Since all of the next round of book clubs seem to be kicking off in October, I’m thinking of going book club shopping while I’m there. Trouble is, if I can’t find the books in Japan, I won’t have time to get them back in Australia.
And honestly, I haven’t the foggiest idea how they arrange the books in Japanese bookshops, so even if they were there, I probably still couldn’t find them…
あの。。。。すいません！！！何々はどこですか！！！！！！
Just walk around yelling this. Eventually you will probably find success or else be kicked out of the store. Either way, makes for an exciting story.
Or, if you wanted to be a bit more polite, you could ask some staff member and show them your shopping list. Worked great for me 
But if you want to find them yourself, Naphthalene once wrote up a nice explanation on how to find Manga. For the other books, they might be in various places but I was rather successful in the „Japanese Authors“ section (there usually is a huge sign above the shelves) and then go by (Japanese) alphabet and maybe that is still subdivided for famous authors.
If you cannot find the books at Bookoff you can still buy them new in Japan and it might still be cheaper 
Edit: The post I mentioned
Nath told me that in Bookoff comics are arranged by publisher and novels are arranged by author.
Or at least that’s how it was in shinjuku
But who actually knows what publisher a book is under? 
Google does.
Wikipedia is also fairly knowledgeable.
But, more seriously, that’s why, if you ask the staff, they will first go back to check on a computer where the thing you are looking for would be stored.
Nobody. Although sometimes with niche categories it’s pretty obvious. For instance if it’s yuri it’s probably under…
Comic Yurihime 
I do for most stuff I’ve read since it’s usually written somewhere on it, which means you automatically end up seeing it a lot
Maybe not so helpful in this case though.
When I went to a Kinokuniya they had little computer kiosks for customers to use where you could look up where in the store a book was (all the aisles were numbered). That might only have been in the manga section though 
I did indeed wander around the actual bookstore for ages with almost no success, although it was fairly easy to find the Aoi Tori and Kadokawa Tsubasa sections in the kid’s area… Neither of which is much help for this book club, so yeah, ask someone I guess 
I don’t think there are enough people interested to warrant a scheduled reading, but does anyone still want me to set up a misc discussion thread for it? I can set it up similar to some other threads where you can vote on what chapter you’re up to and stuff like that. But if none of you (except @sigolino) are planning to read it any time soon I’ll just start reading it without creating any kind of thread.
cc: @Ditto20 @Naphthalene @Sylph @Belerith @sigolino @Kyayna @Airdramon @_Shiori
I actually prefer having a schedule since it forces me to make time for reading even when I’m busy.
Anyway, maybe we could make an “optional” schedule like we tried with 放浪息子 but people can still read at the pace they prefer? If that doesn’t make much sense I think at least the misc thread would be good.
I got rid of the optional schedule in the 放浪息子 thread because no one paid attention to it. 
I should be done reading 「青春ブタ野郎はバニーガール先輩の夢を見ない」in a couple of days, so I can start reading next week-end.
I agree with @Sylph that having a thread would be nice. That being said, I can’t promise that I’ll be participating too much in it (Speaking from experience with 放浪息子 and 青春ブタ) We are back in the “I’m insanely busy” part of the year and I’ll probably focus what little time I have left on reading rather than talking about what I read (but I still want to do that as well, as time allows).
I’m with Sylth, a schedule makes me read even when I’m busy. That being said, I also agree that the group (unless others will join) is quite small, so how helpful a schedule really is is questionable.
Generally a thread would be cool though, just to deposit some thoughts every once in a while.
Speaking of schedules, do you know how fast you want to read this book already? Also around 15 pages as usual in the intermediate club?
Generally I prefer schedules, too. If you want to read this one faster though, I’ll just have to be behind. If only we were done with Haruhi already I’d have more time for an extra book. 
Agreed with everyone that a misc thread and a general schedule could be helpful.
But like Naph, I’ve got a busy few months coming up. And 魔法少女育成計画 is likely to be a bit above my current comprehension level, so I’ll have to work a little harder and certainly don’t want to hold anyone back (but I’m up for a challenge!).
Whatever the group decides, I’d like to try and be around to partcipate if I am able.
My main goal is to try to read every day, regardless of how little that is. Ultimately I want to get better at reading faster, so my current aim is to finish it by end of November, which would be 25+ pages a week. We’ll see how that goes.
I just learned an interesting technique for figuring out if a book is “at your level”. This was from my daughter’s elementary school.
They call it the five finger rule. You pick a page at random and read through it. Every time you encounter a word you don’t know, you hold up a finger. If you can get through the page with just the fingers on one hand, then it is a good level for your ability.
Nice rubric. Sensible way to gauge something that pushes your boundaries versus being totally over your head.
For me, with コンビニ人間, it would totally depend on whether it was a page where 白羽 is speaking. When he isn’t there, I can sometime go a few pages without looking anything up. But the moment that guy opens his mouth, I’m sunk. His vocab is from the 縄文.
I-I mean, maybe if the text is elementary-school-book size. Maybe you should count on both hands for adult books : o
I would probably have to use every finger and toe on many pages. 