Re Zero Volume 1 After Book Discussion

Japanese Language Book Clubs
1

First of all, congratulation for finishing the first volume of Re Zero :tada:

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In short, I want to have everyone opinion on Re Zero book 1 and on the bookclub in general.

Here are some rules
-This is a friendly discussion, not a debat about who is wrong or right so respect is compulsory.
-Some of these question ask for Constructive comments not insults. Agains respect is compulsory
-Your opinion is important so please speak up.
-Have fun.
-Do not spoil futur book. If you speak about futur expectation please use the spoiler tag.
-Since the book is about the first volume…
WARNING THIS WILL CONTAIN SPOILER ABOUT VOLUME 1

How did you like the book(1 = very bad, 10 = perfect)

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I would like if you can describe in more details your experience so here are1 some guideline. These are only guideline you don’t need to use them but I can help you develope your opinion.

-Was the story plot good, interesting, made sense, captivating etc…
-The character are well made, interesting, who is your favorite etc…
-The difficulty was good, too hard, too easy, grammar, vocab etc…

What difficulty was the book for you(1 = too easy, 10 = too hard)

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Next section is about the bookclub

How would you rate the Bookclub in therm of usefulness, fun, organisation(1 = worst book club, 10 = best book club)

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GuideLines
The bookclub is well made,easy to find/know, etc…
The bookclub is interesting, fun, etc
The bookclub is useful for learning, etc…

The last one is mostly to help me.

What did you think of me as the manager of bookclub(1 = worst, 10 = best) This poll is obviousy anonymous.

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Since it’s my first time managing a bookclub I want to know if there is anything I can do to make the bookclub more interesting for you guys.(Please be kind to me :sob:) I’m asking for way for me to get better, for example more details, more organisation, change some things in my way of doing things etc… I can accept critics so I won’t be mad if you say i’m bad :sob:

So yeah, I will be waiting to read about what you have to say :smile:

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First off, I started Re Zero with the anime so I already knew what was gonna happen so my opinion of the story may change but I really liked the book.

Story: 9/10
The story is really interesting because as much as I hate the isekai types these days, it’s an interesting way of doing it. The comedy/Tragedy really melt well together. The die and retry with the weak character is an original approach.

Character:9/10
All the character are differents and interesting. Subaru is a nice real life otaku. His comments from time to time reflects that he compare the new world with video games. He is not the normal blank character devote of all emotions, lust or desire of every isekai. Not gonna talk about all character but my favorite was either Elsa or reinhard. I like Elsa because of her sadistic side while showing a “Innocent girl” side and Reinhard because… well… he is just too epic. You just look at him and you have to show respect. He is kinda cliche but I really like the trope. Almost all character have a distinct way of speaking which makes them easier to indentify. For exemple, Felt have アタシ, Rom have 儂 etc…

Difficulty(1 = too easy, 10 = too hard) 7/10
This book was a nice challenge to me. Lot of complicated vocabulary and specific vocabulary to the book. I haven’t read a fantasy book apart from Kino in Japanese so the medieval/fantasy vocab were hard for me. From time to time I hard trouble understanding some parts but overral a nice challenge.

For the Bookclub part:
The book club was really useful to help me realise my dream of reading Re Zero. I wouldn’t have been able to read it so soon without it. I would have prob waited at least a year before reading it otherwise. It was also useful to help me understand some part that wasn’t obvious at first glance. I remade the Op in the bookclub because I thought that the information were hard to find. Now I’m pretty glad of it. We still have 9 people actively reading so I would call it a success. :smile:

For the manager of the bookclub:

That is strange to speak about me like that so I will be quick. I do think I made a good job except for me putting thread up late. I wanted to had more think to make it more lively but I had not enough time. :sob:
I am ready to continue to manage it for volume two if you guys think I made a good job.

The next book are gonna be more interesting(Everyone said so) so I am very excited to read it with you guys.

My hope for the futur books(this is prob not a spoiler though)That Subaru become OP

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It’s nice that everyone seemed to like the book well enough! At least, judging just by the poll results so far. :slight_smile:

I’m bad at describing my thoughts in an orderly fashion, so I’ll just ramble along the topics you provided. Thanks for those! :+1:

Summary

This is the kind of story I wanted to read before I started learning Japanese (異世界とか). While my interest in Japanese literature in general has grown to include a broader range of genres, it’s nice to be able to do that now.

I feel like the plot tied together quite nicely, and doesn’t contradict itself so far. Or maybe my Japanese is still too lacking to pick up on it. :stuck_out_tongue:

I really like all of the characters. They’re cliche, but the dialogues are still fun to read. :slight_smile: Of the characters introduced in book 1, I like フェルト and ロム爺 best. Or maybe the 果物屋さん. :thinking:

Difficulty wise it is definitely up there with Haruhi as the most difficult book I’ve read so far, for me. It’s only the 4th book I finished though (not counting Manga), so my scope of reference is obviously quite limited. xD Grammar wasn’t too much of a problem - I probably missed some nuances here and there, but understanding what was going on wasn’t too difficult. If it counts as grammar, the contractions and colloquialisms and speech styles of the characters was quite difficult to parse sometimes, especially when they first appeared. Also that time Subaru couldn’t speak properly because his nose was broken… Gladly he didn’t get the chance too speak for long then. :roll_eyes::joy:
While I say this was the most difficult part for me (aside from vocab. Man, I need to learn more words :sob:), it’s also the part I enjoy most when I’m reading anything in Japanese. The way they talk tells so much about the characters! :slight_smile:

