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

Thank you for such a thorough response! :blush:
Moved it to the beginner club and edited the main post here!

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The next Poll is upon us!

Have a look at the List of Proposed Books section in the first post for details on each book. Every book has a difficulty associated with it (based on book club members voting, thus subjective) out of 5, where 1 means “no effort at all” and 5 means “so much effort my head might explode”. The difficulty is annotated in the poll in square brackets after the book’s name, together with the book’s level on Natively (you can find the links to Natively for all books in the first post if you want to have a look at the gradings in detail).

Do not rely solely on difficulty or Natively level when making a choice. Please have a look at nomination posts if you haven’t already.

Expected reading pace: We aim to read books at ~15 pages per week (that number might vary a bit throughout, depending on the book’s breaks and chapters). For manga, depending on difficulty and chapter length, we will probably read one to several chapters per week. The pick’s exact reading schedule will be negotiated before the book club kicks off.

Short book rule: If the first place ist taken by a pick that will take us 6 weeks or less to read, we will read the one in second place directly after it, without running a poll in between. I haven’t checked in detail, but I’d assume that this basically applies in case one of the manga wins the poll.

Start of Book Club: We will start the next book on June 18th (after a one-week break).

Poll duration: I will close the poll within a week (and most likely before that), whenever it looks like voting has dried up. You can choose up to 5 options.

  • きらきらひかる [2.67 / L30??]
  • 日本人の知らない日本語 (Manga) [2.4 / L29]
  • 山と食欲と私 (Manga) [2.5 / L25]
  • くま クマ 熊 ベアー [2.36 / L24]
  • 天気の子 [2.64 / L31]
  • ガイコツ書店員本田さん (Manga) [2.45 / L24??]
  • リング [2.67 / L34]
  • City (Manga) [2.56 / L24??]
  • TUGUMI [2.5 / L30]
  • Just Because! [2.17 / L30??]
  • 笑顔のたえない職場です。 (Manga) [2.83 / L29??]
  • 穴 [2 / L38]
  • 人質の朗読会 [2.43 / L30??]
  • 死にたいけどトッポッキは食べたい [2.75 / L30??]
  • Spy x Family [2.75 / L30]

0 voters

EDIT: I forgot to annotate that Spy x Family is a manga, sorry! Also, I wanted to point out that there is currently a coin cashback sale going on at BookWalker until 2022-05-06T01:00:00Z. I think by then we should already be able to forecast which entry is likely to be among the winners, for those who want to buy before the sale ends.

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Kinda think Spy x Family has been generating so much buzz lately that it’s practically a shoo-in. :stuck_out_tongue:

But, ah… vote for mine! 山と食欲と私 :grinning:

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I’m basically expecting that too :wink: But I expect it to be a short read, so the second place will be picked as well. :grin:

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Ooh the Natively levels in the poll are a nice touch.

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sorry, i’m one of those fans pushing for Spy x Family cause I also happen to be reading it now thanks to anime/ it’s on sale :laughing:

i hope it’s not presumptuous to have started a vocab sheet for it…

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Thanks! I found it interesting to see that almost all of the books are in the L25-L30 range, so that seems to confirm the Natively levels and our picks at the same time :grin:
But of course you can’t fully rely on the levels because for some books there are really few gradings (e.g. for 穴 it looks as if the Natively level is a bit too high? Especially compared to our own poll. But maybe it just gets harder later on. Difficult to tell unless we read it I guess…)

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It’s strange because it seems only one person has read 穴 on Natively, and they write in their review that it’s an “easy read language-wise.” Also I thought there would be question marks after the level number if there aren’t enough people grading it? There are none in this case. I’m very new to Natively, so I don’t know, maybe the level is based on other criteria too besides reader gradings?

