"Flesh&Blood" Vol. 2 - Pirate Series Reading Club 🏴‍☠️ ⛵

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Oh, excellent! Great find there! Yet another level of detail I’m kind of shocked made it into the book.

So taking a look at our participant poll, me, ekg, and Pyororon have finished, and Nicole’s still working on it. I see we have a prospective new joinee (@Kiwiqp), while @sycamore’s put the book on hold? The reason I mention this is because I wanted to sound out when most people would be starting volume 3. We have a thread for it already (since ekg has already started), but I was wondering if the rest of the group had any particular dates they were gonna start in mind.

I think I should be good to start at any time; I’m reading 十角館の殺人 with the Natively book club, but since that’s on an actual schedule I can plan around it.

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Yep, now that 海辺のカフカ and 十角館の殺人 clubs will be going at the same time I decided to put this one on hold at least until I can scope out how much free reading time I have on top of those two. Unfortunately with the amount of unknown vocab I come across in this it’s not really a good candidate for something to read as a break for the other two!

I’ll get back to these once those book clubs are done, maybe sooner, but I wouldn’t worry about factoring me into any discussions on starting vol 3!

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I forgot to mention, but during the sounding scene in the BLCD adaption, it sounded like he was saying: “Weiserman deep!” :rofl: it was definitely easier to figure out while reading, though kana often are difficult. ^^;

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Thanks for checking back with me! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: I am planning to finish Vol. 2 early next week (or maybe over the weekend? Let’s see) and I would like to squeeze in Vol. 3 before the new ABC pick 狼と香辛料 starts on Aug 27th because I don’t know yet how difficult that is going to be… Although tbh currently Flesh&Blood is my slowest book (at ~8 pages per hour :sob:) so Spice and Wolf can’t be worse, right? …Right? :cold_sweat:

Anyways! Early next week would be a fine date for me to start Volume 3. :+1:

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I guess it’s up to you and me (and Pyororon, of course) since @sycamore 's taking a break unless @Kiwiqp mentions any particular timeline they’re working towards. Do you want to say, maybe the 17th as a starting date to give you time to finish vol. 2?

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Yep, sounds good to me! Let’s do this :+1:

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I don’t have any big reading commitments right now so I’m good to start sometime next week as well.

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Excellent; I look forward to seeing you all there! ^o^ Hopefully I can finish my initial research into F&B bonus materials by then (I keep finding more and more stuff :eyes:) and finally post my volume 2 questions.

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Chapter 6 comments:
So amazing how Jeoffrey can already drink wine in the morning, then pull off a fight later on, and finally swim in the ocean without being hampered in the least! I’m impressed :rofl:
On the other hand, I know that in medieval times people drank beer all the time because the alcohol was a way of preserving the water. But that didn’t mean that the beer was as strong as today’s beer - the alcohol contents was around 2%, is what I heard. Now I wonder whether it was the same with wine or different? Because if the grape juice is sweet enough, and if you don’t stop the yeast, then it will produce alcohol until all the sugar is eaten up or until the yeast kills itself through its own alcohol (which happens at around 14%). Maybe they didn’t have grapes that were as sweet as nowadays’ grapes though? :woman_shrugging:

For the fight, I thought it was a typical Japanese thing to talk about Jeoffrey’s “signature move” at the end… Felt pretty unnatural to me, but then again I’m not used to this type of books (written by Japanese authors).
And when (towards the end of the chapter) I read カイトの礼を聞くだけで、全ての苦労が報われた気になってしまうあたり、自分もおめでたい人間になったものだ I was like OMG the cringe is REAL! :scream: but then luckily Jeoffrey noticed the cringe himself and dampened it somewhat by ending the sentence in his head with と、ジェフリーは内心、苦笑を洩らした。 :sweat_smile:

Chapter 7 comments:

I was stumped for a sec as well but then was able to infer from context :sweat_smile: (I was once (a long time ago) taught by a group of Russians how to drink Vodka “properly”, and that reminded me a lot of Jeoffrey’s behavior :grin:)

Also thanks for sorting out the depth sounding! That helped me a lot.

Looking at the wikipedia page, the first paragraph closely matches the actions that are described in the book:

Tacking is a sailing maneuver by which a sailing vessel, whose desired course is into the wind, turns its bow toward and through the wind so that the direction from which the wind blows changes from one side of the boat to the other, allowing progress in the desired direction.

This is particularly apparent at the time when the yard swung around as if it was moving by itself, after the sailors had a hard time pulling it initially. (This effect is often used in movies for all sorts of comedic or dramatic effects, when a small yacht’s yard swings around and sends an unsuspecting (non-sailor) person overboard.) In our case we don’t have a small yacht (where the yard only extends to one side of the mast so it can swing around 180° or more) but we have a large ship where the yard extends to both sides of the mast, so the angle of movement is much smaller, and the yard is much higher up, so nobody should go overboard, but the effect is basically the same.

