Intermediate Japanese Book Club (Now Reading: 地球星人)

Japanese Language Reading
#4068

I was actually wondering about that as well today :wink:

The way the BBC does it, they will only read the second place winner if the first place winner is short enough (I think 6 weeks or less) because in that case the vote for the next poll would just be super close to the previous one, and that’s a bit useless.
Having said that, it all depends on the schedule we will pick for the first place. E.g. Yokohama consists of a prologue + 7 chapters, and those are fairly short (15 - 20 pages), so given this is the Intermediate Club, I was wondering whether we’d want to read two chapters per week, putting us at a total of 4 weeks for the whole manga. In that case we’d read the second winner straight away. But if we decide we only want to read one chapter per week (because maybe they are very hard? I don’t know the manga yet) then the schedule would span 8 weeks, and we’d have another vote for the next book after that.

#4069

Yokohama’s very airy and calm in a way where there aren’t many words. Difficulty would probably mostly be just casual/dialect stuff. A quicker schedule would likely be fine (although the pace of the story might promote reading it slowly and basking in the scenery and vibe)
I remember Hondasan as being more dense with words and references and stuff - it’s pretty frenetic.

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#4070

Agreed! But since this is the IBC I think two chapters per week should be doable since the chapters are all on the shorter side with 15-20 pages. And the language itself isn’t too difficult from what I remember, there’s just a lot going on :sweat_smile:

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#4071

I see, thanks for your insights! Even if we did two chapters per week, that would mean maybe 40 pages, i.e. ~6 pages per day, which I think should be fine for basking I guess… Also, people are always free to read it more slowly ofc, but I would not want to drag the book club out too much if there is no real need language-wise. (Also, I checked its nomination post, and it also suggests a 4-week schedule followed by reading the second place. So it seems like we all agree on that bit :blush:)

4 Likes
#4072

Yes, there’s a bit of dialect and some technical words, but there’s also a lot of pages with no dialogue and just vibe. It really reminds me of ARIA.
Nominating it here was purely for the selfish goal of reading it quicker than the BBC :stuck_out_tongue:

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#4073

Not so “quick” if it takes over a year to win a poll (if it does end up winning). :stuck_out_tongue:

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#4074

Yes, that’s why I went ahead and read it on my own anyway :joy: I’m still looking forward to read it again with others, though :slight_smile:

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#4075

The Poll Has Spoken

and we have two very clear winners: ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 and 地球星人 :tada:

We will start reading ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 on Oct 23rd.
If we go with a 4-week schedule for it, plus a 1-week break as usual, then we will start reading 地球星人 on Nov 27th.

@Naphthalene and @Phryne, I’ll hand this over to you :bowing_woman:

Another interesting outcome of this poll is the enormous amount of nominations that fell below the 20% mark. Besides the two winners, only three other books could get more than 20%.

That means we need to say goodbye to the following nominations:

  • All You Need Is Kill
  • もやしもん - Tales of Agriculture
  • ブギーポップは笑わない
  • ポーション頼みで生き延びます!

If it turns out to be unpopular in the next poll as well, we will then also need to say goodbye to ifの悲劇.

A few other books are on their first stint of being not so popular, and the next two polls will decide their fate.

Having said that, I think that the members of this reading club have changed quite a bit over the past year or so, and so it seems only natural that older proposals get out of fashion and new ones pop up. I’m looking forward to a new round of fresh and interesting nominations :blush:

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#4076

Here we go! We can figure out the schedule over there :slight_smile:

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#4077

I didn’t realise you guys also read manga so I will absolutely be joining for ヨコハマ which is one of my favourite manga series! Very much second the person who mentioned it will go down well with ARIA fans - definition of a comfort read, especially as we head into the colder months.

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#4078

So, to clear one thing up about ヨコハマ, the nomination post says (of the Amazon link) " Note: link to the 新装版 edition; the original is out of print." - does this mean we’re reading the 新装版 edition? Because the 新装版 condensed the fourteen volumes of the original print down to just ten.

(Also, TIL there’s a novel too, subtitled 見て、歩き、よろこぶ者.)

2 Likes
#4079

I have the first two volumes of the original 14 volume version, since that’s what was available for free a while back.

Also, it seems like the new version is just as out of print as the original version. So I imagine nearly everyone will be reading digitally.

3 Likes
#4080

Does anybody know of digital options besides Bookwalker? I’ve always used Bookwalker for manga but the last few I’ve bought have been really poor-quality, and the iOS app drives me crazy.

#4081

That question came up recently in the freebies thread and I found an article with many options indeed:

I’ve been experimenting with Booklive since and it seems just as accessible as Bookwalker and would be at least worth a shot if your main problem is the specific app.
Another option in that article I haven’t tried beyond very minor dabbling but that I’ve seen mentioned a couple of times around is コミックシーモア.
(Yokohama is on both of those, and I assume other platforms in the article too)

I’d be curious if the quality of the scan would differ though… I would have assumed that would be probably be a publisher thing but I guess come to think of it I have no real reason for thinking that.

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#4082

I‘ve always thought this is a generational thing (of the manga), like e.g. Fruits Basket is pretty poor quality but it’s also quite old. Newer manga are of much better quality, e.g. Flying Witch. I always imagined this to be „scanned“ vs „digitally produced“ but this is just my speculation.

Not gonna lie, the app has its quirks :sweat_smile: (For me the pain points are mainly with dictionary lookups.) But especially for manga, well, it displays the pages but what else can it do anyways? Curious to hear what is driving you mad about it wrt manga…

3 Likes
#4083

Thank you! I’ll take a look at a few of these. It will be a bit sad to step away from the library I’ve already accumulated but I think it might be worth it.

日常 (2007) is really bad, to the point where I probably could have done better scanning with a phone app. 地縛少年花子くん (2015) is better but still bad enough that a lot of the furigana is illegible. I haven’t had much of a problem with others yet, but those titles represent two of the only five series I’ve read digitally. I suppose that supports your theory. It’s frustrating because as we’ve seen here older manga is harder to get physically and more likely to be low-quality digitally.

I have all my manga downloaded to my device, but it won’t let me read offline. Also, even when I am connected, pages won’t load and I have to restart the app to get it working again. It’s also laggy.

1 Like
#4084

I will depend on participants, I guess?
So far, everyone voted in the relevant thread that they have the original edition, so I would go with that.
Plus, schedule-wise, only 4 weeks (+1 week break) are accounted for until the next book from the club. Obviously, we can use the extra week to cover the remaining chapters (I think it’s only 2, but not sure).

NOTE: that link to the new edition doesn’t make any sense anymore, since the new edition ran out of stock since then and there’s no reprint planned right now. That makes me a bit sad :cry:

#4085

Don’t worry, it’s only a matter of time before the Book Club Effect kicks in.

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#4086

Saw this in the BBC thread, so wanted to put it out there that I’m willing to run the 地球星人 club. I was planning on writing discussion questions anyway since I’ve read it before in English, and I enjoyed running the コンビニ人間 repeat club last year.

Also happy to not put in the extra work and just enjoy being along for the ride. Your call @Phryne !

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#4087

I think that’s an excellent suggestion, especially since you were already going to contribute discussion questions. It makes it a lot easier if you make the threads as well, cause then you can post it all at the same time at your leisure.

I don’t mind helping out with a reading schedule, I’d just been holding off for the time being cause I’m waiting to see if the Kindle version might get priced down on Amazon :upside_down_face:

Could one of the regulars turn the 地球星人 home thread into a wiki?

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