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

If we do both at once, maybe read fewer pages each week?

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I’ve bought the Kindle version of Haruhi!
I’ll probably give CSW a miss since I’m also doing the Absolute and Beginner book clubs and I don’t think I could manage another book on top of that. I’ll probably read it some day though.

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I’m passing on Convenience Store Woman because the synopsis given doesn’t really grab my interest. Though, a friend of mine mentioned reading it (in English) back on New Years’ Eve…

I think we need to stick with 15 pages a week for Haruhi because of its length. It could be reasonable to drop Convenience Store Woman to 10 a week though, since it’s so short. Assuming that fits reasonably well with the chapter breaks.

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For me (I will only be reading Convenience Store Woman) it is fine either way. If we go slower, I can maybe read something else on the side, and if we go faster, I have more time afterwards to read something else :slight_smile:

For the division into pages, this is very easy as the book only consists of one chapter (plus a short afterword called 解説 - explanations). So we are free to split this up however we feel like :relaxed:

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Agreed on being OK with going slower on Convenience Store if it helps folks keep pace. I, personally, am planning to start shifting more time to reading test-prep stuff.

The book only has a single chapter, but has relatively frequent breaks. Here’s the breakdown for the hardback:

3 ーFirst Page
7 ー並べ始めた。
20 ー確かに誕生したのだった。
22 ー人間にしているのだった。
31 ー世界を信じている。
38 ー膝の上で静かに撫でた。
52 ー女性客に告げた。
55 ー唇を拭った。
67 ー見つめていた。
77 ーやっとわかっらような気がした。
80 ー微笑みかけた。
82 ーへと向かった。
92 ー済んだのに、と思った。
97 ー吹い込まれていた。
103 ー口に運んだ。
106 ー頷きながら聞いていた。
116 ー身体に詰め込んだ。
120 ー店員でありつづけさせてくれていた。
125 ー見つめていた。
132 ー響いた。
134 ー駅へと歩き始めた。
137 ーぼんやり見上げていた。
151 ーLast Page

The longest sections are 14 pages long.

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The analysis no-one asked for:

Assuming we always split the weekly reading on breaks in the text, I have found the splits that minimises the variance of pages per week for various reading rates. Here I present the splits for ~10, ~12 and ~15 pages per week (where the red lines represent the proposed breaks):

Plots

15

As you can see with the ~10 pages per week split, this method starts to run into issues due to the assumption that splits happen only on text breaks, as we are forced to have some weeks with only 4/5 pages per week.

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Your three plots look identical. Does it mean that there’s no impact from the changing the number of page between 10 to 15 in this case?

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Yep. It’ll take us 23 weeks to read the book regardless of how fast we read it.

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The changes are more visible if you can leaf through the images with an arrow key or something… Do you know how I could do that? like the images in the nomination posts.

Make them bigger. Currently they’re already displaying full-size, so Discourse doesn’t need to make the click-to-enlarge thing.

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Wait, I get it. The red lines are the proposed breaks, not the dots?

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Yes, exactly. I should’ve added a legend :disappointed:

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It’s not too late :stuck_out_tongue:
Also you x-axis shouldn’t be called “break number” I guess

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Now it makes sense. I was wondering how it could take 20+ weeks to read a 150 page book at 10-15 pages a week…

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Hi there, after the great success of Kino’s reading group, we are thinking of running something similar for the Beginner Book Club as well. To keep maintenance for the admins and the participants to a minimum, we would like to also use the Intermediate Book Club Discord server for this if this is ok for everybody?

(btw seanblue already volunteered to set up the text and voice chats for the Beginner Club in that server if nobody is against reusing it - thanks!)

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Don’t see why we shouldn’t just make it into a general book club server. Would make it easier to switch between levels as people advance (if interest in reading groups stays high) or for those participating in both.

If we’re voting, my vote’s yes. :stuck_out_tongue:

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has absolutely nothing to do with you question, but where’s the schedule for the discord meetings for the intermediate club? I’ve never joined (mainly because I read about it in the forum once and then completely forgot about it), but I’d like to in the future if I’m free, if only to lurk.
Also is the link in the OP still active? (it says it hasn’t been used for a while)

The link’s working fine! I think that note’s there because it was on a bit of a hiatus before we re-started it for Kino.

Please drop by whenever you’d like, nothing wrong with just lurking. The more the merrier, after all. :smiley: (Though there is a very real danger of being converted to the talking side of things… :eyes:)

The times can be found in the reading aloud discussion thread (OP) as well as the weekly threads’ OP. (but apparently they might be wrong? Thanks @NicoleIsEnough)

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What?! That danger doesn’t exist at all. :eyes:

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