I just ordered mine off amazon, I’m excited to start it 
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Should we go ahead and establish a start date for the next book so that those who are waiting can start buying their books, if they haven’t already? We have a projected finish date as February 18th should we go ahead a move to start the following week giving the week break we did the last time (February 25th start)?
We also need to calculate reading rate and discussion. Last weekend some members got together to do a reading of the final story of Autumn Prison, and it seemed to be unanimously well received. Should we do something like that in lieu of WK discussion questions? I just found that after the first story in Autumn Prison the discussion page went silent, which in turn affected my reading pace. It’d be nice to avoid that deadness for this upcoming collection of stories. Do we have any suggestions?
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Here’s a projected reading schedule:
|
||
|---|---|---|
| Week | Stories | Pages* |
| 1 | 開いた窓 猿の手 |
15 |
| 2 | 父の時給 幸せグラフ 空席 |
18 |
| 3 | 望み通りの結果 たどり着けない星 動物園 |
16 |
| 4 | 運命 雨のあと |
14 |
| 5 | いちばん大切なもの 失った財産 |
15 |
| 6 | 老婦人の肖像 答案用紙 アウル・クリーク橋でのできごと |
18 |
| 7 | 奇跡は起こる 大富豪の本心 教育の必要性 |
18 |
| 8 | 学校嫌い 素敵なプレゼント 復讐 |
16 |
| 9 | 心の準備 幸福論 100万人目のお客様 |
15 |
| 10 | 箱のボタン ロボットの恩返し 人生最悪の日 |
18 |
| 11 | 力 無口なアン夫人 悪夢の続き |
15 |
| 12 | 隠蔽工作 | 17 |
| 13 | 彼の好物 | 9 |
*Page counts are from my kindle fire which have higher counts than printed page counts so this projected plan is quite conservative. Additionally, I’ve omitted pages that only had one line on them, illustrations, or were blank. I welcome additional proposals so that we can vote on suitable alternatives.
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Reading as a group also helps me stay focused on reading a book rather than just killing time on the Internet.
However, I feel like it’s harder to organize long hangout/discord sessions than talking on the forum (at least for me).
So there are two options I can see: short online voice chats on a regular basis OR long voice chat, but only as a last option, when people are really having troubles keeping up.
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I was referring to in general. Before the discord meet up in the previous book as well as the first short story in Autumn Prison, we had regular discussion questions brought up every check point. Since we didn’t set anything up for the last two short stories, it led to a silence. Although I enjoyed the Discord discussion, doing the same thing we did the other day on a regular basis may not be doable for numerous reasons. My point is whether it’s an online chat or just posting discussion questions, we need to organize something otherwise the same silence will happen again.
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I see! Sorry for misunderstanding. Then yes, I definitely agree.
it seems I just keep misunderstanding things on this thread, for some reason.
That schedule looks good to me. This book is definitely easier than the last one so should be no problems keeping up.
In terms of discussions, we have a bit of a chance to experiment with this book - given it’s broken into wholly distinct, very short short stories. One idea I have would be to choose only one story per week to focus on. Of course, people can read and discuss grammar etc for the other(s) as much as they like, but having one story would give everyone a clear focus and give the opportunity for people who are slower / have less time a chance to stick with the group while faster / freer people will still have something to keep them occupied.
A further benefit would be an opportunity to practice the fast and slow approach. I found I got the most out of the first story in 秋の牢獄 because I read each chapter multiple times and studied the unknown words in Anki etc. However, that was too much time and effort to keep up all the way through the book. With this one, we could really focus on getting absolutely everything out of one 6/7 page story per week and read the other(s) in a more relaxed way. (This was impossible in previous books since if you missed stuff in one chapter, you wouldn’t understand the next - which is not the case here.)
In general, I’m pretty optimistic for this next book. Oddly I think it’s less challenging than the book the Beginners’ Club are reading so difficulty shouldn’t be a big issue, plus the short story nature allows anyone to jump in and out and be able to rejoin at any time. I’m always reading something anyway so happy to start any time, by the way.
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No, I could’ve phrased it better. It’s easy to see how you interpreted what I said to come to your conclusion, so it’s my bad for writing my initial post poorly.
