VOTING
I’ll plan to close the poll Monday evening UK time, so just over 24 hours left to get your votes in!
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Thank you, Micki! Thats perfect. About to pick up Mitsuboshi Colours volume 1 and Happiness (first 3 volumes are free atm! In case anyone is interested) through Bookwalker. Looking forward to joining in with you all going forward!
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The votes are in! Mitsuboshi colours was the clear winner and will be our next book starting around Nov 13th. It was a close race for second place but Happiness just won out, so unless there are any objections we’ll schedule that one afterwards.
@ChristopherFritz do you want to run the Mitsuboshi book club? @eieio do you want to run Happiness?
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Sure thing. I’ll get the thread up today. Thread is up:
I was wondering which would make it to second. I knew if Colors came first, it’s short enough that there’d absolutely be a second pick.
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I‘ve updated the thread header, hope it’s ok like this?
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If you ever wondered when it might be time to take the jump to the next level: Here is your chance ! The Beginner Book Club is currently voting and if you’re interested you could have a look at their proposals - maybe there is something in it for you?
Also, I can reassure that the Beginner Club gang is as friendly and helpful as the people you’ve met in here, so don’t be shy and try it out! 
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With an 11 week schedule for the next book, the book after that would be scheduled to start on Feb 5th. Assuming we go with the plan of reading the runner up in the poll afterwards, we’ll need someone to volunteer to run the Happiness book club. @eieio it was your pick so you are welcome to run the club. Otherwise would anyone else like to run this one?
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The 大海原と大海原 Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea Volume 2 Off-Shoot Club will be starting on November 20th. You can find the schedule at the Vol 2 Home Thread!
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Reminder: We’re starting 三ツ星カラーズ this upcoming weekend!
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The week one thread for Mitsuboshi Colors is live. For subsequent threads, I’ll only post about them in the main Mitsuboshi Colors thread.
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Would anyone be kind enough to change the title of this thread so that it reflects we are now reading Mitsuboshi Colours please? Thank you!
Edit - thanks @IzCreature!
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That’s apparently been my “thing” in the past, but I just discovered today that I’ve lost my Regular status. Tragedy!
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Just a reminder we still need a volunteer to run the Happiness book club scheduled to start Feb 5th.
“Running a book club” simply means:
- setting up a home thread (you can copy a template from other book clubs)
- agreeing a reading schedule
- creating a vocab spreadsheet (or asking someone else in the group to do)
- posting the weekly threads for discussion
You don’t have to:
- complete the vocab spreadsheet - that’s a group effort
- answer all the questions that are posted
- be confident at reading
It simply needs someone willing to put it a little time to organise things. If it’s your first time there are lots of people that can help you out if you have any questions!
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Over in the 三ツ星カラーズ home thread, it’s under consideration to maintain a slower pace, bringing the club length to 18 weeks. (Here’s Micki’s post on it, which I agree with.)
If we extend, will that push out the start date of Happiness? Or would we overlap the end of one and start of another? (Would it be dependent on whether we get a volunteer to run Happiness?)
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I made a home thread for Happiness. I’ve gone for a start date of March 5th - based on current schedule for Mitsuboshi Colours, with the usual one week gap between books.
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I’ve been reading Mitsuboshi Colours and having a blast! It’s making me curious to do a bit more reading on my own to get some extra practice and I see there’s 12 books that have already been read in this club.
It’s been mentioned a few times that Mitsuboshi Colours is a bit harder than other books ranked in the ABBC, are there any of the previous books that are particularly easy to start with or should I just go in order? I’m probably most interested in Shirokuma Cafe, how does that one compare in difficulty?
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I can’t speak for all of them, but a few that I’d recommend from the list are:
- レンタルおにいちゃん: Starts off on the easier side and steadily ramps up in difficulty over the chapters and volumes.
- からかい上手の高木さん: Stays fairly easy throughout the series.
- それでも歩は寄せてくる: Stays fairly easy throughout the series, and has short chapters.
It’s fairly easy from a grammar perspective. The main difficulties are that 1) some jokes/puns are based on (sometimes obscure) Japanese culture/media, so they may not make much sense, and 2) a lot of the vocabulary that comes up in jokes/puns are uncommon words. So long as you know this going in, it’s not a huge problem.
The best material is the one that interests you most.
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We read this in ABBC last year. Currently free to pick up volume 1 on Book Walker (that usually means it’s free on other digital stores too).
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Thank you. I just got the book to practice some reading!
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Assuming you are referring to それでも歩は寄せてくる, don’t forget to check out the discussion threads from the book club if you run into any headaches while reading!
And should you decide to continue with the series, we’ve just wrapped up Volume 3, and will be starting Volume 4 next weekend (this is a series which you can fairly safely jump into at any point, and play catch-up later if you should so choose!~)
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