Master List of Book Clubs

This is my main argument for grouping them.

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Thank you for pinging me! I was a bit lazy these past weeks. I’ll update the thread this week, there are two of us left, but there is a schedule, and I continue to stick to it and update word lists… So I want to believe that it is still in progress :slight_smile:

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Hey everyone, I just took a glance at some of the books mentioned in absolute beg/beg/int and all I saw were mangas (didn’t read every single posts though) but I was wondering if some clubs were reading novels? I’m aiming at begin/inter lvl though

I believe the absolute beginner book club does read kids books fairly often. The beginner book club has read a few kids books as well (such as 魔女の宅急便 and 時をかける少女). In fact, they are starting a short story collection in late August, though I don’t know the details since I’m not planning to read it with them.

As you can probably imagine, the intermediate book club and advanced book club almost always read novels.

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If you’re looking for novels at a lower intermediate level you could check out the Sayaka Murata book club, her works all seem to be on the easier side language wise.

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Like @seanblue said, we will be reading a collection of children’s short stories written by Ogawa Mimei starting end of August. You can find more about it in the book club’s home thread. All the stories are freely available and therefore you don’t even need to buy a book! The reading pace is pretty slow because it is the Beginner Book Club, which might be a pro or a con for you though :upside_down_face:

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I’ve picked out the non-manga that absolute beginner book club has read. The detective books are a series of detective novels aimed at children, very good beginner books (we’ve read four out of the five in the series). The other books are fact books rather than novels but also good beginner material for reading prose.

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I put up 地縛少年花子くん in the Miscellaneous (non-nonscheduled) section of the list since a few of us decided to keep reading in an informal format. We didn’t continue as a scheduled offshoot due to lack of members.

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I just cleaned up a bunch of stuff. Moved books from in progress to complete and from upcoming to in progress. I think everything should be up to date now, except @Naphthalene will need to add a link to the ヨコハマ entry once they create the home thread.

EDIT:
And with @rodan’s help it’s even more up to date. :blush: (and typo free :laughing:)

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I didn’t correct any typos, but I did fix my mistake of pasting Panorama Island in the Beginner’s Club originally and then poorly covered my tracks :upside_down_face:

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Oh, I read your one change backwards. You changed TBD to TBA according to the diff. Any reason you wanted to make that distinction? Or just a conflict with my change and you just happened to pick that phrase independently of me putting TBD?

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Genuinely, I pasted the Panorama Island book club into the beginner section, saved, then realized what I’d done and replaced it hastily - I just picked the first TBX that came into my head!
Apparently I did it fast enough discourse didn’t save my first edit… I would have gotten away with too it if it weren’t for those meddling Ds!

Far from fixing any, arguably I added a typo! Voting is more deciding than announcing huh…

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Are the “Off Shoot” clubs ones that are currently active? If so then I think “Active” is a good word, since the following category are “Finished” (no longer active).

“Offshoot” includes both active and finished.

For example, 「レンタルおにいちゃん」 is finished and 「からかい上手の高木さん」 is ongoing, and both are listed under “Offshoot book clubs” for the Absolute Beginner Book Club.

I feel like I should convert the lists to table format at some point. That way all the clubs can be in their original order, with a status column mentioning things like offshoot and whether it’s ongoing or completed.

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I’m just curious about exactly where Orange would fall on the difficulty scale for misc book clubs. It will be schedule and we’re nailing down a start date (but don’t have it yet so couldn’t add it to the list yet anyway).

I recently learned that (especially when it comes to manga) the difference between BBC and IBC is more page count than text difficulty. (Obviously not always true.)

For example, Sailor Moon is listed as beginner, but not only is it rather hard in places, it was also read a chapter a week and those chapters are 40+ pages; that puts it more at an intermediate (book club) speed, as well as Natively also putting the text at an intermediate difficulty too. Maybe this means Sailor Moon is misclassified, but…

Where would it put Orange? I think difficulty-wise it is probably Beginner, but we might be reading it quite fast by BBC standards (voting on speed just started, so maybe it’ll be BBC speed). Of course, after the club is done, the speed of the initial read doesn’t matter, so probably reading difficulty is more important for the master list?

Just trying to get it clear for when I can add my little :tangerine: :email: club.

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I’ll admit I was unaware of this back when I classified it as Beginner. I was looking more at the general grammar usage in the first couple of chapters as a guide.

Or, asked another way, “Easier than Death Note + more pages per week = ?”

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To be fair, grammar-wise Sailor Moon isn’t hard; it probably is Beginner there. And maybe the vocabulary isn’t wide enough to add to the difficulty enough to take it out of there.

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Almost certainly beginner. There is that awkward point between beginner and intermediate that I think a lot of manga fall into, but I don’t think many with a relatively normal setting like Orange would be classified as intermediate or higher. Not to mention that Orange has full furigana.

Where did you hear that? I know that’s often the case for books selected between intermediate and advanced book clubs, but intermediate book club picks so few manga I’ve never heard this comparison with beginner book club before.

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I kinda asked which book club I should join, or had the ability to join. So it wasn’t specifically about manga. But then it might have been more about my situation/reading ability, rather than in a kinda general sense about the clubs.

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