@riccyjay
So are you proposing that we go at a story a week pace? I think this has some credence with regard to digging into each story deeply. One downfall is it would take over six months to complete the collection of stories (I counted 32 stories in total). I’m open to whatever because the goal is to consume as many books as possible over this year and the future. If I have spare time from this book club, I’d just read other things on the side.
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In terms of discord meetups, I feel like we can schedule them whenever there’s interest. Perhaps there could be a few each month, and people just go to whichever one(s) they’re available for? Maybe we could do something similar to the book-choosing process where people nominate dates and times, then we throw the nominations into a poll and greenlight whichever times get a decent amount of votes.
I think @riccyjay’s proposal was to go with @LucasDesu’s proposed schedule, but to pick one story out of 2/3 for the week to be the main focus? If we did that we could maybe try to have discussion questions each week again, but have the questions just be about the designated main story.
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ピンポン。
Yeah, exactly like this - sorry if my explanation was a bit vague.
Reading is fine, but I worry having two or three stories being discussed simultaneously could get a bit confusing. People go at different paces so having one story for discussion would keep things focused. Maybe we could use @WaniMekani to choose which one the day before we start each week?
Hi! To find out what I can do, say @WaniMekani display help.
Oh, go away, you.
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At the risk of sounding like a total dork, what is the book coming up? (This thread goes back to last July, please don’t make me read it all to find out).
It’s this one. A short story collection. Hopefully starting later this month.
Next Book: 赤い悪夢 (5分後に意外な結末)
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@Snowflying thank you for clarifying
@riccyjay I see now. I’m sorry I didn’t read what you wrote carefully. So I’m assuming we’d be choosing a story after we’ve read for the week so that we have an idea about the content ahead of time. Or are you suggesting choosing the for discussion before we’ve read them for the week? In any case, focusing on one story seems to make sense, but in the case that more than one of the stories are discussion worthy, we should also be flexible to discuss the anything that generates discussion.
What do you think about the proposed schedule?
- I like this reading rate, let’s do it!
- I like this reading rate, but I’d like to suggest an alternative (or wait for other alternatives).
- I don’t like this reading rate, and I don’t have an alternative to suggest.
- I don’t like this reading rate and will be submitting an alternative shortly.
- I’m ambivalent (I don’t care).
0 voters
I’m not trying to be pushy, but I’m doing this so that we’re not rushing to get this done later. For those of you with suggestions, please vote accordingly and post your alternative.
EDIT: I’ve added the info for the next book in the OP Wiki, so those of you who have already obtained your books, ordered your book, etc. please update the wiki’s status so that we have an idea of what people’s book situation is at this point. Thanks!
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I bought 赤い悪夢. It should arrive within one month. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it as a kindle version. It said, it’s only for people in Japan. 
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For the future, if you ever want to buy a book in Japanese for Kindle, you just need to go to amazon.co.jp and make a “Japanese” account (I used a totally random Japanese address I came up with for registration), and then you can go from there and get whatever you want with no issues
If you already have a Kindle account, you’ll just need to use a different email/login for the Japanese Amazon account and can just switch between your logins as needed to access your books
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Perhaps we should also elect weekly discussion leaders who will be there to help stimulate conversation in the case nobody has anything in particular to ask about. It worked well with the first book in Autumn Prison, but when we didn’t have it, there wasn’t much activity later in the thread. Anyone who is interested please say so. The more volunteers we have the less of a burden it is for this to get done. Since there are thirteen weeks, it is safe to assume that we’d be rotating among the current volunteers each week.
@Gough mentioned that you’ll be submitting an alternative schedule, we look forward to seeing your proposal soon.
Discussion options
- Vote on one story to focus on for discussion each week before we read through the stories
- Vote on one story to focus on for discussion each week after we’ve read through the stories
- Open the discussion to any story that is read during the week (regardless of what the discussion leader brings for discussion)
- Have the discussion leader decide on what story to discuss for the week
- I have another option that we should consider which is not on this poll
0 voters
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i think it’d be fine if the discussion leader chooses the main story so we don’t have to do a poll every time - but, I think it should still be done before the designated week, so people know which one to read first/focus on more 
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I actually clicked the wrong button and was hoping no-one would notice.
I wanted to click the one where I don’t have an alternative to suggest. I just like to read a head/a bit faster than the chapter a week pace. But I don’t know how comfortable people would be with a quicker pace.
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