Advanced Japanese Book Club (Now reading: 本陣殺人事件)

Japanese Language Reading
#374

I wondered about that as well :wink:

Well, I did not “plan” to run it, at least not without explicitly checking back. For now I thought I’d nudge you a bit and see what happens :laughing:
Anyway, I don’t mind either way. I don’t want to “force my way in” at all, but if I can be helpful, then here I am. (I’m guessing that your workload won’t lessen any time soon, given the recent developments…) So I was thinking maybe if we both run the two clubs as a team, with a bit of “shared responsibility”, that might work out quite well?

By the way, there is something I wanted to ask for quite some time now. I see that the OP’s (of the Intermediate and Advanced clubs) contain the list of nominated books with quite a bit of their nomination posts duplicated. Is there any reason for this (other than “that’s what the other clubs did before”)? I’m asking because it somewhat goes against my need for maintainability (it requires effort to copy the stuff over, and the OPs get so long that they are much harder to edit) and non-redundancy. And if it doesn’t serve a real purpose, maybe we can get rid of that altogether? I’m thinking of just keeping a list of the links to the nomination posts, plus the difficulty levels. What do you think?

3 Likes
#375

Indeed. Well, technically I was pretty free during the new year’s break, but sadly that’s ending today…
I’m back to a busy schedule until the end of February.

That’s really helpful, actually! To be completely honest, considering I’m spending less and less time on the forums, I was wondering if someone could take charge instead of me. Even just having shared responsibilities would be very helpful. (We will have to decide how to split them, though).

The main reason was to make it possible to see all data at a glance, rather than having to use the links to jump back and forth between the original post and the nomination posts. :confused: I usually care about the content of the book rather than the difficulty, so it’s convenient for me at least. It’s not like I remember the summary of books that were nominated two years ago. Well, except for 君の名は, but that’s a special case :rofl:

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#376

Sure, no worries! I will run the Intermediate club poll then.

That would work for me! I’m a bit hesitant to fully commit because my workload is quite unpredictable, and this way we both have a safety net.

I was thinking of a somewhat “organic” approach: If one of us feels that something should or needs to be done, we can raise this and then the other can chime in (“That’s unnecessary” / “I would like to do that” / “Please go ahead”) or something? This way we can be flexible wrt workload and other interests. (So, basically what we did for the two clubs very recently.) What do you think?

Hm, I see. I personally would rather open each nomination post in its own tab and jump between those, because opening them all in the OP still requires a fair deal of scrolling. But I know that different people use browsers very differently. OK, so what about this: Let’s keep the descriptions but remove all other information (e.g. there are the amazon links and maybe other stuff in there as well for some nominations at least). Also, I guess there is no need to keep those descriptions for the historical nominations? I.e. those that got either picked or removed. Eliminating those and replacing them with just the nomination links would help me a lot already.

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#377

For what it’s worth I really appreciate having it all in the op. I exclusively use my phone for browsing atm, and the mobile app of the forum doesn’t support tabs. :stuck_out_tongue:

Your compromise sounds perfect to me.

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#378

I have my copy of suspect X ready to go. Will the OP be edited after the book starts to show goals and progress as the weeks go by?

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#379

Every book club has it’s own “home thread”, which contains the schedule and most other information. Generally there are new threads created every week for that week’s assigned reading. Make sure you’re following the home thread so you don’t miss when the weekly threads are posted.

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#380

maybe shouldn’t have, but i updated the topic and the title

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#381

Thank you very much! I totally forgot about that :woman_facepalming:

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#382

With only 7 weeks left on the current book (including this week), I guess it’s time to ask for nominations again!
I guess I’ll put up the poll in 10-14 days (to leave enough time for nominations and voting on said nominations)

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#383

Great! By now I have mostly automated the generation of the poll entries (including difficulty rating) so if you’d like, I can send you the generated poll entries when you plan set up the poll.

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#384

Oh! I’ll take that, yes. Or if it’s less hassle for you to just post the poll, don’t mind me!

#385

Oh, no, I’m totally fine with you running the poll, if you’re ok with that as well. I’ll send you the entries close to the date.

Regarding the discussion re: cleaning up the book club OPs, I’ve established a table to keep track of the low-interest books for this club. What do you think about it?
(If you like it, I’d try to establish something similar for the Intermediate Book Club as well.)