Anyways, I found them going through the narrow strait pretty unrealistic, even with the depth sounding, because imagine the depth suddenly decreasing dramatically - what can you do? You cannot stop the ship and take a different route out of the shallow water. So I think you can only realistically go through there when there is somebody on board who is guiding you - or when you have a proper sea map. But okay, maybe that’s where Jeoffrey’s character becomes visible? He just goes through there, no matter the risk.

For Kaito returning to the “hospital ward”, that was a pretty terrible moment, I’m sure. Especially with poor Jim having become septic… I mean it was a nice move of Kaito to use the lavender oil to refresh him, but I’m afraid if he really got septic (which means bacteria have entered the blood stream) then lavender won’t really cut it… and he is not able to produce anything that would help here, and not at that speed, as sepsis is pretty deadly pretty quickly.
If Kaito would remember his chemistry classes he could maybe try to produce some disinfectant by distilling wine or cognac or something (or just use the cognac as-is, maybe?), that would be a good start if Jim just had an inflammation but not yet a sepsis.
Let’s see what he has in stock for us :blush:

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Yeah, I noticed that as well. I guess you can try to headcanon it away by saying that Jeoffrey’s just kind of flamboyant and would have a “signature move”? Maybe?

That was exactly my thoughts toward it as well - it’s a risky, extremely dangerous move, but seemingly part of Jeoffrey’s success as a captain is taking those risks and being smart/brave enough to power on through them. I did appreciate how the person sounding was like, “Captain, I can’t swim. D:” and Jeoffrey reassured him that he wouldn’t let him drown.

This could be an interesting character moment for Vicente, too, if he sees that his opponent is willing to pull crazy stunts. We’ll have to see how impressed Vicente was, though.

Ah, so slightly unrelated, but can someone remind me what mission/reason Jeoffrey and co. are out here sailing for? Besides the whole Kaito thing. Did they have a specific destination/goal in mind that I’m forgetting about?

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I’m unsure if it’s properly defined/explained until vol 3? :thinking: because I can’t remember it being spelled out in so much detail in this volume…

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OK, so I don’t remember the full story, but that’s what I do remember: Drake tried to check on Kaito’s prophetic abilities and asked him where he would go to, and Kaito pointed to a Spanish town on the globe (I thought it was so cool that he had a globe, actually; I wonder what it looked like? Half white or something? :sweat_smile: Anyways) and then Jeoffrey said, no you’re wrong, but Drake said that he had made up his mind and had changed plans without telling anybody, and that Kaito was right. This only relates to Drake’s travel plans, of course, but I somehow assumed Gloria was also headed there. And also of course they needed to leave in a rush because they wanted to hide Kaito from Walsingham (who is like head of MI6). Other than that, details elude me :sweat_smile:

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I think they’ve said they’re going to Spain but I’m not sure where specifically, I remember since they were leaving earlier they were gonna go attack some Spanish merchant ships to kill time and make some money before meeting up with Drake at some point.

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Yeah, this is as much detail as I think is mentioned in volume 2, while volume 3 actually mentions the specific heading. Though, I guess, looking back, it was hinted at in vol 2? :thinking: I won’t say more, as you’ll read about it soon enough. ^^

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Oh, this is definitely it. :eyes: Now that you mention it, the mission was spelled out in volume 2.

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Chapter 8 comments:

What a sad ending for poor Jim! :cry: On the other hand, anything but his death would have been a big surprise. I think Kaito would need to up his reputation and get involved in the treatment from the start in order to be able to make a difference… Anyways. There are many volumes still to come, where he can take advantage of his modern-day scientific education. For now, he managed to establish himself as a devoted and reliable person, which is the best he can aim for in his position - especially when he and Jeoffrey get closer… which otherwise might trigger the dislike of the others? I think he preempted that nicely now.
I also like how Nigel and Kaito got closer. It felt a bit too frictionless (just like Jeoffrey said as well) but maybe Nigel is really so loyal and also brave that he can turn around that quickly.

In other words, I finished the second volume! It took me 3 weeks altogether (but I read other books as well in that time), with a total reading time of 26 hours (i.e. ~8.4 pages per hour). :face_with_monocle: I’m planning to improve this over time though :grin:

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Congratulations! :partying_face: Depending on how long we keep chugging through this series, there’ll be plenty of practice, haha. I can’t wait to see how I’ve improved by the end.

And thank you all for the replies re: their mission! Glad to see the wasn’t something I had accidentally glossed over or anything. Although, it seems like most of that info was given in volume one and not volume two, right?

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Yes, there we had the episode in Drake’s house. In Vol. 2 we just get a quick mention in the last chapter that Jeoffrey & co. will head toward the Canary Islands to find some enemy ships they can fight against.

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Okay, cool. Guess I need to reread that last chapter, then; I knew they were headed to the Canary Islands, but was unclear on why they picked that particular destination.

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Yeah, I think I messed up by implying it was from vol 2. it’s during the scene at Drake’s house. Like @NicoleIsEnough says. :slight_smile:

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