Intermediate Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: セーラー服と機関銃

You don’t really have to delete your post. People pointed out the same thing before, sometimes in even harsher words, and I don’t think they deleted their post. :sweat_smile:

At the end of the day, I feel it’s less about enjoying the material than finding something that you can learn from. For a lot of people, I guess knowing the source material would be a huge help to understand what’s going on, making it a easier read regardless of actual difficulty.

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Aside from already having some idea what will happen making it easier to read, another possible reason for why people may want to read this one in particular is that it, if I recall correctly, also is written by the same person as the film, so I could see why some people who really liked the film may want to read it to get more details about stuff(since books usually portray things in more detail than film, and in this case it’s just not someone else adapting the film’s story into a book).

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I may have been one of those people. :eyes:

Yeah, I’ve made clear for a while that I have no interest in reading a book that’s been adapted from a film.

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Perhaps @ekadish realised that Your Name was made into a book by the filmmaker. Or possibly it was made into a film by the author - I’m not entirely clear on the order of operations. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Well, the movie came first, but obviously the material that was made to prepare said movie went into the writing of the book. Looking at reviews on bookmeter, it seems that some background stuff are much more clear in the book. :woman_shrugging:
Anyway, I’m fairly neutral to that, but YMMV.

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Well, that was tight, but once again we get a draw, plus a third place just one vote behind. Factor in that no book got 50% approval, and I think we are set for some extra voting shenanigans.
The options I see are: have a second vote with those three as options and/or read some in parallel.

  • Extra poll
  • Read top two in parallel
  • Other

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Edit: also, as mentioned, I am implementing the first round of nomination clean up.
Any nomination that did not manage at least 20% in one of the last three voting rounds gets automatically removed from the list.

Eliminated this time:

  • (Manga) Made in Abyss
  • (Manga) Land of the Lustrous
  • The Familiar of Zero
  • 紅霞後宮物語
  • The Closet of Nightmares
  • Door D
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This poll seems to have started out pretty uniformly at least.

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Well, 5 more votes for “poll” and an absolute majority of people will have said so. (I’m assuming that random passerby aren’t voting there, but anyway, it looks fairly consistent).

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I’m not going to vote since I didn’t pick any of the top options, but it seems pretty clear to me.

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That’s all the manga eliminated from the Intermediate club. Hmm…

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Yeah… also both my nominations are gone in one go :sweat_smile:
I’d like to read some manga, now that you mention it. I just don’t know any good one to recommend :frowning:

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Something perhaps a little older? Like Planetes? Or Negima?

GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class?

Or maybe something like Line, a single-volume manga, so there’s no need to worry about cliffhangers. Not too sure how easy that’d be to find, though.

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I maintain that reading a manga with intermediate book club would either be done too fast (one volume) or be prohibitively expensive (many volumes / whole series). You could always just create a random book club if there’s a series you really wanted to read with others.

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I’m sad about seeing 紅霞後宮物語 go! I was actually thinking about changing one of my votes to that, but I didn’t think it would matter. I’ll probably still try to read it on my own time eventually.

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What if we read both the first and second places if a manga wins? :thinking:

Yeah, it’s too far from the top anyway. I resigned myself after the second round of voting and read the first volume already, actually :sweat_smile: I really liked it too!

Oh, I remember Planetes being mentioned in the past! That could be nice. :thinking:

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Would it still only be one volume? I read a volume of manga in a week on average, and I assume that’s slightly on the slow side compared to others in the intermediate book club. What pace would you want the club to read a volume of manga at?

I still have the English version sitting on my book shelf, unread. I bought it over a year and a half ago. :sweat_smile:

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I have no idea; I don’t really know what’s a good pace for manga reading for the intermediate book club. I guess we should aim for at least 4 weeks of content. Considering the pace you mentioned, that would be two volumes, or one big “masterpiece edition”-like volume. (Since I do think it’s best to do a club at most at 50% effort, so that it’s possible to catch up if necessary and it gives time to check grammar etc in more details).
That doesn’t sound ridiculously expensive :woman_shrugging:

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I was in Kinokuniya on Sunday and spotted an “omnibus” edition of Planetes, with colour pages intact (which is honestly what made me think of mentioning it above), but I’ve honestly got no idea whether it exists in Japanese, or whether it’s just a new English release. English publishers seem to loooove omnibus editions, even if it makes the book unreadably thick.

Also saw Aria the Masterpiece volume two. Still planning to buy 5-7 so that my collection is complete, still tossing up whether I need to buy 1-4 so that my collection is uniform. Fervently hoping that Tokyopop doesn’t throw in the towel (again!) before they reach volume 5…

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I’ve never even heard of this but it looks pretty neat!

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I’d be up for reading Planetes with everyone (even outside of the normal book clubs) as long as it’s in December or later. I don’t plan on placing another order on Amazon until then. But it would be good to know sooner than then to make sure I don’t finally read my English copy at the worst possible time.

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