Oh, do please do this when they hand over your copy of the book.
lol, I will invite him in for some fava beans and a nice chianti
Good news all! I just finished the first page after many hours of looking up every kanji and furaganaing and translating everything! Some grammar caught me up but it’s all mostly good!
Now I just need to do this 34 more times in the span of ten days.
Oh, lawdy!
There’s a lot of blood in the first page. XD
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I feel you, man. Reading the first 7 (Kindle) pages took me 2 hours. And that’s with Kindle’s built-in dictionary lookup.
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See, this is why I gave myself a head start. But I feel like my speed picked up after a bit, for whatever reason. I am beginning to have hope that by the book’s end I’ll be at 1/10th my English-reading speed. Or…1/20th.
Edit: Okay, no…because 1/20th would still be like 6 minutes per page??? That seems overly optimistic.
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Crappidy crap. My mum’s big UK adventure is the 7th-14th. I think I will start that week’s reading on the 1st and just post what I can during our travels around England. We’ll have some long train rides, so it’s doable!
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Don’t worry about it too much. I’ll be on vacation (away from home) during the start of the book discussions. Do what you can, right?
How fast do you read in English? There’s a distinct possibility my maths is all over the place but wouldn’t that work out to less than 20 seconds a page?
For reading technique, by the way, I strongly recommend to people who have a lot to look up to try and make it to the end of a section or dialogue or even just paragraph before doing the looking up. So many times I’ll be feeling completely confused and then half a page later something someone says clarifies the whole preceding paragraph.
Me too. Will try and check in, though. And actually the vacation I’m going on’s kind of a good one for reading anyway.
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I want to strangle USPS. Books were suppose to arrive Saturday but the mail carrier decided to not check to see if someone was home (I was) and put a notice in my mailbox to pick it up Monday at the post office. I hate it when people are just blatantly lazy at their job. A 30 sec walk would have saved me 2 days and a 30 min drive.
I want to join, but I’m unsure of how to edit and add my name to the list…
You’re not able to edit just yet, so I’ll add you. Do you have the book already?
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Not yet! I plan to go to kinokuniya this week to pick it up. If they don’t have it I’ll get an ebook version.
Thank you!
I’m not sure if this was mentioned before, but will we be including the previous candidates from the old OP’s poll in the next poll? If not, could we at least include the books that received votes in that poll in the new poll when it’s created?
If this has been discussed already, please forgive me for the unnecessary redundancy.
Oh, excellent. Thank you so much for confirming that. Sorry about the redundant comment.
No worries! It’s why this is the planning thread and why I’m lurking it.
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Yes, around 20 seconds–for this book specifically, which has small pages and fairly large/widely-spaced text, and not the most complex ideas/sentences. Maybe it’d be closer to 30 seconds per page? I just looked at a page I’d already read and tried to guess how long it would take to read an equivalent amount of information in English. That page may have had lots of dialogue, and therefore shorter lines/less text, which might also have skewed my already rough guess. In any case, it’s a far cry from my Japanese reading speed, that’s for sure
I was wondering about this too. From what I remember, the vast majority were all contributed by one person who just suggested all the books they currently had on their Kindle. Not that I mind if they all are included, just might get a little sprawling if more people do add suggestions.
I’m also wondering how things will go with this book and if that might affect what’s chosen for next time. From comments so far it seems like this is pretty difficult for a lot of people (I know it is for me). I’m guessing we might want to avoid anything even more difficult and, other than キノの旅, I think everything suggested so far would fall into that category.
@Caracal: I see. I guess I was thinking of different book types. Still pretty fast, though. I guess you read a lot?
On the issue of difficulty, I feel that the one week a chapter goal might be a little too ambitious. I’m all for breezing through books in a month a half or so, but if a large portion of people (including myself) aren’t able to complete the chapter in time for the discussion, doesn’t it negate the purpose of doing this?
In essence, do we have a plan “B” if a certain percentage of us doesn’t make it in time for completing the chapter deadline?
Hmm. Hadn’t thought about that. I guess one advantage of doing it in a forum is if people fall behind they can just stop reading the thread and continue with the book at their own pace then check in on discussions after they’ve happened. I think we should encourage the use of spoiler tags for plot points even during the reading period since different people will be at different places in a chapter. Not the best, but better than nothing.
Also, I doubt everyone will read every book. If someone couldn’t finish one book they could skip the next one, something like that.
Anyway, all further reason to maybe aim for something not as difficult next time. Problem there though is if you go much easier you’re heading into full furigana territory. Not something that I personally mind, but I’ve seen a lot of aversion to that in other threads in the past. Guess we have to wait for the first week at least to see how people are getting on with this one…
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