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

I‘ve updated the thread header, hope it’s ok like this?

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If you ever wondered when it might be time to take the jump to the next level: Here is your chance ! The Beginner Book Club is currently voting and if you’re interested you could have a look at their proposals - maybe there is something in it for you?

Also, I can reassure that the Beginner Club gang is as friendly and helpful as the people you’ve met in here, so don’t be shy and try it out! :slight_smile:

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With an 11 week schedule for the next book, the book after that would be scheduled to start on Feb 5th. Assuming we go with the plan of reading the runner up in the poll afterwards, we’ll need someone to volunteer to run the Happiness book club. @eieio it was your pick so you are welcome to run the club. Otherwise would anyone else like to run this one?

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The 大海原と大海原 Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea Volume 2 Off-Shoot Club will be starting on November 20th. You can find the schedule at the Vol 2 Home Thread!

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Reminder: We’re starting ()(ぼし)カラーズ this upcoming weekend!

g2077

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The week one thread for Mitsuboshi Colors is live. For subsequent threads, I’ll only post about them in the main Mitsuboshi Colors thread.

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Would anyone be kind enough to change the title of this thread so that it reflects we are now reading Mitsuboshi Colours please? Thank you!

Edit - thanks @IzCreature!

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That’s apparently been my “thing” in the past, but I just discovered today that I’ve lost my Regular status. Tragedy!

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Just a reminder we still need a volunteer to run the Happiness book club scheduled to start Feb 5th.

“Running a book club” simply means:

  • setting up a home thread (you can copy a template from other book clubs)
  • agreeing a reading schedule
  • creating a vocab spreadsheet (or asking someone else in the group to do)
  • posting the weekly threads for discussion

You don’t have to:

  • complete the vocab spreadsheet - that’s a group effort
  • answer all the questions that are posted
  • be confident at reading

It simply needs someone willing to put it a little time to organise things. If it’s your first time there are lots of people that can help you out if you have any questions!

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Over in the 三ツ星カラーズ home thread, it’s under consideration to maintain a slower pace, bringing the club length to 18 weeks. (Here’s Micki’s post on it, which I agree with.)

If we extend, will that push out the start date of Happiness? Or would we overlap the end of one and start of another? (Would it be dependent on whether we get a volunteer to run Happiness?)

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I made a home thread for Happiness. I’ve gone for a start date of March 5th - based on current schedule for Mitsuboshi Colours, with the usual one week gap between books.

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I’ve been reading Mitsuboshi Colours and having a blast! It’s making me curious to do a bit more reading on my own to get some extra practice and I see there’s 12 books that have already been read in this club.

It’s been mentioned a few times that Mitsuboshi Colours is a bit harder than other books ranked in the ABBC, are there any of the previous books that are particularly easy to start with or should I just go in order? I’m probably most interested in Shirokuma Cafe, how does that one compare in difficulty?

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I can’t speak for all of them, but a few that I’d recommend from the list are:

  • レンタルおにいちゃん: Starts off on the easier side and steadily ramps up in difficulty over the chapters and volumes.
  • からかい上手の高木さん: Stays fairly easy throughout the series.
  • それでも歩は寄せてくる: Stays fairly easy throughout the series, and has short chapters.

It’s fairly easy from a grammar perspective. The main difficulties are that 1) some jokes/puns are based on (sometimes obscure) Japanese culture/media, so they may not make much sense, and 2) a lot of the vocabulary that comes up in jokes/puns are uncommon words. So long as you know this going in, it’s not a huge problem.

The best material is the one that interests you most.

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We read this in ABBC last year. Currently free to pick up volume 1 on Book Walker (that usually means it’s free on other digital stores too).

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Thank you. I just got the book to practice some reading!

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Assuming you are referring to それでも歩は寄せてくる, don’t forget to check out the discussion threads from the book club if you run into any headaches while reading!

And should you decide to continue with the series, we’ve just wrapped up Volume 3, and will be starting Volume 4 next weekend (this is a series which you can fairly safely jump into at any point, and play catch-up later if you should so choose!~)

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Hi all, I was wondering if there was a place to make a suggestion for an off shoot club? Now that 五等分の花嫁 is complete, I think it would be a great manga to read through.

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I mean you can nominate it for one of the bookclubs, though it might take some time until it is picked up by any of them.
If you want to absolutely read it soonish and are looking for people to read it with you, you can just create a thread with a similar format to any of the book clubs. It might be harder to find people since most offshoot clubs get going because enough of them liked the first book. Another consideration is that maybe people already are booked solid by bookclubs? But you’ll never know if you don’t try.
Gotobu is pretty well known though so I would say your chances are not bad.

Maybe try coming up with a shedule and start date, and depending on the difficulty create a thread where you make a poll to gauge the interest. Best case you find a bunch of people interested, worst case you made a nice reading shedule for yourself :smiley:

Ah, and since you are the initiator most of the organizational stuff (vocabulary sheet, making threads, gauging interest, etc) will fall on your shoulders.

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If a book club for 五等分の花嫁 were to come into existence, I would likely join. Haha. I’m currently reading it on my own, currently about halfway through Volume 4 at the moment.

I do think it would be a decent manga for a club to read. The only reason I haven’t suggested it is because it is a little hard to place on the difficulty scale. It has furigana, so that would push it towards the ABBC a bit, but the grammar and style of expressions makes me lean more towards BBC, which is already fairly inundated with a lot of suggestions. Plus the font gets really funky in some situations. There have been pages with 4 different fonts on the same page with varying degrees of readability. So, my indecisiveness has just led me to sit on it and read through it on my own for the time being. But if a casual club were to appear, I would be happy to pop in and chat about the manga! :grin:

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Out of curiosity, how much different is the grammar and stylised fonts from another ABBC manga like それでも歩は寄せてくる?

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