Hi all. It’s time to pick a new book for Absolute Beginner Book Club to read. The なぜ book we have been reading finishes in a couple of weeks. We also have the doggy detectives book running as a spin off club, which goes through to September. We are up to the third of five volumes in that series.
There have been a mix of approaches to picking a book in the past. We’ve had some clubs where someone just picked a book and invited everyone else. And we’ve had some rounds of nominations and polls to pick a book.
The なぜ book has been enjoyable and a nice reading level. There are several others in the series at grade 2 level, and the grade 3 books don’t look dissimilar in difficulty.
Personally I think we’ve done a lot of “book” books recently and that it’s time to tackle a manga again at absolute beginner pace. The more formal style prose books are great, but we need to balance that with the wealth of natural spoken Japanese that comes from a manga reading.
I wondered about a reread of Yotsuba volume 1, originally read by the Beginner’s Book Club in 2017. But: it’s not available as an ebook, which has been important to a lot of people when we’ve discussed books previously.
There are a few manga nominations already but the one that really stands out to me as a good absolute beginner pick is Big Brother Rental which @ChristopherFritz nominated in this post.
I’m tempted to just go ahead and set up a thread for reading Big Brother Rental, but wanted to check first if anyone else had any strong ideas, or perhaps if there’s a strong appetite for another round of nominations followed by a poll.