The only reasonable length book I have is 人類は衰退しました, at 235 pages of actual text, split between two separate stories. So probably 14-16 weeks. I’m not sure about the difficulty since I never looked that closely before buying it. We could also just read the first story as a group if we want to keep it shorter, and then read the second one (officially or split off) if there is enough interest.
There’s also 獣の奏者 of course, but I’m still planning to run that one separately around January. For those curious, I want to run that differently from normal book clubs. It would have a schedule, but one chapter per week regardless of length. The chapters range from 10-25 pages, but average out to only 15 pages per week. So overall I think it should be manageable by most people that are used to intermediate book club. The difference being that if you usually can only just handle 15 pages a week there might be some occasional catching up or getting ahead.
I can run that as an official book club book, but there are 20 chapters (so 20 weeks with my proposal), which is a bit long.
So 20 for people reading the normal IBC 15 pages per week as well, if I understood that correctly? We did (do) have Haruhi which is the same length, so it’s possible if a bit of a drag. Nothing wrong with nominating it, if you don’t mind maybe reading it with the club. And if it doesn’t get chosen you can still run you own.
I’ve been wanting to read しあわせのぱん, that one’s short and probably OK level wise. I’ve only read the first 10 or 20 pages so far, but I’ll give it a more in depth look soon.
When I put a poll before, most people didn’t vote for the “nominate it for book club” option, so I’m going to stick with my original plan unless there’s significant pushback. Plus I specifically prefer to start reading it in January or February, while the book after キッチン will start in December. I was thinking about creating a poll to decide when specifically to start.
Here’s a nomination I picked up in Japan the other day. Honestly not sure whether this is better suited to Beginner or Intermediate, but I decided to put it here in the end because classical Japanese. I thought of you when I saw this, @seanblue.
マンガ✖くり返しでスイスイ覚えられる百人一首
Smoothly Memorise with Manga and Repetition: The Hyakunin Isshu
Simply put, it’s a book to help kids (specifically, twelve-year-olds, according to the cover) memorise the Hyakunin Isshu, the Hundred Poems which are used on karuta cards. I’m not expecting us to memorise the poems, but it’d be great for finding out more about them. Each poem has a double-page spread, with the poems (including modern-equivalent readings, if they differ), a brief explanation of the meaning, a handy mnemonic for memorisation, a single four- (or sometimes three-) panel manga strip illustrating the meaning, and an explanation.
Well, aside from the lurking Chihayafuru fanclub which I know exists around here, it might be good for us to get some exposure to actual aspects of Japanese culture, not just the works of fiction.
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
Quite well divided into bite-sized chunks - no need to put a break in mid-chapter simply to stop the page count getting too high.
It’s intended for twelve-year-olds, which might peg it below intermediate level, but on the other hand, it’s therefore specifically aimed at people who are still learning the language.
Cons
It’s a reasonably solid book - 240 pages. I mean, there’s a hundred poems - if we read five a week, it’d take us twenty weeks to get through the book, even without the foreword and afterword pages at each end.
Meet the crew of the Quin Zaza, a flying ship which hunts flying dragons. And then butchers them for meat and other products, and sells them. Like, that’s literally the blurb on the back of the book’s obi - “Hunt, butcher, sell, and then… eat!!” But more to the point, it’s full of swashes, and buckles, and all manner of derring-do.
It looks kinda pretty and kinda fun. Honestly, it first caught my eye because the style of shading and the aircraft technology was quite reminiscent of the Nausicaä manga.
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
Pretty. Not excessively wordy. No furigana.
It’s getting an anime adaptation starting early next year, so clearly it’s popular.
Cons
Well, if I’m to be completely honest… it’s got some fairly strong hints of whale hunting in the imagery, which is not an awesome theme, though at least in this case the dragons propose a legitimate threat to both the ship and to innocent towns on the ground.
CIt’s hard to give a straight answer to difficulty. The poems themselves are quite hard to memorize, I feel, even with the mnemonic proposed by the author.
I could, of course, just not care about memorizing them, but then the book looses 80% of its interest, I think
TL;DR: I feel like the book gives too much information to quickly go through it, but the alternative would take too much effort/time.
