I seem to remember that’s how people felt after the first time the club ran 
and then I guess people get side-tracked and it’s either not their priority or they just read it themselves.
I’ll try to post some polls about this book tomorrow evening!
Also, this feels like an appropriate place to post this… Look who’s gonna be joining my household on Wednesday! 
No I don’t either is fine!
I just didn’t like the book enough to warrant ever reading the next one. 
Did you name the cat Jiji though?
Okay, ahem, definitely not a week late, here are some polls!
Huge congratulations to everybody who has made it through - this really is a pretty long book for beginners. If you’re still going, keep at it 
everybody is welcome to keep posting questions or thoughts in any of the discussion threads.
I know many people have posted their thoughts already, but that’s no reason to miss the opportunity for a good poll.
(5 is ‘excellent’)
0 voters
0 voters
0 voters
Any other comments on the whole ‘repeat club’ thing would definitely be very welcome and interesting.
I somehow sometimes found myself buried in the old book club comments, and that was disorienting. Also, it made it difficult to find the beginning of the repeat book club discussion.
I’ll be running the コンビニ人間 Repeat Club in a few weeks, and I plan on using a very similar system. As someone who often uses old bookclub forums to aid my reading, I would find it very frustrating to have multiple topics to dig through so I think the repeat club format is also helpful for people reading the books out of sync.
Could anybody who used it (or @Radish8 ) comment on having a head start schedule? Was it useful? Difficult to manage? Confusing?
Personally, I found them useful, but I didn’t attempt to go back and read everything. I would just search up a snippet of text if I was having difficulty, and sometimes it would already have been covered.
The head start schedule definitely made things a little confusing and, while I don’t want to under-play what a big difference it makes being able to ease slowly into a book, I think there’s a risk that it lures people in when they’re fundamentally just not ready to read the book. But it would be good to hear from anybody who followed the headstart schedule.
My main problem with the old comments was that originally, the chapters weren’t divided. So there wasn’t a clear cut and it made it difficult to follow.
At the end of the book, I’ve started reading whole chapter at once biweekly and it made it much more comfortable for checking old explanations.
Yeah, it’s important to remember that 魔女の宅急便 is a kids book, while コンビニ人間 is targeted towards adults. The content itself and the pace from the original book club make them fundamentally different, which is why the latter was read with the intermediate book club. Nothing says a reread group has to go at the same pace as the original book club, but if people want to read コンビニ人間 at 5-8 pages per week, to me it indicates that they’re not ready. And there’s nothing wrong with not being ready. Between 魔女の宅急便 and コンビニ人間 I read two other books: 時をかける少女 (another kids book) and キノの旅 (a light novel), not to mention a whole bunch of manga.
For me Kiki has too flowery language. I also didn’t like how it’s using hiragana instead of kanji, which is unfortunately a problem with basically all children literature.
Basing my opinion on 殺人出産, I think with Murata books, main difficulty is vocabulary, not grammar, because Murata’s grammar is very straightforward. Since I’m using Kindle, I can tolerate much more word look-ups than someone reading paper edition, so for me, 殺人出産 was actually an easier read than Kiki - and I did read the two of them more or less at the same time period. But if someone has to check all these words manually - I can see it becoming a problem and a serious slowdown.
The headstart was a little confusing for me too. This time I would rather start pre-reading by myself (and do as much as I can before we officially start) and then read it again together with everybody else for a better comprehension. With a whole month to prepare, I hope to be able to keep up the pace by then. But if this isn’t the case, I’ll give up and try an easier book.
I think I did find the head start helpful - mainly because my work schedule is very erratic and I was able to work around that. Also because I’ve found with every new book I’ve started, it takes a bit of time to get used to the style of language and orient myself to what’s going on.
Reading Kiki was a big jump in difficulty for me, but I also had no idea what the story was really about so the scene setting pages went over my head at first. By the end everything was much easier - probably helped by the extra vocab and grammar (and kanji!) I’d learnt in that time.
Actually, when I suggested the headstart in the first place, that was exactly what I had in mind 
and I never expected it to turn into a full-blown schedule of its own. But observing from the outside, it seemed that people were actively looking for this kind of “guidance” which I can totally understand - it is really hard to “just start reading” when you’ve never done that before.