I’ve set the threshold at 10% because there are so few people voting here, which naturally causes the number of votes per entry to be lower on average than what we see in the Intermediate Club.
For comparison I figured out which entries would get removed with a 15% threshold, and it turns out that we’d kick out 5 entries after the 3rd poll (i.e. now)… which I think is not a good idea on many levels.
So I’m totally in favour of the 10% threshold. How does that feel for you?

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#386

Sure, 10% sounds good for this club. Thanks for that!
For the intermediate book club, I still need to do the clean up, but we could compare the results based on both methods. :thinking:

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#387

Can someone tell me what the next winner will be, so I can add it to my book order.

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#388

Just order them all :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

(And some are on Aozora so you can even read them for free)

But seriously, can you hold back on ordering for another week or so? Then we should know better.

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#389

I guess. I’ve just been meaning to order for forever, and still don’t have my copy of 容疑者Xの献身. I’ve read the first two weeks parts through a sample and need to know what happens next :rofl:.

Do we have an author limit in the nominations?I kinda liked the idea of reading Norwegian Wood, since it’s a standalone unlike the current ones. I can’t leave it just one part read, but not sure if I have the mental energy for a thousand page series atm :smile:. But it’s a bit boring if half the list is Murakami…

Incidentally, my Japanese friend recommended Masquerade Hotel as her favorite Keigo book, when I told her I’m reading him atm. I also found out there’s Masquerade Night and Masquerade Eve…

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#390

Shoot, I totally forgot to get back to you!

I wondered about that as well… Like you said, it might get a bit boring, but on the other hand it might also be worthwhile to include a standalone book, like you said. As we don’t seem to be flooded with proposals, I totally would not mind if you nominated it.

I didn’t even realize it was also written by him :woman_facepalming:
(I got it from my Japanese host father, who had read it and thought it was good, and then I lent it to Belerith who nominated it here :upside_down_face:)
It is a bit on the brink of getting kicked out in the next poll, so hopefully some people are interested in the author by now and will vote for it…

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#391

Is that a book written by Keigo, or in Keigo? :stuck_out_tongue:

The movie based on that book was screened in the Japanese Film Festival here back in 2019. I wanted to see it, but sadly I couldn’t fit it in. Can’t remember if I was seeing something else at the same time, or if it was just on at an inconvenient hour.

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#392

虐殺器官 - Genocidal Organ

Author: 伊藤 計劃 （いと けいかく）
Alias: Project Itoh

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Summary

Japanese

９・11を経て、“テロとの戦い”は転機を迎えていた。先進諸国は徹底的な管理体制に移行してテロを一掃したが、後進諸国では内戦や大規模虐殺が急激に増加していた。米軍大尉クラヴィス・シェパードは、その混乱の陰に常に存在が囁かれる謎の男、ジョン・ポールを追ってチェコへと向かう……彼の目的とはいったいなにか？ 大量殺戮を引き起こす“虐殺の器官”とは？ ゼロ年代最高のフィクションが電子書籍版で登場。

English

Genocidal Organ takes an introspective look at a post-9/11 future, exploring freedom, security, and a bizarre shift in terrorism throughout the world. After a homemade bomb decimates Sarajevo, developed countries rely on advanced surveillance to free them from the threat of terrorism. But while the United States enjoys heightened security, the nations it once considered threatening are mysteriously plagued by genocide within their own borders. Strangely, these massacres all link back to one American by the name of John Paul. Special agent Clavis Shepherd is sent to capture the elusive target, but even with combat meds to numb the pain and a life rooted in the bliss of ignorance, nothing can prepare this soldier—or the world—for the truth behind humanity’s darkness. [/details]

Length: 391 pages
Category: Fast?

Availability

Amazon??
Bookwalker

Personal Opinion

According to Wikipedia “A poll by the yearly SF magazine SF ga yomitai ranked Genocidal Organ as the number one domestic SF novel of the decade.”, so it seems to be a staple of the SF genre. There’s also a movie and manga adaptation. He was also a friend of Hideo Kojima. “Kojima noted Itō as being one of the only people who understood the themes and morals in his video games.” “He[Ito] died at age 34 on March 20, 2009[Due to cancer]” :/. He also has a another SF ga yomitai winner Harmony.

Sample Pages

Sample pages available above at Bookwalker.

(Poll in next post so this can be edited. Is that a discord bug? Not being able to edit posts with a poll :thinking: )

5 Likes
#393

Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this book?

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

0 voters