I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask, but how does one determine what book is what level?
Fort example, I currently have a bunch of books I want to read, on various levels. I would put 5分後に笑えるどんでん返し as beginner, ウインクで乾杯、アリバイ崩し承す and other light novels as intermediate, and then longer novels (52ヘルツのクジラたち、人形館の殺人)as advanced, but it’s mostly based on how often I need to look up a word or kanji, or how often they add furigana. Would that be even roughly accurate?
The best way to roughly determine the club level is the Natively level, if available.
Very roughly:
less than L21 and furigana: ABBC
L21 - L26 or less than L21 and no furigana: BBC
~L27-L32: IBC (read slower the higher the level is)
L30+: ABC (read faster the lower the level is)
(You can also read the tables in the opening post to get a feeling for this.)
If no Natively level - go by feeling, talk to the club you want to suggest something to.
(And going by that, none of the books you suggest seem like BBC material. They could probably all go into intermediate, and some into advanced if you want to read them faster.)
That makes a lot of sense, thank you! I made a little Natively list and, while there are a few entries that I had to request, I ended up having only three books in the beginner category (大海原と大海原 from a WK bookclub eons ago, and たまぽよ that I bought exclusively because it looked cute).
I just want to recommend to not limit yourself too strongly by the levels. If you have something you think you should read because it is appropriate in difficulty, but find it a drag to actually read, I’d rather drop that book and pick up something more challenging if it is more enjoyable.
Natively + the length of the book is good to get a rough idea of how challenging a read might be, but individual factors like enjoyment, similarity in genre, prior knowledge of the material, mood etc. all play a role in your individual reading preferences and what you should ideally tackle next.
There’s also always the option to start something and when you realize it is too hard at the moment, to put it on the backlog for later. I did so for 国宝 after reading the first chapter for example.
That said, have fun with your backlog. I have some of your books on mine as well so don’t forget to update us with your opinions after you tackled each of them
@mods Can one of you facilitate getting the forums updated to the latest version of Discourse? There was a bug that was impacting the editing of this wiki post, which they have now fixed, but we can’t benefit from that fix until the forum is updated to latest. See below for the bug (if you’re curious) and their email to contact (not sure if you have more direct means of contact).
Everyone else: I honestly have no idea how to even insert a new row into a table using the rich text editor, but at least it no longer seems to break what we already have. You can insert a new break in a table cell using Shift+Enter. It’s just the new row I don’t know how to do.
Can’t thank you enough for this advice, actually! I was feeling a little unmotivated but have picked up アリバイ崩し承ります , and while it’s obviously more challenging I am steadily reading through the pages and chapters