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

That would be a strong indicator against 1Q84 as it does not seem to be available in Japanese in digital form. You can get it in all sorts of other languages, including Chinese, but not in Japanese :sob:
(or maybe I’m too stupid to properly search for it…)

Although I appreciate the thought, I don’t think a book should be discarded because of this. Besides I’m not sure if this even applies anymore since it seems like I’m the only person remaining from that time…

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Poll time. What is your preferred reading method?

  • Exclusively physical books
  • Prefer physical books
  • Exclusively digital books
  • Prefer digital books
  • No preference

0 voters

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Probably not all that helpful, but if the club decides they want to refresh anything about the OP I like tidying and editing things, so I’d be happy to help with that.

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Hopping back to the topic of manga for a moment, what would the expected pace of a manga in this club be, do we think? I’m wondering because - granting that the manga I’m reading right now is pretty text light, but - I have a tendency to read an entire volume in a sitting. So I’m a little apprehensive that I’d get frustrated with the pace of a manga book club?

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I couldn’t tell you that, but if helps the schedules of books read in the past averaged about 20 pages a week (3 pgs/day) . That pacing along with the difficulty of the text proved too prohibitive to those who wanted to transition over here. So the difficulty of the selections may go down, the pacing may be slower than before, or both may be reduced to have more participation. Translating that to a manga would probably mean a pretty brisk pace. But then again, others may differ in opinion with respect to that.

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Same here, or even multiple volumes in one sitting :thinking: The ARIA book club taught me patience though.

I think a nice compromise would be somewhere around twice the speed used in the beginner book club (and/or twice the difficulty, but that’s more subjective), so roughly two chapters per week?

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I think it would depend greatly on the expected difficulty of the manga. For example, reading an 18 page chapter of Non Non Biyori took significantly more effort than reading a 36 page chapter of Aria does.

Now take 放浪息子, the manga I’ve been pushing for. It has no furigana, but otherwise didn’t seem too difficult. Most of the chapters seem to be 24 pages long. I could possibly see doing two chapters a week, whereas doing one a week would be the norm for beginner book club. That said, we tried doing two chapters a week for Non Non Biyori, and it was a bit hard to organize. So we probably need to figure out the discussion format if we want to do something like that.

@Naphthalene Jink!

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The other thing I’m thinking is that, if we do go faster (two chapters a week) in a four chapter per volume manga, that could become financially prohibitive for some people too. Possibly including me.

Unless I already own 10 volumes of the manga.

放浪息子

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I was looking for a many-volumes bundle of 放浪息子, but the one I was eyeing got bought before I could put in a (lowball) offer. It’s just annoying that people in Japan can buy these used for the equivalent of a dollar and it would cost me like $5 a volume minimum to get them used, and twice that if I get them new.

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This isn’t that bad, all things considered, but yeah unless you get really lucky it’s always a lot.

I was happy to snag some used Japanese books for $5 and $7 with free shipping off non-Japanase Amazon (!) recently. In the grand scheme of things that’s pretty normal for a used book, but here it felt like a steal…

Yeah, I was just eyeing that one as well… On one hand, if I really like the series I’m getting it for about $75 instead of $130 new. On the other hand, if I don’t like it, I’ve spent $75 instead of just the $10 it would cost to get the first volume.

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For those interested in voting or stalking, the beginning book club poll is up.

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@ditto20 @seanblue @Radish8
Well, I just moved some stuff around and added the guidelines and proposal template.
(I modified slightly the guidelines, but both are basically a copy paste of the beginner book club).
I don’t think I have broken anything.
At least, we can start putting up nominations now.

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Thanks! Is 350 still a bit long though? I was originally thinking 300, so the expected pace could be 15 pages a week instead of 10 pages a week to take the same amount of time. (Not much difference in the end though.)

Also, I think we should still hold off on nominations until we see what wins in the beginner book club, just to be sure.

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So that means I can fire away, right? :wink:

おおかみこどもの雨と雪

Light novel, slice-of-life

Summary

It’s about a young student who falls in love with a werewolf (he’s really nice though) - they have two children (called 雨 and 雪) together and the story is basically about the children growing up. Which is slightly more exciting than raising “normal” human children…

Availability

amazon.jp - this is the version with furigana but there are others as well
ebookwalker
ebookjapan

Personal Opinion

Pros and Cons for the Book Club

Pros

  • I’ve watched the anime some time ago, and while I did not really understand much back then, I recognized quite a number of the words. To find out more about the difficulty level, I just read the first two pages, and I’d say they were definitely simpler (grammar-wise) than 時をかける少女. Of course that might be different later on (e.g. I know from the anime that there is some decent keigo communication going on at some point), but in general I expect the book to be quite accessible to many.
  • The book is 2nd place in the FloFlo wishlist, so maybe the vocab list will be available there at some point… :wink:

Cons

  • I don’t know if the topic is appealing to everybody; it is basically a story about how two children grow up and find their place in the world. There are some interesting twists and difficulties in general and due to the fact that they are wolf children, of course, but it’s not like the action-packed superhero manga or something.

Pictures

These are screenshots from the ebook (the edition with full furigana). I guess the pages of the physical book are much smaller.

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
  • Just right
  • Challenging
  • Impossible, even with everyone’s help
  • I don’t know (please click this if you’re not voting seriously)
0 voters
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Well, はたらく魔王さま was ~315 pages long, so it feels weird to put the bar lower than that…

For nominations, I was thinking of putting up stuff that aren’t already on the beginner poll. (Reminder: I recently bought a bunch of books thanks to the new year’s “ultra sale” at book off; I can singlehandedly fill the recommendations if I feel so inclined :stuck_out_tongue:) (I don’t)

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You guys also read that really fast though, right? I thought the point was to find a more middle-ground pace this time around.

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20 pages per week. I think it’s still fine at 15 pages per week :man_shrugging:

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It doesn’t seem all that likely something harder will win with what the poll currently looks like, but I don’t mind waiting either. For how long will the poll in the beginner book club run?

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