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

I think that’s more the fault of the screenshot format than anything; when I view the actual preview, it’s no worse than any other digital manga I’ve read. (Well, some of the background text is a bit smaller than I’m used to, but still legible).

1 Like

Slam Dunk (スラムダンク)

Summary

Taken from MAL:

Hanamichi Sakuragi, infamous for his temper, massive height, and fire-red hair, enrolls in Shohoku High, hoping to finally get a girlfriend and break his record of being rejected 50 consecutive times in middle school. His notoriety precedes him, however, leading to him being avoided by most students. Soon, after certain events, Hanamichi is left with two unwavering thoughts: “I hate basketball,” and “I desperately need a girlfriend.”

One day, a girl named Haruko Akagi approaches him without any knowledge of his troublemaking ways and asks him if he likes basketball. Hanamichi immediately falls head over heels in love with her, blurting out a fervent affirmative. She then leads him to the gymnasium, where she asks him if he can do a slam dunk. In an attempt to impress Haruko, he makes the leap, but overshoots, instead slamming his head straight into the blackboard. When Haruko informs the basketball team’s captain of Hanamichi’s near-inhuman physical capabilities, he slowly finds himself drawn into the camaraderie and competition of the sport he had previously held resentment for.

Personal Opinion

The first few volumes are limited furigana wise, but is very readable for new learners. The dialogue is fun and the vocab is easy enough. You can enjoy it in it’s entirety without being a Japanese expert and the pacing feels good. Its level 23 on Natively but I think its a good fit for ABBC because if you do keep with the series they add furigana and it gets easier to read with time. Its also one of the greatest manga of all time by one of the best mangaka of all time… So a great motivator to keep reading and find high quality content with a low bar for entry.

Pros

  • Limited furigana but easy to read kanji.
  • Easy grammar and words.
  • Good pacing and encouraging if you feel you’re a slow reader.
  • Excellent characters that feel like real people.

Cons

  • Limited furigana in the first couple volumes.
  • Some slang can be hard to understand but good to know.
  • Text heavy in some areas in the beginning.

Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this book?

  • No effort at all
  • Minimal effort
  • Moderate effort
  • Substantial effort
  • So much effort my head might explode :exploding_head:
  • I don’t know

0 voters

8 Likes

Thanks for the submission! Do you happen to know if there are digital copies available for that manga? I’m having trouble tracking one down to try and grab some previews. :joy:

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I don’t think they exist but they had been republished fairly recently.

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I take it back… they exist but not officially if you catch my drift.

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ルリドラゴン ・ Ruri Dragon

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Summary

Availability

Physical: Amazon JPCDJapan

Digital: KindleKoboBOOK☆WALKER

Personal Opinion

I like cute things. I like absurd things. Enter Ruri Dragon.

As far as premises go, this seems like a fantastic combination of “cute” and “absurd”. And despite the abnormal situation, it seems like it’s mostly a slice-of-life set at a school, so it hopefully it isn’t too hard and has useful daily life vocab.

Pros and Cons for the Book Club

Pros

  • Slice-of-life + school setting
  • …with a cute half-dragon girl!
  • Furigana
  • Generally not too much text per page, with most speech bubbles on the shorter side
  • Natively L20
  • 25 minutes of official voiced-over manga on YouTube (here, plus the two following videos in the playlist - there are gaps in the story between the videos) to train your listening comprehension!

Cons

  • First part of a series currently on “indefinite hiatus” due to author’s poor health :cry:

Pictures

First Three Pages of Chapter One



Additional Pages









Two pages from school later:


The page with the longest sentences/speech bubbles I found in the preview:

Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this book?

  • No effort at all
  • Minimal effort
  • Moderate effort
  • Substantial effort
  • So much effort my head might explode :exploding_head:
  • I don’t know
0 voters
19 Likes

Gotcha! If you could snag some photos of the first few pages (assuming you own it/have a way to do so), I would appreciate it! It makes it easier for folks (it’s me; I’m folks. :joy:) to judge how difficult it would be for them to read! :grin:

5 Likes

First three chapters available for free on Shonen Jump Plus - pretty sure it used to be all six, but I guess they removed some. You can get all six in English on the Viz website, though.

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Yeah, I’ll take pics of my collection at home and share.

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Sweet! Much appreciated!

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This is so cute! I’d be more interested in the prequel lmao. Despite having my reading schedule set for the next year, I’m tempted to join if this one gets picked, especially since there’s only one volume out so far, right?

