風の谷のナウシカ (Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind) Advanced Book Club

actually, I flipped through skim reading the first 30 or pages, at least up until Lord Yupa shows up, and got a taste of some of the text heavier pages, and I think this should be a totally manageable level for me. Honestly this felt easier to read than 桜蘭 to me, but maybe that changes when more plot heavy things start happening :sweat_smile: Probably helps that I read it in english a long time ago, and also have some of the movie parts burned into my memory. Can hear the hisaishi score cues start during some panels even :laughing:

I’ll switch mine to a yes. (although, i suspect that this is a special case, and most of the ABC stuff will continue to be too hard for me, so I will probably only be reading with you all for this manga, however much of it you decide to do)

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Okay I had some time now to more than eyeball it, and it turns out that while 6 is visibly thicker, it ain’t actually much longer than the previous ones, and while 7 looks twice as long as 1, it’s more like 1.5x. Average text density looks pretty consistent between the volumes, though 3-5 may have the highest proportion of text-sparse pages (so, they may be a little lighter). And while there isn’t much furi, it does look like there are some words (including the made-up ones) that get furigana every time. This is just from a very quick skim, though.

vol 1 - 136 p
vol 2 - 136 p
vol 3 - 156 p
vol 4 - 140 p
vol 5 - 157 p
vol 6 - 165 p
vol 7 - 223 p

(Although they all start on p 9 or 10, which 9 is literally the first page, the only thing in front of it is the fold-out poster-slash-map, so idk where they get that. Above is the last page that story falls on, so just step down a decade and that’s more like the actual count)

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Aye, I was about to say. I figure maybe those are the starting page numbers in some other edition, and they decided to leave them unchanged in this edition despite removing some of the leading pages.

Or, only a wise man can see the first pages?

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Please keep in mind that the premise of this book club was to run it as as „short“ club, i.e. 6 weeks or less. While I’m not super fussed if it takes 8 weeks in the end, please also consider that people might drop out despite the initial enthusiasm, and so maybe it might be worth considering to run at least part of it as an offshoot club? Because if the majority doesn’t participate (any more) and just waits for the next club to start, that would be a bit beyond the point, I guess. But I’m fine with you deciding to switch to offshoot along the way (which would then mean shortening the book club after it started) as we‘ve done with the current pick. It’s only that I‘d be happy if you could start out with 8 weeks or less, would that be ok?

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Miscalculations were apparently made when working out the start date for the group, and it turns out that starting on June 17th results in a two-week break after the end of the last group rather than the customary one week. Do we want to start earlier?

  • Start June 10th (one week earlier)
  • Start June 17th (no change)

0 voters

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For those of you who have the 7 volume set, how is the paper quality? Given how low-cost these are relative to their size it makes me worry that paper is going to be really thin and cheap.

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I’ve only got the first two volumes separate, though I’m fairly sure they’re the same books, and the paper’s definitely not thin.

Though I’m not sure I can rule out “cheap” - it almost feels like newsprint.

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It reminds me of the one manga magazine I have, in both size and paper. I feel like the paper in bunkobons is thinner, though that may or may not just be the different texture.

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Thanks for the answers, though it’s hard to know from those descriptions since I haven’t touched a newspaper in who knows how many years and I don’t own any manga magazines. :sweat_smile:

As an aside, Manga Time Kirara has skewed my expectations since those volumes have really thick, high quality paper. Everything else feels cheap by comparison. :laughing:

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Compared with the original Aqua/Aria tankoubon release (not the Masterpiece release), Nausicaa’s 7-volume release pages feel at best maybe 2/3 the thickness of Aria’s pages.

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I voted “start on the 10th” but what I really mean is “I’d be ready to start on the 10th, but if some people aren’t then I’m also OK to wait for them to get their copy of the manga or whatever”…

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Well to me it’s more a question of when I want to buy and read it. I think this club is a good excuse to accelerate that decision. Also thinking of getting Shuna as well.

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For me it was a matter of checking if I could get the books for a reasonable price, but it looks like even if you can find them second hand for cheap, shipping is gonna be high no matter what. Given that I don’t have much interest in this pick besides keeping my book club streak, I think I’m gonna skip…

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I voted June 17th because I have a slight preference for having no overlap with the current IBC, but it’s not a huge problem for me if we start earlier, so I’m fine with going with the majority vote.

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Ok, I’ve written up a schedule. Tried to put gaps at natural pauses in the story rather than just lopping volumes into two equal pieces, but that wasn’t always as possible as I might have liked. Divided the last volume into three due to its length - if we decide when we reach that volume that we’re confident enough to do it in two 110-page readings, we could rearrange, though the story in volume 7 doesn’t have many natural pauses, and the midpoint is definitely not one. Also, volume 7 is where it starts to get really philosophical.

I’ve left the start dates for the second part TBD so we can decide later on if we want to insert breaks between weeks.

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…and it arrived today. The box for the set is just a thin cardboard one so it’s not as nice as the slipcase for the Viz four-volume set, but it has served the purpose of keeping the manga inside nice. Plus there’s a poster inside volume 1 (carefully preserved by the original owner)!

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It’s shipped, should get it this friday. Would be good for me to finish reading 告白 before diving into nausicaa.

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Amazon shipped this in a bigger box with zero padding, so some hits to the enclosing wrapper. At least the manga itself is safe. Regarding the paper quality, it’s thick but somehow a little coarser than I expected?

Taking a brief look into the language, I’m going to have to transcribe this for myself for further study. Quite a bit above my comfortable reading level but I’m willing to work on this one.

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Got my copy! I’m hoping to keep up and read along.

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Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

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