Way too long opinion
Well, I’m not saying it’s not interesting. I’m saying that I feel a book like this requires more time than we can reasonably give it in the book club. Just learning the meaning covers simply the top right box and the manga. Maybe the vocab/grammar points on the bottom left if you are feeling fancy.
I do not have the historical knowledge required to put those poems back in context, since I have no context.
I can’t even do the cute “Oh, he is from, err たいかのsomething something” (ref to the first poem) because I haven’t heard of 大化の改新. I’m left with two choices: shrugging it off and basically getting nothing from that part, or looking it up and discussing findings with others, which does seem like a good idea, but time consuming.
I’d be interested in doing something like that with others, if people care, but I have a feeling I might be alone on that.
It sounds really fascinating. But I think going into it with that much detail, 5 poems per week are a lot!
For a book such as this, it might even be fun to treat it like an actual group project from school, where we have the above mentioned 5 poems per week (or x amount for x people) and then everyone chooses one for their project that week, for which they prepare a post with a summary of the history etc and some reference links for people to take a look themselves.
This way we’d all get to take a look into a poem’s background without having to look them all up ourselves, and still have convenient starting points if we do want to know more about sth particularly intriguing.
So yeah. In any case I’ll be getting that book when I’m next in Japan, at the latest. It’s kind of nice to have an ongoing project.
I was just gonna say that! I’d actually also be interested @Naphthalene.
When I saw it nominated my first reaction was that i wanted to get the book. The second reaction was that I would way too obsessive about it and actually want to remember all of them (Which will never happen, but one can have dreams.)
I really like your idea @Belerith, that would be a fun little project, if more people would be interested. And I agree, one poem a week a person is more than enough if you put the time into doing research and everything. In this case though, I don’t think it should be treated as a book club, simple because the format is quite different, it’s probably not everyone’s cup of tea and it would replace another book we’d otherwise read.
@Belerith@Kyayna Haha, it’s good to see I’m not the only one I also really like your idea @Belerith.
Well, let’s see how it does in the poll. Even if it doesn’t win, we can see how many people could potentially be interested. I don’t think I would have the time to tackle that before the poll anyway
Haha, glad to see I’m not the only one with fond memories from school. Not that it was quite this exciting very regularly
@Kyayna@Naphthalene Yeah, the format wouldn’t quite fit for a normal book club. More like @Belthazar’s poem research club for the betterment of everyone’s education. Or however that one went, I forget.
But yeah, let’s revisit this after the poll/ in the new year.
The novelist Kano who lives in Abashiri, Hokkaido, loves his cute sister Aya, but when Aya got a job at a trading company, she started living alone in Yubari. However, when it was discovered that her fiance Okutsu had an affair, Aya committed suicide by jumping off of a building. The elder brother who vowed to revenge on Okutsu invites Okutsu to Abashiri and kills him. On the way to Yubari to hide the body of Okutsu in the car and build an alibi, Kano causes a traffic accident.
From here the story splits into two ⇒
A: The murder is revealed through the traffic accident
B: The murder is not revealed through the traffic accident
… and how about Kano’s fate?
When two parallel worlds are combined into one, the impact becomes clear.
I think it would be nice to read a criminal story, especially in the dark part of the year (for those in the northern hemisphere at least). I especially like the idea of the split story, and I’m curious to see how this is done in the book and what it leads to.
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
It’s a different genre for a change
Not too long (240 pages)
Vocabulary is available on FloFlo
FloFlo claims it has 4080 individual words, that’s a manageable size imho (slightly more than Kitchen, slightly less than Kino no Tabi)
Cons
Might be difficult to read for people who don’t like the genre.
Aya Kitō was diagnosed with a disease called spinocerebellar degeneration when she was 15 years old. The disease causes the person to lose control over their body, but because the person can retain all mental ability the disease acts as a prison. So in the end she cannot eat, walk or talk.
Through family, medical examinations and rehabilitations, and finally succumbing to the disease, Aya must cope with the disease and live on with life until her death at the age of 25. (from Wikipedia)
The ドラマ based on this book original diary was very high praised, so I thought that it would be nice to read the original in Japanese and bought the book. That was two years ago…
This is definitely a very sad story, but I think this kind of stories are motivating and help appreciate life more.
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
Not very long.
A new genre for the club: non-fiction.
Written from a perspective of a school-girl, so probably not very difficult (see cons though).