I think the most confusing part was when we were on chapter 3, where we had like 4 weeks of reading in the normal thread, plus the headstart schedule which was kind of being merged into the regular schedule during that chapter. So we had this confusing 6-things-at-a-time thread going on 
I think for the newer book clubs where we stuck to the “one week - one thread” rhythm, if you decide to add a headstart schedule that basically splits the first few weeks in half, then I think that will eliminate a lot of the confusion because there will not be so much mixing and mingling between the discussions of the different timelines.
It might indicate that they are not ready for the intermediate book club pace, which is totally fine, I agree. But I wouldn’t say that they are not ready to read the book at all… You know that it is nearly impossible to find books aimed at Japanese natives that are suitable for beginners, and so I think anything is good as long as the reader is interested and willing to put in the effort. I think the book’s language is quite clear and straightforward (maybe with the exception of waffle-guy talking) and so why not? It will be a rough ride no matter what, and there is nothing wrong with trying (and of course there is nothing wrong with dropping the book and picking it up at a later stage if it doesn’t work out - that’s what I did with Kiki as well when it was read the first time around 
)
There were moments throughout the book where I did enjoy the flowery descriptive language, one example being the descriptions of the scenery during Kiki’s first flight to コリコ. It’s interesting to see how another language can flow poetically, and I think it can seem particularly beautiful from my outside perspective.
That being said I do often find more direct, straightforward prose to be more engaging, and I’m really looking forward to a big stylistic change of pace with Murata.
Thanks for starting this. It was my first book club and though I wasn’t super active in the discussion, it was very helpful to read others comments and have the deadlines as a check to make sure I kept going and stayed on pace with the group.
Thank you very much for running this book club! I didn’t manage to keep up with the group, but it was a nice experience to follow everyone’s comments, and the threads are still very helpful.
In reading, I had a big jump in difficulty going from Crayon ShinChan (my first book in Japanese, a manga) to Kiki’s. I ABSOLUTELY had needed to go on the early start schedule, which was “right-paced” for me. As it was only my second book club, I was not fully adept at reading through comments.
TLDR: As prereading, it was nice to be able to ask questions as I went. It seems possible once an old discussion is “unlocked” by chapter to ask questions even if you are not at all in synch.
I was very VERY grateful for the Anki vocab list. It was organized by chapter, but as it was my first Anki experience, I did not know how to organize the reviews by chapter (but it still helped me). As a beginner “punching above my weight”, I had to look up many words or sentence all through the entire book, but my reading got much faster (Tadoku-style).
I was very VERY glad that I coupled the reading with the audiobook! The audiobook seemed to access different channels in my brain, understanding on a different level.
The discussions BY CHAPTER were so so helpful, even having access to BOTH versions of the book club like that. It took A WHILE, but I would first scan the vocabulary worksheet for the chapter, try to gain some familiarity, then skim the comments and THEN try my read.
Audiobook: I was listening all of the time to the audiobook, regardless of the chapter (only understanding the odd word). As I got to it in the reading and REALLY understood each sentence, it was great. BUT without going back and reviewing, I was not able to listen and understand even after I had translated the writing! Fluency is a slow process that requires constant review… So not surprising.
Reading out loud. OMG, I found that this tickles my brain in even another way. Hopefully I am actually learning some. Now I am becoming a BIG fan of Satori Reader’s options of playing out loud each sentence (for shadowing) and an entire passage. I wish every book that I read was in that interface!
I really REALLY enjoyed the light novel over a manga, because it has more descriptive language, including describing how people say things. And I did really like the poetic aspects. As jhol613 said, it’s a window into the culture.
THANK YOU ALL FOR THE AWESOME BOOK CLUB.
I bought the box set too, before it was even picked first time, so yeah, I’d love that!
Just… need to finish book 1 first (I failed again XD I’m past half way both times, so have basically read half the book twice now, does that count as having read 1 book? )
I’ll finish it. Can easily get through a full chapter or two on a good day. Just haven’t had those lately =P (or rather had other priorities)
