Oops, I’m being a dumb dumb. I even read it and voted in the poll. In my defence, it’s so cold in my office that I can’t type properly, so I’m pretty sure my brain processes have slowed down. A bit like a reverse Terry Pratchett troll.
Yep, that’s definitely it.
Do people in other countries read Terry Pratchett? Is he just an English thing? Oh god now I’m filled with doubt about everything.
The sample for Penguin highway is clocking in at [less than] 1670 unique words and has 760ish kanji. Porepore Nikki gave me an insanely useless sample that consisted of the cover, the splash pages, and the table of contents.
Anyway, Penguin Highway will probably be more suited for the intermediate book club? The beginner club might be able to do it but you’ll definitely lose some people (considering some people thought Kiki was too hard)
Yeah, as @Radish8 said, Penguin Highway is simply too long for the beginner book club. Maybe you can get people in the intermediate book club to read it since they could read it at a much faster pace.
I do plan on nominating 時をかける少女 though, which is much more reasonable at about 160 pages. Have you already read that?
@Radish8 Do you think we should set a rule for the max pages a novel can be for nominations? I’m thinking no more than 200 pages which at 10 pages a week would be 5 months. And even that’s pushing it.
No but I think that and Porepore Nikki would be suitable books. It might be a fun read (although you’d have to make sure they get the Tsubasa Bunko version for Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo)
I think that would be a good idea. As you say, 200 pages would still probably be too long, but at least it would stop people nominating anything totally ridiculous (and would make people consider that factor when deciding whether or not to nominate something).
If it’s an easier book and we could read it faster it’s unlikely to be so long anyway.
We read him in France, and the translation is amazing, making original puns with the characters names.
it makes communication difficult sometimes since it’s difficult to know who is who. At least, Rincewind, Weatherwax and Death have their names literally translated.
We should do a Floflo club at some point. Like not even joking, I know that sound super shilly but like if the entire group uses Floflo it becomes a lot easier to figure out what kind of pacing the group can go at and you can determine right off the bat if it’s possible for you to keep up.
I… guess? But then, what if you can’t? Plus, vocab isn’t everything, you still need grammar.
Even if you get a group of people to use floflo, nothing says they will have similar skills.
I’d rather recommend floflo to people in a given group rather than go the other way around.
I mean you know something about them - that they do or don’t know enough words to keep up if they learn a reasonable amount of words a day.
Any book club is gonna have people come in whose grammar isn’t up to par, but that’s why it’s a book club instead of a solo reading right? You got people who are better and people who are worse, and the better people help out just like a normal book club. You just get the extra metrics to determine a book’s difficulty and a premade vocab list.
Yes, but then the criteria can’t just be “using floflo”, or you’ll have a huge distribution of skills. So you are left with either making separate floflo groups based on beginner/intermediate/advanced (might as well keep the current structure) or have the club pick stuff that are “average” in terms of difficulty all the time. Might be frustrating for both beginners and advanced learners.
That being said, if you set it up, I’ll join anyway.
I’d really rather limit it to 160, but then we’d basically never be able to nominate books, hence 200. Kiki was about 240 pages by the way.
With Kiki we did 10 pages a week, which was really tough at the beginning and really easy at the end. But even just 10 pages a week resulted in almost everyone dropping out, so…