Beginner Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: 気になってる人が男じゃなかった // Next 葬送のフリーレン, then ウスズミの果て

This is the right topic, yes. But if you look at the first post you’ll see that the next two books have already been selected, so the books have been decided into mid-March. That means there will probably be another poll at the end of January or beginning of February.

This is decided per poll by simply voting for the books or manga you want to read at the time. You don’t vote for a style. You vote for a specific book/manga. The first post also includes the current list of nominations. In the Beginner Book Club (here), most of the options/winners are manga, but regular books do get picked as well. In the Intermediate Book Club, it’s mostly books.

Also, it looks like there are only six nominations right now, so feel free to nominate some more options if you have something specific in mind.

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Master List of Book Clubs says that your next book is still TBD

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Sounds like whoever’s running those book clubs needs to add them to the master list then.

Unfortunately that position is a bit vacant since Radish disappeared some time ago; @Shadowlauch was so kind as to run the most recent poll but I don’t know whether we can persuade them to take on the full responsibility for this book club.
(Although we could try :thinking:)

And no, I won’t run the club because it doesn’t make any sense imo to have a single person run the three three of the main book clubs :no_good_woman:

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I’m open to the idea of running this club, it is just a bit hard to grasp how much effort it would take. It would be great if you could give me a quick rundown of the main responsibilities.

My current guess:

  • Keep the thread up to date
  • Run the next book polls
  • Update beginner club in the master book club list
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doesn’t this mean it should be simple to manage for an experienced expert such as yourself
tehehehehehe :laughing:

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this is actually a good point…there are no FAQs/Go-Bys for people that do want to run a bookclub, and no one really knows what they are getting into…

not sure if our resident experts cobbled something together… (sticky bookclub post?) might help manage expectations for those jumping in… if it truly is easy, then might not be too bad to get more people helping…

for me… I know I cannot fully commit at this time and don’t want to let anyone down…but if I knew exactly what was required, could see about managing time and maybe provide some support for the community that has always been so helpful with my own dumb questions about the books

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I knew my persuasion skillz would work out in the end :sunglasses:
erm, I mean
That’s great to hear, thanks! :sweat_smile:

Yeah, good point! Well you guessed the most important points already. Here is a slightly more complete list (please don’t be shocked, most of that is not much work as such):

  • Keep the OP up to date (especially the list of nominations, of past books, of polls and their results, and retire unpopular nominations from time to time)
  • Keep an eye on the dates, i.e. “when is the next poll to be held”
  • Ask for new nominations periodically, especially close to the next poll (but make sure we don’t exceed 20 nominations as that’s the max number of poll entries)
  • Run the book polls (including calculating the difficulty ratings)
  • Check back with nominators of the poll winners whether they are ready to run their book club (or else try to find somebody else who will run the club)
  • Update beginner club in the master book club list (something I’m very very bad at myself, sorry everybody :innocent:)
  • Whenever necessary, update the thread title or ask a regular to do it (e.g. during nominations phase, during polling phase, whenever a new book club starts)

Oh absolutely! I’m not refusing because it’s not simple but because it’s dangerous.
In software development there is a term called “truck factor”: How many trucks does it take to remove enough people from a project (by running them over) so that the project cannot proceed and needs to be terminated? The closer the number is to 1, the riskier the whole thing is. In our case the project is “the book clubs”, therefore I’m convinced that we should spread the knowledge (and load) across several people.

That would be a-frickin-mazing! :+1:

Do I sense a first contribution from your side? :grin:

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Standby…

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Thank you for the detailed list. I think I can handle that (except for the changing of the title)

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You can always ping me or other regulars whenever the need arises :+1:

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I was just teasing…you already do so much haha

Nice try :stuck_out_tongue: Maybe at some point but right now…I know I cannot fully commit and would likely end up flaky and that’s just not good for anyone…I wouldn’t mind running some or helping sometime but for me…when I say I’m going to do something … I actually do it… so it may seem my answer is wishy washy, but I don’t just go half in…I go all in when I take on responsibility so hence my hesitation. Right now…probably not good…but maybe next year some time… Will see where I am in a 2-3 months.

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Oh no! Are we not considered one of the main book clubs down in the ABBC! :cry:

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Oh dang! My apologies :weary:

Of course you are! Let me fix that…

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While I completely agree that we shouldn’t push all the burden onto any one person….

May I suggest that we construct truck/bus proof fortifications to protect our strategic NicoleRauch reserves?

please don’t take me seriously

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Luckily you didn’t say „resources“ :face_vomiting:

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On a completely different note. The difficulty poll of the nomination I posted a couple of days ago seems to lean towards the “Substantial effort” category. I wonder if this manga might be better fit for the intermediate book club. If someone who is more familiar with the difficulty of that club could have a look at the preview, that would be much appreciated!

Also if one of the regulars could updated the title from “Coming soon” to to “Now reading” that would be great!

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Manga with little furigana can be really difficult for the beginner book club unless there’s relatively little text. For example, 少女終末旅行 doesn’t have much text so I think it was fine. But the new nomination seems fairly dense.

You could probably move it to intermediate book club, but they don’t pick manga very often over there. So who knows if it would ever get picked.

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Title changed :+1:

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Thanks for the insight. I moved it over to the intermediate book club.

Thanks!

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