Ready Player One is that book for me. I’m fascinated by it. It lives completely rent-free in my head, to the point where I seriously considered making a YouTube video essay about it just in order to get it out.
Can we nominate translations for this club? Maybe I could submit the Japanese version. Then I could post a novela-length rant about it every week. Also I read the book in Portuguese back when I wasn’t very good at it and it was a fairly simple read.
Can’t remember what our general feelings on Ready Player One were, though I largely enjoyed it. The movie was a bit… oof, though.
I have, however, been informed that if I even consider nominating Ready Player Two, I’m out of the club. Once I’d read a synopsis of it, I think I’d have to agree. 
We did read Harry Potter a few years back…
That’s a surprise. Reader Player One felt super cringe to me, mostly because it seemed like the same shallow geek wish fulfillment you assume Silent Witch will turn out to be. If you nominate that, I‘ll hate on the nomination to get revenge for @Redglare.
I don’t see why not, as long as you make clear that it’s a translation in the cons. It might have a slight penality due to people wanting to rather read originals by Japanese authors than books they could easily read in their original language.
Could we not, please.
I read that one too (in Russian this time). I think even people who loved the first one generally didn’t like it, and for good reason. It removes what was good in the original, doubles down on the bad stuff, and then adds some new bad stuff that really wasn’t called for. That part where the protagonist hacks into an underage trans girl headset to spy on her in her bedroom was particularly memorable.
@Boodil I genuinely can’t start talking about RPO without derailing the thread completely. I need to exert restraint. But to be clear I don’t consider it a good book, I just find it extremely interesting. I enjoy it the way I enjoy The Room, kind of, although I actually think that the author deserves some credit for writing (at times) competent sci-fi set-pieces.
Yeah that’s definitely a good point, although in my experience translations are often a bit easier to read than original works of a similar level because the prose is often a bit less culturally-loaded with slang and whatnot.
Personally I’d rather read an easier book by a Japanese author in Japanese then (and the English book in English). But that’s just me, and I mean the worst thing that could happen is that people don’t vote for it and you wasted a few minutes writing the nomination.
But where would something like originally in Chinese, translation in Japanese fall? 
No I’m not sitting on a copy of The Three Body Problem in Japanese that I need to actually read past the 5th page of, why do you ask?
I would definitely be interested to read that one. I could be wrong but I would assume that Chinese-to-Japanese translations may be a little more straightforward and true-to-source thanks to all the shared vocab, but then again I barely know any Chinese at all. I was actually thinking about that earlier this week because I’ve always wanted to read Journey to the West and I thought that maybe I could read it in Japanese some day, which may be a little more “authentic” than an English or French translation.
Amusingly I bought a Russian copy of the Three Body Problem but I never actually read it because in the forewords the translator explains than he doesn’t speak Chinese so he re-translated the English version instead. That just felt too silly.
Oh no, I’m sorry! Silent Witch looks super fun to me and I love the concept and the cover. 
I believe in not judging things other people like too harshly, so I was rather enjoying the merciless teasing @simias incurred when they mouthed off about it. 
But I wasn’t thinking about how it might effect folks who weren’t vocal in the thread. So again, I’m sorry, and I hope we can all have a great time in the Silent Witch club! 
And in the meantime I picked up the book because I thought the cover was pwetty and binge read it in two days. Thanks for nominating it 
Whoever is interested can make themselves known here 
For every reader who only wants to read only one of them, there’s a reader who only wants to read the other. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
This is such a sticky situation with no right answer… NicoleIsEnough has all my sympathy for having to make this call 
2/3 of people are interested in either of the books (second poll), and reading them at the same time would make a lot of people only focus on 妊娠カレンダー (third poll), so reading them at the same time seems like a bad choice.
63% of people agree with reading 妊娠カレンダー and then サイレント・ウィッチ right after without a poll, with only 20% disagreeing (fourth poll).
All polls seem to point pretty strongly to “First read 妊娠カレンダー, then サイレント・ウィッチ” from what I can see.
There’s also the fact that it was estimated that reading them back to back would take 33 weeks, but that was using 15 pages/week. When you consider that Silent Witch is level 29 and the current book is level 28 and being read at ~25 pages per week, if Silent Witch was read at that spead it would only be 25 weeks total.
That’s not because of the level (I really hope Silent Witch won’t be read at 25 pages/week… 
), but because of:
It’s actually a bit relieving to hear that, 25 pages sounds kinda scary 
Or, there was this idea, which seems a fantastic compromise
I also think the idea from @Domjcw is interesting, and would support such a format 
Alright, decision time!
Looking at the first scenario, 妊娠カレンダー is now 3 votes ahead of サイレント・ウィッチ, so that seems pretty clear to me.
Regarding who would read along with the respective club, we get 21 votes for 妊娠カレンダー and 20 votes for サイレント・ウィッチ, which is also a very good result.
Looking at the second scenario, it might look like reading in parallel is also a viable option, but if we count the votes, it turns out that 12 + 3 + 4 = 19 people would read 妊娠カレンダー while 7 + 4 + 3 = 14 people would read サイレント・ウィッチ.
So the former would not lose many readers but the latter would go in with a much smaller group, and given the fact that the book club host puts in quite some effort to start with, plus it’s much more fun to read in a larger group with more discussions and whatnot, plus there are always dropouts for all sorts of reasons, I think reading in parallel is not a good idea for this constellation.
Now for the extra scenario: Thank you to everybody who raised their concerns. I did not comment on them yet, but I must confess I was not a big fan of this option from the start, and I just included it because we had such a poll already in the past, and so I thought that maybe we can learn something interesting from it.
Although many people agreed with reading the books back to back without a poll, given the large number of “disagree” and “not sure” votes, I don’t think this is a good solution either. If サイレント・ウィッチ is still so popular in the next voting round, I think it will easily win, and so we get to the same result while at the same time having a fresh decision, which is more interesting as well. (Also, we should not forget that this is the IBC so we can expect quite some fluctuation as new people join the club and others move on to higher levels.)
TL;DR:
and we will have a regular poll once it’s finished.
Thank you to everybody who participated in the polls, the discussions and the analysis, I did not reply to your comments but I read them all, and you all helped me a lot with getting to this conclusion.
Also, my apologies to @Redglare for the discussion-gone-wrong 
I should have spoken up earlier but I did not realize that it could be hurtful for you and everybody who really likes the book. I hope that our next poll will take us back to our former discussion standard 
Now back to the book club business: @Domjcw would you like to run the club for 妊娠カレンダー ? It is scheduled to start on October 19th.
