The Intermediate Manga Club (IMC) // Now Reading: ダンジョン飯 // Next: ぼっち・ざ・ろっく! (Nov 16th)

I would say have the submitted make a judgement call. Maybe mention it in the Cons, that the natively novel is not known and might be wrong.

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Let me also mention that when I first read the first volume I was lower beginner level and it absolutely destroyed me. But now I have trouble judging just how hard these 4-koma (without furigana) series actually are. They tend to be more dense than standard manga. At 8 pages per chapter they are probably doable in BBC sometimes, but no one wants to read a single manga for 13 weeks. Yet making it two chapters per week would be too hard for BBC. So whether it makes sense here probably depends on the pace. Can’t hurt to nominate it and let the process work though.

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As long as other members can read the sample and suggest removing it if there’s consensus it’s too easy.

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That’s one way to put it :joy:

I’m not particularly sensitive to much but that one got a “wow, that’s seriously messed up” from me more than once. Still a pretty interesting read and I’d love to try it in Japanese at some point, but for a book club… yeah, maybe not :joy:

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3月のライオン

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Author: 羽海野 チカ
Page Count: 188
Natively: Level 31

Summary

Japanese

その少年は、幼い頃すべてを失った。夢も家族も居場所も──。この物語は、そんな少年がすべてを取り戻すストーリー。その少年の職業は──やさしさ溢れるラブストーリー。

English

(DeepL) The boy lost everything when he was a child. His dreams, his family, his place in the world… This is the story of a boy who regains everything. The boy’s occupation - a love story overflowing with tenderness.

Availability

Rakuten
eBook Japan
CD Japan
BookWalker
Honto
Amazon Kindle JP
Amazon JP
Kinokuniya JP

Personal Opinion

One of my personal favorite series of all time (I’ve recommended it to people all over the place, both on and off the forums) both in anime and manga form. Gorgeous art and reading it in japanese has a very special flow that I haven’t found in many other manga. It showcases an extremely deep love of people and the many complicated ways they can relate themselves to each other (a style you might be familiar with if you’ve read this mangaka’s other famous work: ハチミツとクローバー) it’s an extremely hopeful (although not always happy) view of humanity through a case study of the professional shogi world. It’s won or been nominated for like a bajillion awards in both anime and manga form, and imo they are well deserved.

Pros:

  • One of the all time great seinen series
  • Gorgeous art
  • There’s a lot of it, if you like it (17 volumes, ongoing, but very slowly ongoing)
  • Has a lovely anime adaptation from studio SHAFT (monogatari, madoka) that follows the chapter structure very well
  • なんかコタツみたい
  • Was recently on sale on bookwalker, and I know at least a few of you picked up the whole series :eyes:

Cons:

  • Dense some pages are literally columns written by an actual pro shogi player trying to help give you some context, and they can be a real challenge to read
  • Lots of handwritten/stylized fonts, which can be a challenge for some people
  • Can get very introspective/heady/philosophical at times, somewhat unrelated to the action happening (maybe a plus for some people)
  • You will learn a lot of shogi words and very colorful poetic expressions, it gets very into the nitty gritty of how the game and organization works, and sometimes in ways that are plot important and you can’t really skim over (also maybe a plus for some people), or will have some expression that you can’t get away with looking up quickly in a dictionary
  • The first few volumes were already run as an independent book club back in 2020
  • It does take a little bit to show its true colors. In the service of making sure we get a good understanding of our characters and the world, it’s fairly slow. Just reading the first volume will not really give you a good picture of what the series is like
  • Digital scan quality can be questionable at times
first pages of chapter 1


additional pages showing some of the high text density (from a later volume, but no spoilers)

Example shogi column, there are 4 of these per volume

Let me know if there’s anything missing, hard to navigate well on my laptop lol

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This one is great. I’m on volume 7, but I’ve been reading it for a while. I read obsessively for a volume or two and then it gets to be too much and I drop it for months. It also doesn’t help that I’ve watched the whole anime run twice, so all the content is familiar already.

Maybe with a book club that leads to an offshoot, I’d be able to actually pace myself and get to the stuff I haven’t seen before :joy:

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There is (was?) a bookclub for 3月のライオン:

The book club stopped at volume 3.

Another con you might want to add: I’m not sure about bookwalker, but I have the digital copies for Amazon Kindle, and the quality of the earlier volumes is … not great. This made some small font and handwritten parts particularly painful to read. Not sure if it gets better with more recent ones.

Examples:

For comparison, the digital version vs a picture of the physical one:

image

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Looking at how old it was and how the format of that club worked, I decided it was worth nominating again. Like with our other ibc offshoot and reread clubs for コンビニ人間, just having an existing club doesn’t preclude nominating something to be read again or in a different way, although I did mention it in the cons for if people really want some new blood for nominations

Can anyone who picked it up on bookwalker recently check the scan quality? I didn’t see anything near that bad in the preview pages when I was grabbing the example pages, but I own physical so can’t check

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You got me completely sold with your nomination post, now I’m so sad that I didn’t buy them all while on sale :smiling_face_with_tear:

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Bookwalker version:
image
Compared to your kindle screenshot:

It seems to be bit less fuzzy. (although that white-on-black text… why did they style it that way :sob: luckily that seems to be only this page)

Also here is some typical text

image

and another example of text on a black background

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Also this is based on my old attempt at Bocchi, but I think Bocchi da Rock would be good here too. (I found it supremely difficult at the time)

/edit and Apothacary Diaries, come to think of it.

