Read-Aloud Session Announcement: It was a close call, but in the end I had to pick a date and time, and so this one won:
GMT Su 15:00 / EST Su 10:00 / JST Mo 00:00
We will run the first Read Aloud session on Sunday 22.12. / Monday 23.12. (depending on your time zone). We will read the first week’s reading together, so the Read Aloud session will always be one week behind the book club’s reading schedule.
Sorry for all of you who can’t make it though - it’s always sad for me to leave out interested readers, but unfortunately the Earth is round But if you feel so inclined, please go ahead and organize a parallel session at a different time - we had that before for other book clubs.
If you’re interested in joining, please go to the Discord server and join the book’s thread and voice channel. (@seanblue would you please be so kind and create the thread and channel for this book? Thx!)
If you have any questions, feel free to ask here or ping me on Discord.
Hey, I’d like to join and since this is gonna be my first book, I originally wanted to get the normal book instead of the e-book (if I wanted to write some notes in it and also just to have a book in front of me).
However getting it from JP would take quite a bit and especially with christmas coming up it would take even longer to get a copy, so catching up to the rest would take a bit.
I really wanted to get a real book but I think because of limited time getting the e-book would be better.
Any opinions?
Also I know I’m kinda making a big deal out of it but it’s still gonna be my first book
You can order the physical book right now and use the free online preview from the publisher in the meantime. It covers both last week’s and this week’s content. You may get a bit behind for the third week, but that should be fine.
I’m afraid I have to drop this as I won’t be able to keep up. While Flying Witch was great, this is (for me) a significant step up both in language (eg. the hefty use of dialect) and page/sentence count. It’s frustrating me more than I’m enjoying it. I’ll definitely get back to this book in the future, though.
Don’t worry…depending on how this goes I might have to drop it also…it may end up going to fast for me…I’m hoping with the holiday weeks that I can get through this hard stuff with the extra time off work and then get back to normal things… (fingers crossed)…
@Kappa420 As I have been reading through this…I realize that w/o the reading on skype I’ve been doing with my 先生, I wouldn’t be able to do this book…BUT also thinking so what happens if we both just keep going? The thread doesn’t close for a long time and the book goes through the end of March right?
So what happens if we fall behind…there’s no punishment from our overlord the evil most awesome crabigator (ducks and misses the lighting bolt)… so depending on how far behind we fall…there are several months to catch up… see if you can stick with it…By that time a lot of the dialect should be sorted out… (if not, then maybe flying witch will be coming in Feb). There’s also the possibility that the club could actually slow down the pacing if it ends up being too fast for everyone…I see other folks struggling too. I wouldn’t count on this but it wouldn’t be out of the question.
You can also order the English version of the book. The translation is really well done from what I’ve seen. Haven’t read ahead (no cheating), just enough to ensure my understanding is ok or if I’m truly stuck! Haven’t needed to yet but also figure if I’m really drowning I can look at the English and reverse engineer the grammar so I can understand the sentence construction.
It really is a massive jump in difficulty from comics and children’s picture books, isn’t it? I was hoping the latter (Kitty Detectives) would prepare me a bit more than it actually did.
So far, my focus is reading through the material to get used to big amounts of vertical reading (it feels very different from Kitty Detectives!) I don’t worry too much about understanding the sentences just yet. When I find a sentence I can understand but for one or two words or a bit of grammar, I’ll look it up.
Then, I read everyone else’s comments on the story and say, “Wait, did something like that happen?” and I’ll re-read it, and sure enough, there it is.
I’m not even bothering with dialect dialogue yet.
As a final stage (so far), I’m looking over random sentences and marking up the grammatic parts of speech, and adding translations of words I’m not familiar with to help out. It is time-consuming? Yes. Am I getting anything out of it? Too soon to say.
There are some other children’s novels I hope to read in 2020, so I’m forcing myself to push through this one until the end.
Yes, we will stick to this time slot for now. The cool thing about it is that it covers a broad range of the Earth - we had 7 (iirc - or maybe 8?) participants ranging from California (7 a.m.) to Japan (midnight)
So if anyone is interested in joining the next round, please feel free to hop into the Discord channel on Sunday!
I wasn’t home for the last one, but I’ll definitely try to be there for this one! How much did it take for you guys to finish last time? Just to know if I should have lunch before or after or during lol.
The first week’s reading was very short, so we finished in about 20 minutes But of course it will take more time each week because the reading portions gradually get longer.
For some of us the alarm clock goes off at 430am and have to be at work by 7… So it’s not impossible… Tho I’m hardly caffinated at that hour haha… This time I’ll be more ready!
I wake up relatively early five days a week. I don’t need to do it on Sundays too! Granted, the new 10am time isn’t bad at all (compared to 8:30 for コンビニ人間), but I don’t particularly want to read this book out loud anyway.
But if you feel so inclined, please go ahead and organize a parallel session at a different time - we had that before for other book clubs.
