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

Like 時をかける少女?

Or one week, or four weeks. It depends. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, or any other book that doesn’t consist of mainly short stories (時をかける少女 has short stories at the end, but the main story is still fairly long compared to a chapter of キノ)

I get your point :stuck_out_tongue:
Anyway, it’s still true that someone who takes four weeks to read a chapter gets to see some closure faster than someone reading a book like 時をかける少女.

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Do you know of any other episodic books (not manga) like this? Or anyone else know for that matter?

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Among stuff I’m reading/have read in Japanese, the only book like that is キノ, so I’m afraid I can’t recommend anything…

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One thing this brings to mind is that people who want to participate but are behind could technically just jump in and not miss much by skipping to the current or next chapter, like if they fell behind. Not sure how to highlight this, though.

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promoting my own nomination, ごめん not ごめん

世界から猫が消えたなら has 7 chapters (+ a prologue maybe) that are each one day if the week, each starting with a different thing disappearing and watching the effects it has on his life. So in that sense the end of each chapter is a pretty good stopping point (not so cliff-hanger-y).
But unlike Kino, if someone wants to skip a few weeks worth of reading to catch up with the group, it might be confusing plot-wise.

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Haruhi books 3, 5, 7 and 8?

Fair, but I need to read (and enjoy) the first one first. If I do like the first one I’m definitely buying through book 4 though, since that one is supposed to be really good.

Right, I was asking for stuff where that wouldn’t be a problem. Not that I want to only read stuff like that. I actually generally prefer stuff with well-developed stories. I’m mostly just curious.

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My bad, i thought the problem was stopping mid-arc (cause I imagine dividing up The girl who leapt through time created a lot of cliff-hangers which must be tough to stop at)

Edit: in that case, Hyouka might be a good choice. I personally haven’t read it, but its on flo*flo so i bet there are a few users who have read it and can chime in on how difficult or episodic it is. If double nominations are allowed I can write one up for it since it seems fairly popular.

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Hmm… That could fit the pattern as a series, but I’m pretty sure each arc is a whole book.

Oh wow. The anime must have skipped a lot

Probably! :laughing:

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I fell off the キノの旅 wagon pretty early. I thought the level was good - in that I had to work at it but no so much that it wasn’t enjoyable. I couldn’t keep up though 15 pages a week was a bit too much with everything else going on in my life right now. I’m hoping i’ll be a faster reader on the next one.

Not sure I’m ready to nominate something yet, but I think I’d lean towards a manga. (Especially if it were one of the ones piling up here).

I’d also be interested in knowing if anyone would be interested in a reading club idea I’ve been thinking about. Rather than a book we focus on short form content - magazine articles and the like. Could be all online material. Easier for people to drop in and out of. Different language too. Thoughts?

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For a split second I thought “Wait, is this a proposal to read something that’s not Japanese?” - Then I got it. :joy_cat:

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As expected, the pace is pretty high for me (especially when I’m very busy with work and stuff), and it shows me that I’m not quite at Intermediate level yet (which I’ve decided to ignore for now). To compensate that, I’ve switched to a more 多読 style of reading where I tend to skip over stuff where I don’t know the kanji readings. That’s fine for me right now, but sometimes I miss out on quite a bit, especially in week 4 (which is also fine for me but at the same time a bit sad…)

There is an important improvement on the horizon though: Yesterday (after only four weeks of reading ahem) I discovered that the Bookwalker app on iPad actually lets me look up stuff in dictionaries (J->J and J->E - I guess those are the built-in ones which seem to be fairly decent). So now I can even look up unknown kanji, and I’m curious to see how this will change my understanding of the text from now on.

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I ended up doing that this week too. :confused:
I’m sure I missed a bunch, but I’m behind and wanted to finish the chapter (3 pages left at time of writing).

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Manga could be “tough” for this book club, because we’d likely read it so fast that it would be hard to justify the cost of buying it (for me at least).


Not likely for me. It would have to be a topic I’m really interested in to bother with something like that. The only non-fiction topic I can think of that I’d be interested in reading would be finance/economics. But at that point I might as well also read about a cute wolf girl as a bonus. Obviously referring to Spice and Wolf.

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That might be the challenge. In my mind it was more akin grhe lines of things you might find in the Sunday supplement - art, design, food etc. That said I’d live to be able to read the business section at some point so I’d be up for some finance and economics; coming from a very low base on the vocabulary, though.

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The pacing hasn’t been a problem for me, however due to life circumstances, I haven’t been reading for the past couple weeks. I intend to catch up this week, though. That way I can be more active in the discussion threads.

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@QuackingShoe We have to start our campaign push for 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 so it wins next round. Can’t let it lose to those novelizations!

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