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Bocchi is definitely at the right difficulty for the club, yeah.

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Doesn’t look like this club is going to run out of quality nominations soon.

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Nice, I would definitely like to see more nominations, because otherwise it will be awkward if we can vote for 5 things if there are only 5 nominations or less :x

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I will nominate 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 1 | L29 later. Unfortunately that’s basically all I got… unless you want me to nominate some things I liked but wouldn’t reread with the club or ones that are slightly under level at L26.

I could do:

I suppose there’s also ゆゆ式 1 | L30?? and クプルムの花嫁 1 | L30?? on my owned list, but I don’t know if they are hard enough to belong here.

By the way, how strict do you actually want to be with the levels? Because technically とんがり帽子のアトリエ is only level 26, though I’d say for the series at least that’s an understatement of the difficulty anyway (not sure about the first volume). Still want to know in general though.

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Natively levels are just general indicators. I would trust the intuition of a hypothetical nominator over Natively, especially for series with lower or no amounts of natively raters

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Within reason I suppose. Not gonna be many Natively L20 manga that are actually L27+. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Point taken though. I suppose then I can also nominate こみっくがーるず 1 | L25, which is L25, but I’m the only one who has graded it. :joy: And I’ll look at a sample of 愛しの花凛 1 | L25 later to see if it can be justified. That one I haven’t read so I don’t know how hard it is.

Better be careful or I’ll nominate 5+ 4-koma manga though. :stuck_out_tongue: (I own a volume of like 20-30 4-koma manga that I got on sale, but since I haven’t read them I don’t know how difficult they are. These 4-koma can range anywhere from L20 to L30 really, so it’s hard to say without reading them.)

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ミステリと言う勿れ 1

Natively: Level 31
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Summary

Personal summary: A college student with distinctive hair and a very logical mind keeps finding himself pulled into unfortunate ‘mysteries’.

Availability

Amazon JP and CD Japan.
Kindle (JP), Rakuten and BookWalker.

Personal Opinion

I have already read the first few volumes and watched the drama based on it and enjoyed them both a lot. It’s a fun series that gets a little serious without getting too dark for most people (at least so far as I’ve read) and I find most of the characters likeable in their own way.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Easily available
  • Has a drama adaptation
  • Engaging plot that moves at a decent pace
  • Full furigana
  • I personally think the scan quality is good

Cons

  • Some of the later volumes (not this first one) have dialect which is a bit challenging
  • This is a crime solving series so like most series in the genre, there is murder (nothing graphic)

Pictures

First Three Pages of Chapter One



Additional Pages

I feel like the first 3 were pretty representative, but here’s another one with more text

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I had Kaguya-sama nominated in the intermediate book club previously, but it got removed due to lack of interest, so I guess I’ll try to just nominate it here?

かぐや様は告らせたい〜天才たちの恋愛頭脳戦~ (Kaguya-sama: Love is War)

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Author: Aka Akasaka
Page count: 214
Natively: L31

Summary

Copied from amazon, the English one isn’t a translation of the Japanese one sadly.

Japanese

「恋愛は告白した方が負けなのである!」 家柄も人柄も良し!! 将来を期待された秀才が集う秀知院学園!! その生徒会で出会った、副会長・四宮かぐやと会長・白銀御行は互いに惹かれているはずだが…何もないまま半年が経過!! プライドが高く素直になれない2人は、面倒臭いことに、“如何に相手に告白させるか”ばかりを考えるようになってしまった!? 恋愛は成就するまでが楽しい!! 新感覚“頭脳戦”ラブコメ、開戦!!

English

Two geniuses. Two brains. Two hearts. One battle. Who will confess their love first…?!

As leaders of their prestigious academy’s student council, Kaguya and Miyuki are the elite of the elite! But it’s lonely at the top… Luckily for them, they’ve fallen in love! There’s just one problem—they both have too much pride to admit it. And so begins the daily scheming to get the object of their affection to confess their romantic feelings first…

Availability

Currently some of these are free to read until early may
Ebook B-W: Amazon, Bookwalker
Ebook Color: Amazon, Bookwalker
Paperback: Amazon, CD Japan

Personal Opinion

I’m a sucker for romance and Kaguya-sama is one of the best, if not the best romantic show airing right now as an anime. The manga mostly follows the same exact plot with some additional stories that weren’t animated. It’s fun, sometimes a bit over the top, but that’s part of the enjoyment. It’s also quite funny.

Pros and Cons for the Book Club

Pros

  • Heavy use of (even uncommon) kanji, so you can challenge your reading ability
  • Mostly disjointed stories, so you can pick up and put down the manga quite easily
  • As of November of 2022, the series is finished, so you get an actual ending if you continue reading
  • Decent (though not at all perfect) ebook quality

Cons

  • Heavy use of kanji without any furigana, making lookups a bit of a chore sometimes
  • Mostly dijointed stories in the first volume, you don’t get a very strong overarching plot
  • The series is finishes, so besides the offshoots, you won’t get any more content ever if you finish it
  • Has quite a bit of handwritten (or at least handwritten-like) text outside of bubbles

Pictures

Screenshotted from the amazon web reader, because I’m lazy, so quality isn’t representative

First Three Pages of Chapter One



Additional Pages (from a bit later in the first chapter)



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This thread is just full of bangers god damn

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