I am interested enough to see how it concludes.
I am hoping 蛇にピアス is lighter reading (at least it’s a lot shorter by the looks of it).
Agreed with other’s comments about the effort required to read this book. I do like aspects of it but it’s crazy to me how long it takes me to get through a page sometimes (especially those without dialogue). Then if I dip into most other Japanese novels it’s like night and day how much easier they are to read in comparison. Maybe it’s all the jargon and katakana words or just the overall sentence structure, I can’t quite put my finger on it. There are times where it’s made me doubt that I have any reasonable proficiency in Japanese so I’m glad it’s not just me who’s struggled.
I think for me it’s partly that there’s a lot of discussion of abstract ideas in there, which need more concentration to understand what the author is trying to say, compared with “stuff happens” descriptions of people’s actions.
I don’t dislike the book, but it doesn’t exactly make itself easy to like…
Anyway, my week eight thoughts:
This chapter seems to be a neat encapsulation of the dynamic of the book: a lot of downtime and sitting around in briefing rooms or counselling sessions, chaining into action with more of those brutal battlefield descriptions, and then all its narrative energy kind of fizzling out at the end ready to repeat the cycle: action never chains into action, it only falls back into another set of briefing and introspection. JP still hasn’t said anything about his motive in doing all this either.
so I’m glad it’s not just me who’s struggled.