I think I would put it under Beginner Book Club, because the book was voted for there. And even if this iteration wasn’t, I think I’d find it more confusing to spread them out across various categories tbh… I would probably even put them next to each other in the list (although this breaks the timeline if there is such a thing), to make it easy to understand.
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I would go even further than @NicoleIsEnough and put the extra thread link on the same line, with a title such a [2] or [re-read (date)] or something like that.
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Personaly, I would just create a re-read section for these bookclubs. Less confusing and it will be easier for the new readers to not get overwhelm by the huge ammount of book that will be in the beginner section. You can even Add a section for the years so that everything will be easier to find.(Yes I am that kind of guys that classify EVERYTHING)
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Sounds like overkill since I don’t think anyone is planning to reread anything else. Maybe it should just be included in the misc scheduled section.
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Awww, I went ahead and added it to Beginner earlier cos you liked Nath’s comment, haha 
I agree that it’s not worth a section of its own. I was also thinking I would probably remove it entirely once it’s finished (or possibly started) - there’s no reason somebody needs to be pointed to both (finished) groups for the same book, and the home threads cross-link each other if anybody is particularly interested in the ‘history’.
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That’s fine too. I just don’t want a new “re-read” section.
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I think this only applies to about one club at the moment, but for the misc category, should there be some kind of signifier to indicate clubs which have stopped? Or perhaps two tables behind the tag; current (/upcoming) vs finished?
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It looks like many of them are inactive actually. But then there are ambiguous ones. Like is the ご注文はうさぎですか club inactive? I was the only one participating really, and I’m caught up. But once more volumes come out I will continue to read it and comment in the thread.
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Ah, yes - I was thinking more of the scheduled ones. The non-scheduled ones are too ambiguous - whether they’re still going or not it’s still a bit iffy because clubs often fizzle out rather than officially ending, but at least if they’re following a schedule then it’s easier to say a club is clearly not active right now, and if they do reach the end then they’re clearly finished.
A non-scheduled club never reaches the ‘end’ because it’s just an individual thing.
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I think “finished” vs “unfinished” is helpful, not so sure about “active” and “inactive”. That feels a bit volatile.
If we label a bookclub as inactive, will it discourage people from posting questions? If they do post a question in an inactive bookclub, and people answer has it become active again?
Plus it’s another thing someone has to maintain.
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Oh yeah, I’m not suggesting that’s something we’d update every five minutes. More like “okay, nobody has suggested reading the next volume in a year, I think we can say it’s not super active right now”.
And I don’t think “inactive” is a good label, partly for the reasons you suggest - but specifically thinking of the scheduled threads I think it can be helpful to note whether it’s currently reading along with a schedule (or likely to be picking up the next volume soonTM or whatever), because presumably the intent with this list is to help people find / pick a club. Some people might really only be interested in one where they could catch up / skip ahead and take part with the active discussion.
Others just want to look for inspiration of course, and many are interested in any club where they can post questions in old threads. I wouldn’t want to do anything that would discourage people from that. But lots of people find schedules motivating, so I know quite a few would be specifically looking for that kind of thing.
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So something like a “next scheduled start” column with the options “TBD/In Progress/start date/Finished”?
To be honest I think the only one no longer running is Doki Doki Literature Club?
I really don’t think we want something that requires a lot of upkeep. So yes, as you suggest perhaps a ‘status’ column which can say “in progress”, “complete” (I think that sounds less closed than “finished”?) or… I dunno… TBD? Hiatus? Paused? just something that makes it sound like it’s not going, but still available 
I think it could just be left blank if not yet started. Should be fairly self-explanatory from the date
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I have a suggestion. Would it be a good idea to put the books in ‘Miscellaneous Book Discussions (non-scheduled)’ in a table just like the ‘Miscellaneous Book Discussions (scheduled)’ table? That way people would be encouraged to display the estimated difficulty level of the book club. I imagine difficulty level is a prime criterium for people looking for their next book to read, and having to go through the threads one by one to try and find out is a bit of a pain 
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That’s not a bad idea. It can be a bit hard to assign difficulty when there’s no schedule though, since how fast you read it influences difficulty. I guess we could just ignore that factor here.
Also, let’s take the two manga I added, 放浪息子 and ご注文はうさぎですか. Compared to beginner book club manga, they’d be hard (no furigana and dense in the case of the latter). But compared to an intermediate book club book they’d be a joke. How do you suggest I should label them? (To be clear, in the past I felt that ご注文はうさぎですか was harder than some of the easier books I’d read. But I’m now at a level where it’s pretty easy and I’m incapable of judging relative easiness of things I find easy.)
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That’s a good point. I am not sure everyone interprets the ‘intermediate’ difficulty level the same way, though. For example, in the ‘miscellaneous book clubs (scheduled)’ table, there are manga listed with an intermediate and advanced difficulty level, even though they would likely not be read in those book clubs if it had come to a vote. When they are shown next to each other in a table like that, people are more likely to interpret those difficulty levels as relative to each other, rather than as absolutes linked to specific clubs.
It sounds a bit fuzzy, I hope I made myself somewhat clear
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We can still add this if you think it’s better than nothing, even if it’s a bit vague.
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Also, what would the level indicate? That you can reading without too much pain?
For instance, 世界から猫が消えたなら is very short (~200 pages of text, with many pages half full due to dialogs) and the grammar/vocab is straightforward. N4 is probably enough to read it, but that will require a very large amount of dictionary lookup, which is painful. I think you would need a solid N2 to go through it without (much) look up. Does that make it a beginner book? An advanced book? Averaging that, an intermediate book?
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My general response is 
. I’m used to having a very small vocabulary and always needing to look up a ton. So if I can understand nearly everything after looking up a bunch, I consider it on the easier side. So for example, I would say 獣の奏者 is “minimal effort” for me. But that’s definitely a very personal view. Overall, I’d indicate the difficulties relative to the book clubs on the forums. Where would they be placed if reading at a fairly typical book club pace?
But there’s still a difference between looking up a lot (獣の奏者) and looking up a ton (魔法少女育成計画) and the overall complexity in the writing styles. If I were to give the books I added difficulties, I’d say:
- 放浪息子: beginner (maybe beginner/intermediate combo)
- ご注文はうさぎですか: beginner/intermediate combo
- 魔法少女育成計画: intermediate (maybe intermediate/advanced combo)
For my knowledge, would you describe 新世界より as advanced? Also, how would you describe 魔法少女育成計画’s difficulty compared to 新世界より? For me, 魔法少女育成計画 was incredibly difficult, which is why I’m curious how difficult it is compared to 新世界より.
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Well, it would depend what the pace is. At 10 pages a week (beginner book club), セカ猫 may be a bit spicy, but sentence structure is really easy, so looking up all the words would be enough to understand. Also, it would take ~20 weeks, which would be too long for the official club. I guess it’s a good transition to the intermediate book club, though.
For me 新世界より was harder, since it included a fair amount of kanji I didn’t know, with almost no furigana. Even old forms of kanji, like in 祈禱… Plus, since the story is written as recollections from the main character, there’s some rambling at times, and things can be contradictory due to “fuzzy memory”. That can really throw off someone whose not confident in their Japanese and rely on context for confirmation. The worst offender is probably when the main characters are brainwashed to believe one of them never existed, replacing him by another guy. The narrator doesn’t acknowledge anything happened until “memory her” realizes it herself.
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