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

I own this book already, too. Probably have the same 394 page version.

It has 19 chapters (so average about 20 pages a chapter) and occasional section breaks for what that’s worth.

4 Likes

That’s what I really love ebooks for! (Oh and the kanji lookup of course :eyes:)

Yes I thought about that as well… Currently we don’t read much more in a week than the Beginner club, although the material might be slightly more difficult. But maybe it is time to think about this again?
(Or maybe finally after all have an Advanced book club that proceeds at a fast pace? …)
Curious to hear what the others think about this!

3 Likes

Same as a lot of people who posted here already I don’t mind upping the speed in general, but I say this now after a year’s experience with reading Japanese.

Tl;dr

  • Maybe up the pace to a more reasonable amount of pages in comparison to the beginner club pace (like 20 - 25) to not make it too difficult to ‘level up’
  • Tentative interest in an advanced club (we had a bit of a free style form of that almost happening some time ago, I should go find that thread again)
Long version

When I first started reading with this book club, I was really rather a beginner at reading and 15 pages a week was really quite hard, though by no means impossible. I did feel like the end of the book was easier than the beginning, which I appreciated and was very motivating. I agree that ramping up as one gets used to the style etc does not not make sense, but might prolong the tough period / erase the satisfaction level of getting better for people who are right at that edge.

Anyway - if we do decide to ramp up the speed, rather than more than doubling it, raising it slightly to 20 or 25 should be more doable, and a more suitable difference to the beginner club page count I think.

Beyond that I think an advanced club would be the more suitable solution, otherwise the divide between beginner and intermediate clubs would be too big for new readers to bridge anywhere close to comfortably. I think starting each new book at a lower pace would give new readers (in this club) a chance to get used to the pace since we’re not reading with the same people every time.

But an advanced club would only make sense if we have a continuous interest and readership. I’d probably join one because I have no concept of self preservation. Or finally start to discriminate more. :upside_down_face:

8 Likes

Don’t forget the simultaneous manga to book transition! Going from the beginner bookclub to actually having to read 20+ pages of prose a week would be pretty intense, given there’s so much more text to read.

I’d probably be fine with more pages if we started doing vocab sheets here as well. I could probably read double or triple the number of pages a week, if I didn’t having to look so much up…

4 Likes

Plus in the rare instances that the beginner book club reads an actual book, the book is a children’s book and they read about 10 pages a week. Even transitioning from that to 15 pages of a light novel or adult book per week is huge.

I wouldn’t be against considering 20 pages a week, but I don’t think I could have done that when I first moved over to intermediate book club. Also, we want to make sure that people don’t have to use all their reading time in one book club. I was basically reading nonstop for a month, and that had me reading about 90 pages per week. But I pretty literally mean I spent all my free time reading, and I don’t want to commit even half that time just to this club.

10 Likes

That’s a good point. I definitely agree that going much over 20 would be too much for the purpose of the club, and keeping in mind the transition period of ‘new’, ibc readers starting with the current 15 pages and increasing the pace after a while seems more feasible.

Yeah, same for me. I definitely was not an intermediate reader at the time, though, but rather the club helped me get there. :slight_smile: I wouldn’t want to make this unduly more difficult for those who will be joining us after this either!

8 Likes

And that’s why we should not increase the pace, I think. Based on the past few books, I feel 15 pages a week strikes a nice balance between speed and having enough people being able to follow along. Same goes for the length limit.

That being said, I’d love to have an advanced book club, now that we have hit a critical mass of people who can manage it on the forum :slight_smile: I don’t have the time to take care of the organization, though.

12 Likes

These are good ideas. Keep the transition between beginner-intermediate-advanced book clubs as smooth as possible.

It seems like there is interest in an advanced book club? I’d be happy to at least get it started with a first book. Hosting a vote, scheduling, discord channel (?), etc.

4 Likes

I’m curious what pace you and @Naphthalene are thinking for an advanced book club. Somewhere in the 30-45 pages per week range? Would you choose books more difficult than those in the intermediate book club or would it be more about pace?

1 Like

Probably more of a pace thing–a bit quicker, 30-45 pages per week range as you said–to allow for a fuller range of modern Japanese literature. Additionally, if there’s interest, we could pick some harder works at a slower pace. I’m thinking of something like Soseki? Classic, modern, but dated vocabulary.

Check out the first few pages of his 「草枕」:

First Three Pages of Chapter One



What is this beautiful community interested in using an advanced book club for?

7 Likes

Same, 30-45 pages sound good. That would also ease the restrictions on length. I feel we should still limit a given book to max 20 weeks, which would put us at a 600 pages soft limit. I’ve seen longer books, but they aren’t common or they have a 上 下 edition (then we can just read one of those).

