Intermediate Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: セーラー服と機関銃

Yeah, rather. A page of Haruhi has a lot more words than a page of something like なぜ?どうして?

4 Likes

I’ll try to make a discussion thread for 魔法少女育成計画 this weekend. So far it’s more challenging than コンビニ人間, that’s for sure. I find that I’m often not understanding a lot of what’s going on, and I’m only getting the basic gist of what’s happening. I feel like if I was better it would be intentionally vague/disjointed, but understandable. I’ve only read 8 pages of chapter 1 so far though, so hopefully it’ll settle down a bit soon (looks ahead and sees that the next three pages is a wall of text :scream:).

6 Likes

Wait aren’t books always walls of text

Am I reading the wrong books

10 Likes

As in, nearly every column is fully written in and there’s no dialogue for three pages. :sweat_smile:

Also, third person narration seems to be harder than first person narration.

1 Like

The beginning was kind of disjointed, sure. It jumps from points of view a bit too often and it’s hard to figure out what’s going on because there’s quite a bit of information missing. It becomes easier soon in that regard, at least.

5 Likes

And here it is. I wonder how many people will actually join.

4 Likes

I’d join immediately if I wasn’t already busy with other stuff, but I’ll read it in a while, so at least one(more realistically I’d guess at least five or six though based on how many people expressed interest when you mentioned it before and the other similar discussion threads for other books)

2 Likes

I’ll lurk at least :stuck_out_tongue: Everything else depends on the pace honestly. I’m debating putting Haruhi to the side until next year since I’m behind anyway, so if I do it becomes quite a bit more likely I manage to keep up.

The pace is whatever you want because there’s no schedule. :wink:

1 Like

That’s the worst pace to keep up :joy:

10 Likes

Then keep up with me. :stuck_out_tongue: I’m on page 19.

1 Like

What’s your pace? :smiley:

Well I’d like to finish by the end of November, but that would be 28 page pages a week, so probably not going to happen. Realistically I’ll try for 15-20 pages a week.

2 Likes

I could aim for 15 to 20 maybe. On what page does it actually start, btw, so I know what to do with your 19 pages? :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes

It starts on page 4.

1 Like

The first volume is currently available for free!

(my source is Bookwalker as always, so I expect all the others to have it for free as well.)

Yep I already grabbed it on Kindle! Plus all the volumes are finally back in stock on Amazon. Hopefully they’ll still be in stock in December…

1 Like

So, there are still ten weeks or so until the end of the end of キッチン. Only 6 without the short story at the end. Maybe it would be a good time to give some new recommendations? We “only” have 9 books at the moment.

2 Likes

The only reasonable length book I have is 人類は衰退しました, at 235 pages of actual text, split between two separate stories. So probably 14-16 weeks. I’m not sure about the difficulty since I never looked that closely before buying it. We could also just read the first story as a group if we want to keep it shorter, and then read the second one (officially or split off) if there is enough interest.


There’s also 獣の奏者 of course, but I’m still planning to run that one separately around January. For those curious, I want to run that differently from normal book clubs. It would have a schedule, but one chapter per week regardless of length. The chapters range from 10-25 pages, but average out to only 15 pages per week. So overall I think it should be manageable by most people that are used to intermediate book club. The difference being that if you usually can only just handle 15 pages a week there might be some occasional catching up or getting ahead.

I can run that as an official book club book, but there are 20 chapters (so 20 weeks with my proposal), which is a bit long.

5 Likes

So 20 for people reading the normal IBC 15 pages per week as well, if I understood that correctly? We did (do) have Haruhi which is the same length, so it’s possible if a bit of a drag. Nothing wrong with nominating it, if you don’t mind maybe reading it with the club. And if it doesn’t get chosen you can still run you own.

I’ve been wanting to read しあわせのぱん, that one’s short and probably OK level wise. I’ve only read the first 10 or 20 pages so far, but I’ll give it a more in depth look soon.