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Yeah I noticed that as well. But then again that person has read crazy hard stuff, so their mileage may be different :sweat_smile:

I think that the question marks only appear if there have not been enough gradings, but this book has gotten 10 gradings, so that seems to make the level be somewhat reliable. Natively doesn’t seem to take into account that all those 10 gradings are from the same person…
But to make sure about this, let’s ask @sweetbeems :slight_smile:

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Yes the ‘temporary’ rating system (‘??’) is pretty dumb in this regard… it doesn’t require multiple people just a minimum number of grades & a variety of grades to make sure the level has settled (‘harder’ / ‘easier’ / ‘similar’). The assumption here is that people won’t have wildly different takes on a book difficulty and that if someone is able to grade enough to get it out of the temporary status, they probably have a good amount of books around that level.

There are, of course, books where there is somewhat large disagreement on difficulty, but that’s pretty rare… usually people agree within 3-4 levels, which is all the temporary system is shooting for. And adding the requirement for multiple people not only complicates the system which makes it harder to handle, but it also puts way more books into ‘temporary’… I think unnecessarily. Eventually, I hope to make it more sophisticated, but lots to do… :slight_smile:

Yes he has. The easiest stuff that he’s read that’s fully graded is lvl 34 :sweat_smile:. This is why showcasing a book’s supposed level, a user’s gradings and a user’s personal library is very valuable context when reading a review! It is ‘easy’ for him, certainly wouldn’t be for me haha.

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Thanks for the explanation, @sweetbeems ! Much appreciated!

And now I’m more curious than ever to read 穴. I’m kind of disappointed that no book I’ve read so far is higher than L33 :grin:

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Well, never hurts to try! If you’re really interested in something, it often trumps a little more difficulty :upside_down_face:

And who knows, maybe _Minos is wrong!

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Go go Spy x Family /o/ /o/ /o/!

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Yeah, I can very much relate to that. After all, a book’s level is just a (more and more educated) guess, no matter what :woman_shrugging:

Anyways, I got really curious now regarding that book! It being an Akutagawa prize winner sort of already sticks the “it will be complicated and confusing” tag to it ime :sweat_smile: but then again, here everybody rated it as “minimal difficulty” :woman_shrugging:. Maybe I will have a look into it at some point :grin:

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The book with the highest difficulty right now is 笑顔のたえない職場です according to the polls. I’m not sure how much weight I would put onto them :smiley:

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A book club! This is awesome, I am going to join after the next round. I have a ton of travel this summer but then I want to do this. Don’t worry I will still read independently in the meantime. Trying to read 20 minutes a day and have read some of these books like コンビニ人間。I think I will be okay on difficulty.

Good luck everyone, looking forward to joining soon.

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Hey, welcome! No worries, you can join in any time. If you’d like to read one of the past book club picks: we use separate threads for each week’s reading, and you can still use them and read the questions and discussions, and of course still ask more! Usually a bunch of people still follow those threads and will be happy to help you out or continue the discussion. :hugs:

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Voting seems to have dried up by now, and so I am happy to announce the winner of this poll:

Spy x Family

:tada: :sparkles: :confetti_ball:

This manga has 5 chapters, some are longer and some are shorter, but I don’t see that it warrants a schedule of more than 6 weeks max (given we’re the Intermediate club), and so we also have a second winner in this poll:

TUGUMI

which we will read immediately after the first winner.

(If somebody strongly opposes my schedule estimation for Spy x Family, please speak up!)

With the auspicious announcements going hand in hand, we also have a few sad announcements: We need to say goodbye to the following proposals because they scored 20% or less in the last three polls:

  • 山と食欲と私
  • City
  • くま クマ 熊 ベアー

This opens up five slots at once in our proposals list! That’s on top of the five slots that were already open. So if you have ideas for books or manga we should read here and that fit the club criteria, please feel free to propose them at any time.

EDIT: Oh I totally forgot: @Shadowlauch are you going to run the Spy x Family book club?

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Yeah sure I can run the club! I will set up the thread tomorrow.

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Feel free to use this vocab sheet for the club!

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