Absolute Beginners Book Club // Now Reading: Granny Girl Hinata chan!

I was thinking the same! But description say fairytales, stories AND poems/haiku, so a good mix.
My vote stays =P

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I have to say at this point that I really think there needs to be a conversation about curating the nominations / the difficulty of this club after this vote though. The marriage manga looks to my eyes like it would fit right in amongst the Beginners’ Club nominations, though I can only judge on the sample pages.

Apart from potentially discouraging people from voting in the Beginners’ Club because they assume it will be much harder, it could mean that this club is missing out on providing the ‘super easy’ material that genuine beginners are looking for, which seems like a huge shame.

You can’t rely on the voting to ‘curate’ this for you, because people of all levels will vote on things they’re interested in reading.

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The idea was to have a book club for easier books than the Beginner Book Club. For example they were reading “The Girl who jumped thought time” at that time.

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Which is a book that had been in the voting for the Intermediate Club :wink:

There will always be some overlap. Difference is the speed in which we tackle the items =)
I was able to read Girl Who Leapt Through Time with the Beginner Club, I would not have been able to get through it in the Intermediate club, as they go faster and cover less of the material in discussions.

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Eh, I guess I disagree, but it’s not my club! :slightly_smiling_face:

I can see the speed argument, but I certainly think using the hardest book we’ve ever tackled as the touchstone for what counts as easier than the Beginners’ Club is unhelpful.

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I’m just explaining when and why this book club was created. I wanted to join the “Beginner Bookclub” but it was way too difficult. And the one we did with @marcusp was ok level wise and very interesting… So I created the bookclub to continue his legacy :stuck_out_tongue:

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Shirokuma might have been hard for us, but the beginner club never chose it cause it was too easy/not challenging enough.

It is hard to find a hard edge is what I mean, to where one ends and the next begin.

I understand that (I was there :wink: ). I just worry about converging difficulty, or rather, a general drift upwards by all the book clubs, leaving us yet again with a vacuum where marcusp’s books sat (and both of our clubs with smaller pools of members!).

But if that happens I get to run my rogue Kitty Detectives club so I’m cool :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m not sure what to do with the difficulties of the books/manga here tbh, because I can’t really understand what is difficult or easy for “absolute beginners”. Seeing that the book is winning now, I won’t be able to say what speed we should do (and I won’t be able to read it), so I’ll need some help :sweat_smile:

And I’m not sure when to close the poll, the 2 top ones are really close :thinking: what should I do halp please

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Seems obvious to me. We’ve just had two mangas in a row. Close the poll, do the 10 minute book next, then the manga after that. (Though, I oughtn’t even say anything as I am offline August/Sept for a month and won’t be able to participate myself). Please don’t run another poll to decide what to do. Just make the decision! (Is my advice).

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@FlamySerpent I agree with @marcusp, just decide on your own when to close the poll. :wink:

If 10分 wins, I’d suggest 1 page per day for reading speed (and just one thread for the whole book). Looking at the sample pages, it seems to have a similar amount of text per page as naze doushite and we did 1 page per day for that.
Would take almost half a year to read it then but people can always join easily with every new chapter/story. But I’m not sure if deciding for the next book to follow (after 10分) now based on the current poll makes much sense then. Might be better to just vote again in a few months.

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Why not a thread per story? They seem quite different from each other (you go from Japanese stories, to a poem, to a science story (?). Makes it easier for new people to join in with each new story too.

Edit: @FlamySerpent I’m happy to help with any editing once you’ve decided what’s going to happen :+1:

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One thread per story would be fine, too, I guess. My suggestion is just based on how it worked with naze doushite and I didn’t see any disadvantages with just opening one thread (chapters and links to the posts where discussions for each chapter started were in the opening post).
I joined naze doushite later (and am now reading the first sections on my own with the help of the thread and I can navigate/scroll just fine) but it seems to me that only a handful of people participated towards the second half / end of the book (but all did so regularly), so I’m not sure if one thread for each chapter is necessary?

But it is all the same to me. I don’t really mind if it’s going to be one thread or several with one for each chapter.

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You could alternatively say “it seems to me that only a handful of people participated towards the second half, so perhaps more people would have joined in if we’d started a new thread” :wink:

Not saying people would definitely be more likely to join in at all, just that it’s hard to know with hypotheticals.

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Personally I find it less daunting to check out book from a book club after it is done, if it is divided into different threads (in some manner whether by reading per week or chapter or whichever). Because that way I have a smaller space to check out and know I’ll have checked all questions/answers about a certain section.

If everything is in one thread then someone could ask a question about page 5 when everyone is reading page 100, and I would have to use a search of the whole thread to find it. Or potentially ask the same question again, and also get that question completely out of order. However in a smaller thread dealing with a limited amount of pages, even out of order questions aren’t that far from the normal space they would occupy, plus the thread is smaller so less intimidating to explore.

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If someone starts a rogue club for 結婚 I would definitely join. I will probably skip the other book if it wins.

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As someone who’s read a book club book over nearly half a year, I wouldn’t recommend it. Since it’s a collection of short stories, the group might want to consider reading only the first X stories, so that it takes 2-3 months.

Just a thought.

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I think naze doushite took roughly 5 months as well. Can’t tell how others who participated (from the beginning) feel about it as I only joined for the last couple of weeks. But to me it didn’t seem that much of a problem? People will always drop out and only a couple will be left, whether it’s after 1 month or 4 months.

Maybe we can read half of the book together and all the ones left at the end who are interested can continue reading (simultaniously with a new abbc book/manga that has been voted on), maybe at a faster speed.

Because honestly, I want to read and buy these books mainly because of the book Clubs (it’s fun to read together). If I pay money for it, I want to read to the end. I don’t think I would read or buy them for reading on my own (or finish them on my own, at least not at the Japanese level that I’m currently at.)

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100% agree with all of this. I much preferred going through the threads for 時をかける少女 than for よつばと!or にゃんにゃん探偵団, which are the three past book clubs I’ve worked my way through so far. I ended up not needing to ask any questions (since they were already all answered in the various threads), but I wouldn’t have bothered with the one-thread books anyway because I would have needed to wait until I was done with the book, at which point I would definitely forget my question(s).

The one-thread book clubs are confusing messes, especially if anyone comes along after the fact and asks questions, but even people who are just behind the club cause it to get very messy very quickly.

Not to mention the added bonus of being able to see how many people are still reading along, etc. each week, which is motivating, at least for some people. And I always try to check in and discuss the reading at least a little bit, even if I don’t personally have any questions.

Yeah, it creates a bunch of threads, and many of them aren’t going to have a lot of posts during the week the club is reading the book. But so what? It’s a few thousand bytes on some server somewhere to create a new thread. I honestly don’t get the aversion to creating new threads, like it uses up some precious resource we only have a limited supply of, especially considering the benefits. The book club as-it-is-happening isn’t the only thing that should be considered.

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