As this was the first non-main book club I actively participated in, I’m glad you decided to stick so closely to their style of doing it. :stuck_out_tongue:

Weekly Threads feel much easier to get back into and catch up with when you fall behind, haha…

I especially like the reading aloud sessions, even if I didn’t participate in them much. I think the amount of pages we read doesn’t really lend itself to them, probably because they seem intimidating? And most people want to commit to a specific amount they feel they have time for I guess. At least for me it’s difficult to break it off in the middle. Just something to get used to I guess.

Props to you, @icefang97, for keeping it alive even when participants dropped in the middle there! :slight_smile: Hope you didn’t feel you were wasting your time. :sob:

As someone with even less experience leading a club, I don’t think I can give you any advice. :smiley: I appreciated that you put the effort in creating the threads, polls, and creating some discussions during the readings.

Oh, my hope for the next book! It sure would be nice if it was (even) more interesting than this one. Also, I hope Subaru dies.

I don’t think I could have read this - or rather, would have read it at this point in my learning - without this thread or everyone reading along! Thank you! :blush:

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Am I allowed to vote having read only a 3rd of the book so far :joy:

Difficulty was surprisingly not very bad for me, but since I have a shortage of vocabs, and ReZero contains a lot of them, I can’t but take my time with it. So it’s taking me way longer than any other book.

@icefang97 thank you for instigating this whole thing.

Glad this club survived. I hope I can keep up with the next volume ;-; (Well… I do have some travelling to do and a possible job move soon. Things aren’t looking good already)

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:sob:

You can do iit! Mind over matter and all that! Just stop sleeping! See, I solved your problem for you. You’re welcome.

All joking aside, though, please consider the title (‘after book discussion’ xD) and consider changing your vote when you’re done. :stuck_out_tongue: I honestly think it’s fine, though. Whether or not you’re caught up, you read with and participated in the club while it ran and have your own insights to offer.

All the opinions count. Especially since we’re apparently only 9.

Hope you get to do some touristy travelling and not just working people’s ‘travelling’. Take your time and enjoy the ride. :smiley:

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I guess it’s a good thing that I randomly posted a picture of some books I had bought that one time in the intermediate book club thread, considering that’s what started the discussion where @icefang97 then suggested a book club :slight_smile:

If that hadn’t happened, chances are I wouldn’t have started the series yet, and definitely not have read the whole first volume, so it’s pretty nice that there is a book club and I don’t have to worry about that hypothetical scenario! (So thanks for suggesting - and starting - it @icefang97 )

Anyway, looking forward to future volumes since(small spoiler from later on in the series, something that is visible on one of the covers of the future volumes though) one of my favourite characters doesn’t appear until later on and because the nearly seven percent points of vocab from the first book I learned while we were reading it probably will make future books easier :slightly_smiling_face:

Oh, and this was the hardest book I’ve read so far, so will be interesting to see how it compares to other stuff when I’ve read more other books(that aren’t just a bunch of SAO volumes, the book club books, and some random books probably aimed at children)

For an actual comment on the plot of the book, one thing I really like is that Subaru is pretty weak in comparison to a lot of other characters and kind of have to find other ways to solve problems instead of just getting stronger or something :slightly_smiling_face:

Oh, and ラインハルト. He’s cool.

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I also came from watching the anime, which I’m sure helped me make sense of things better than I would’ve had otherwise. The colloquial language, and the casual contractions and expressions were definitely a challenge. Out of all the LNs I’d read before (a few volumes of KonoSuba and Strike the Blood), it’s definitely the hardest. I’ve added hundreds of words in a SRS (that I never started to review) just from the latter half of the book. Lots of 四字熟語, idiomatic expressions, combined with ultra-casual language, very challenging grammar.

As for the contents, being a big fan of the anime I knew I’d enjoy it. The scenes where he kept bumping into the robbers, and getting more and more exasperated were great, the casual interactions with Rom and Felt were also 11/10. And the moment when Elza turned on them was incredibly well done, I loved every moment of it. Like I said in last week’s thread, I liked that the author showed what went through Felt’s head after leaving the storehouse, that scene was not in the anime so it was a pleasant surprise :smiley:.

All in all, it was a great experience, I can’t wait to read the sequels (I’m set for the next few years :rofl:).

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Well the only difference between the “main” bookclub and other is that there is a poll to choose the book. It’s also easier to stick to an already made pattern then try to create a new one. The fun part is that at first, everything was in two thread. One for the book club, one for the book Made it hard to follow ha ha. Glad you like my copy-paste skills

Oh yeah I do remember that. Didn’t rememeber I was the one to start speaking about it though ha ha. Not long after that I spoke with tama先輩 on discord about it and he told me to create the thread. There is a lot of people include in that. For the speed I believe it’s because everyone that wanted to read it needed to be at a certain level, and since they were at a certain level they wanted it to be fast.

But yeah, that book comes from a lot of person advice, I just pushed it forward.