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Yeah. And due to the indefinite hiatus (see “cons”) probably for a while, sadly…

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Oh my…

although that only increases the chances of my participation tbh :see_no_evil: I hope it returns shortly after the book club devours it

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A few months ago, during the last nomination period, we talked about Nagatoro being a possible candidate, but also the fact, that it would have to be put to vote, if it should be even allowed as a nomination, because of the contents of it (bullying, sometimes heavy fanservice, etc etc).
I do think it would be quite a good fit for the club, it has a quite everyday style (with actually both a slangy and a more formal speech pattern being used at the same time), it’s easy to pick up, and it’s quite nice, once it sheds its skin of an ecchi manga one or two volumes in.

Here be dragons for those that want to read the conversation about it from july. Not sure if it’s completely off the table, I would still definitely participate, even as a past reader.

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Honestly I think the controversies surrounding the series is greatly exaggerated and people don’t get that its essentially what if the roles were reversed and the girl teased the boy she liked. Its basically a PG version of 高木さん.

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tbf, 高木 got complained too, but somehow it survived. (It concerned me a little as well.)

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I honestly had forgotten about potentially nominating it. I personally have no problems having it as a nomination, though I don’t know that I want more than 2 of my own nominations going at once. :sweat_smile:

With that in mind, though, putting it to a vote probably wouldn’t be the worst thing, simply because it does skirt the line of being NSFW (in the first volume, at the very least) and is doing so in a way that can make light of some situations that could make folks uncomfortable.

Should Nagatoro-san be allowed to be a nomination? (Votes are anonymous!)

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

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I just discovered that part of Ruri Dragon has 25 minutes of official voice-over on YouTube, and it’s super fun to watch:

(Part 2, Part 3, part 4)

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Hey! I’m hoping to join the club for the next book, but I’m confused about the voting process. If I vote that a book would be a higher difficulty for me, does that hurt its chances of getting picked?

My reading level is low enough that I’m marking things Moderate, but I’m up for the challenge, and I don’t want it to penalize books that I’m genuinely interested in.

8 Likes

This is just a gentle nudge to any of the folks here who might be newer to the club, or reading in general:

Voting in the difficulty polls really helps us determine whether a pick would be a good fit for the club. As it stands, most of the votes for recent picks heavily weigh in the direction of labeling the picks as super easy, but they are also mostly from names and faces I recognize from both this club and higher-level clubs, so it’s sort of a false positive in that sense. :joy:

If you are still in the earliest stages of your journey, I really want to hear your voice and see your thoughts on the nominations, because ultimately, this club is for you.

Many of us who still are nominating and voting and discussing nominations are here because we want to help folks get a leg up while reading. Speaking personally, many of the nominations in the ABBC at this point are well below my level of difficulty in terms of what I can read and tackle, but I’m here because I know that being around more experienced readers was how I got my footing and was able to dive headfirst into reading, and I want to pay it forward, so to speak!

My votes in the difficulty polls are pretty much just intended to spark people to vote (when you see 0 people voting, it gives the implication that you don’t need to, after all), and I actually completely disregard my vote when I calculate out the difficulty rating for the final poll, but if I were to hold that standard up to the folks who I know are capable of reading at a similar level to me, we would effectively have only a single vote currently (thank you for voting! We need that!)

Anyway, my rambling aside, I just want to encourage people to vote in the difficulty polls, and also to bring out the point that as of right now, if you are feeling discouraged because you see something that would be difficult for you being rated super easy and are having doubts about whether you are ready for the club because of that, to not pay too much heed to how those votes look at the moment! :grin:

Great question! No, rating a book as a higher difficulty for you does not hurt its chances in the poll (just take a look at our most recent picks to see that in action. They are the two hardest picks we have ever had in the club, and they both won handily). The only time that I would take difficulty into account as potentially disqualifying a pick would be if I start to see a huge amount of “So much effort my head would explode”. That would indicate to me that maybe the pick is too high of a level for the club. And even that, I would likely put into a poll before removing it.

The idea behind the difficulty polls is purely to try and let us roughly average out a number for what that difficulty might be in comparison to all of the current picks in the club, so that when we go in for our final vote, we can see a scale of difficulty ranging from 1 to 5, and get sort of a side-by-side to try and inform people’s votes a bit more.

23 Likes