7 Likes

Both of these sound very interesting to me, and would suit an advanced book club well imho.

Wow, sounds great! We would need a home thread like this one (you can probably use the OP here as a skeleton), and then people could nominate books! I definitely have a list of suitable books on my stack :innocent:

For the discord channel, I’m not sure about this. We will not be able to read a whole book aloud if we go at that pace, plus we (the Kemono no Souja read aloud club) have discovered that we hardly post any questions in the threads any more because we discuss them all in the read aloud session… And while I definitely prefer having a quick chat over writing a lenghty post, it kinda dries out the reading threads, which is a pity for those who are not in the live discussion. So, I would actually lean towards not having a discord channel in order to force me to have more discussions in the forums.

Along these lines (same conclusion) :joy_cat:

8 Likes

This explains so much! :sob:

An advanced book club, I would be interested in that! It’s exciting to think what books we might read and at what pace.

10 Likes

ワクワク

Just unnecessarily expressing interest again, haha.

Creating a new club seems to be the neatest solution, providing more options without making it harder to transition. :slight_smile:

5 Likes

変愛サイケデリック

Summary

Japanese

「ストレンジサイケデリコ」こと彩家亭理子は、その名の通り千光高校きっての有名な変人であり、変わった愛情を持った者が集まる「変恋部」の部長である。そんな変人マスターが「愛しいね」と目をつけたのは、春になると死にたがると噂のクール系男子・神宇知悠仁だった。理子は悠仁の言動が「変愛」に関係しているとにらみ、興味を持つのだが…。『月光』と同じ世界を舞台に新たな登場人物が紡ぎ出す異色の青春“変愛”物語

English

(Disclaimer: this is my own translation, mostly done while very tired. There could be mistakes. Also not completely literal)

The “strange psychedelic” Saiketei Riko is, as her name suggests, known as a famous eccentric at her high school and head of the “strange love club”, a club for people with unusual love. What has caught her attention is the rumoured cool boy Kamiuchi Juujin who starts wanting to die as spring comes. Riko guesses that Juujin’s actions are related to strange love and takes an interest in him, but…

Availability

Amazon
Bookwalker
Booklive

Personal Opinion

To be honest, my main reason for nominating this is just that it’s something I personally thought looked interesting. But if I think it looks interesting, maybe some other people will too, and (at least to me, though I don’t know how well I can judge) it didn’t seem too hard from the first few pages.

Pros and Cons for the Book Club

Pros

  • Seems to be about more everyday stuff, which probably would limit the range of vocab used somewhat
  • Could be interesting

Cons

  • Hard to find physical copies
  • Kind of long at 288 pages
  • Judging by the preview the main character seems to like using occasional more uncommon words

Pictures

(All pictures come from the preview on booklive)

First Three Pages of Chapter One



Additional Pages



Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this book?

  • No effort at all
  • Minimal effort
  • Moderate effort
  • Significant effort
  • So much effort my head might explode
  • I don’t know

0 voters

2 Likes

A book that it seems to be super hard to find new physical copies of might not be ideal and I also realised I’m not great at writing nominations, but I figure one extra nomination probably won’t hurt anyway :slight_smile:

6 Likes

For the advanced book club, I can’t guarantee I will participate personally but I wanted to just say that if someone wants to manage it(Which some people don’t.) then that person can go do it. I just wondered tiny things about it

The advance book club is another book club that will be more time consuming than other book clubs and might thin out the other book club’s members.(Considering the number of people in numerous book club maybe not. The number of people that have increased their Japanese is getting higher so maybe that will not be a problem) I just wondered is the participation for nominations, reading, and commenting will be the same or if this will only thin out book club members. I’m probably worrying for nothing though.

Oh! and for those interested the Re Zero book club is an advanced one.(Yes I must speak about it. It is in my contract to make publicity about it on every post) Just putting it here in case you know :eyes:

7 Likes

This thought has crossed my mind too, but I prefer to think of it in terms of simply providing more options, thus making it more likely any one book being read will be of interest to someone and they will choose to join. There’s always people choosing to abstain from a club for lack of interest in the material, particularly in this club where a lot (if not most) members are able to more of less comfortably read on their own.

So it may well go in the other direction and increase overall readership. But who knows, we’ll find out in due time. :man_shrugging:

4 Likes

Is having a specific, regular, advanced book club necessary, as opposed to independent book clubs that read advanced books? Seems to me that if you want to read harder, longer books, that option might be better anyway, since you don’t have to worry about choosing books that aren’t too long etc…

3 Likes

I really have to get on that; I feel like I’ll never be able to catch up if I start. though. I’m still trying to “level up” with other books before I have the courage to tackle those :smiley:

5 Likes