Also interested in やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている, ようこそ実力至上主義の教室へ and 86―エイティシックス― I hear is really good.
Leaning a lot towards light novels, but I probably want to read Your Name and All You Need is Kill more, so I’m not sure I see reason to nominate more competition (unless they win over some unfavourable ones).
Interesting! Especially 人間失格 seems to be well-received. (But yeah, sounds heavy…)
But “A Lollipop or a Bullet” has already been nominated and got dropped due to lack of votes (see “Former Nominations” in the OP).
To add to what @Ditto20 said, 青ブタ was previously nominated (it’s in the list of former nominations under its English title). It was dropped when the thread Ditto mentioned was created.
Re: nominating books even though there are other things you are interested in: it should not matter. Since people can vote on multiple books, it won’t reduce the chances of other books you are interested in… except if they gather more interest, in which case they were good nomination to begin with!
Re: 人間失格: books by 太宰 治 played a major role in the plot of the ビブリア古書堂の事件手帖 series, which I enjoyed a lot, so I was thinking of reading some of them… I guess that could be the occasion
It should be possible to renominate books even when they don’t get many votes the first time around. After all the competition changes, and so do the book club members.
I think so too, but I would prefer if the timespan between dropping the nomination and re-adding it was not too short… (and I think in this case it was dropped before the last poll)
Which leads me to: @Naphthalene could you maybe add the date when you drop a nomination?
We’re looking for nominations right now in fact. Feel free to formally nominate that book using the template in the OP, as long as it meets the length requirements.
Isn’t that the third book in a series, though? The author looks interesting. Actually saw an interview with him in the newspaper not too long ago. Seems like he has quite a lot of international audience.
Yasuko lives a quiet life, working in a Tokyo bento shop, a good mother to her only child. But when her ex-husband appears at her door without warning one day, her comfortable world is shattered.
When Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police tries to piece together the events of that day, he finds himself confronted by the most puzzling, mysterious circumstances he has ever investigated. Nothing quite makes sense, and it will take a genius to understand the genius behind this particular crime…
One of the biggest-selling Japanese thrillers ever, and the inspiration for a cult film, The Devotion of Suspect X is now being discovered across the world. Its blend of a page-turning story, evocative Tokyo setting and utterly surprising ending make it a must-read for anyone interested in international fiction.
This guy is one of the titans of Japanese mystery/crime fiction, and this is probably his best known book. Still, it’s not gruesome crime. This is from a review on Amazon.jp for the current selection, 「夜市」, and I think it applies well here too: ホラー系が苦手な方でも安心して読める作品です。
Come for the noir streets of Tokyo, the thrill of the chase, and a penetrating look, I think, into the Japanese psychology.
Technically the third book? I know he has written this detective in other books, but it can be read stand-alone. Similar to Dan Brown’s books, if you’ve read any: technically they’re a series, but they are complete as independent reads.
Also, I happen to own that book, and my copy says 394 pages, which I reckon is too long for the book club (we have a hard limit of 350 pages but a soft limit of rather 300 pages iirc)…
I think this should be decided by everybody, because the thing is, if we stick with the usual intermediate club speed of 15 pages per week, this will give us 6 months’ worth of reading material, which might be a bit monotonous (especially for those who don’t like the book and just read it for the book club’s sake, or even for those who want to skip the book). That’s why we usually apply this length restriction, so that we get to read different material in relatively short succession to keep things lively.
Oh golly, definitely wouldn’t spend 6 months on it. But, looking at the samples, I think it’s pretty easy reading for most people here. 15 pages a week would probably be a bit underkill. I think it would be pretty reasonably, after the first week or two (the beginning of a book is always hardest, right?), to move at a pace of ~40 pages a week. A ~9 week read, averaging 6 pages a day.
That said, I’m the new guy here. I’ll defer to you all. Merely, it’s a good book, and I think it’s well within the scope of an intermediate reading club.
edited for wrong math lol.
P.S. Really wanted to hop on for 「夜市」, just couldn’t get my hands on a copy in a timely fashion.
(unless they win over some unfavourable ones).
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