GochiUsa x Bocchi magazine cover for the 20th anniversary of Kirara MAX. Poor Bocchi did the wrong thing with her hand and is embarrassed!
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Heh. Cocoa is holding the Bocchinoko.
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If you’re interested in increasing your book clubs or reading, please consider joining
Tomorrow we start Part 2 of JoJo (somewhere around L24-27 according to Natively). You don’t have to have read Part 1 to read Part 2, each Part is independent of each other. Best of all, it’s legitimately available for free to read on Shonen Jump’s app, Jump+. Whether you’re new to or familiar with JoJo, it’s a fun time and a good read. We are reading at a similar pace to the IMC, that is, one chapter a week. Please come check it out よろしく
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And we’re off.
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頭文字Ｄ
Natively: 頭文字D 1 | L26
We’ve had a few rather difficult picks lately, maybe we could use a breather and go drifting down the slopes of mount Akina instead!
Soundtrack for this post:
Summary
Set in the Gunma prefecture some time in the mid-1990s, the manga follows high-schooler Takumi Fujiwara as a friend introduces him to the world of high-octane mountain-pass racing. Gangs of racers with souped-up cars compete for the best time but a persistent rumor claims that the fastest driver on the mountain is not among them: a legendary tofu delivery driver is said to drift down the slopes of mount Akina at insane speeds during his early morning delivery rounds in a simple black-and-white Toyota AE86.
Availability
Personal Opinion
I think this manga may not need an introduction for people my age. The anime and its very 90s use of CGI car races coupled with high-BPM Eurobeat soundrack was a staple of the era. I wasn’t a huge fan back then but I impulse-bought the first volume recently during a BookWalker sale and I was pretty thoroughly entertained while reading it.
It’s very trope-heavy shounen fare but the plot and character interactions are actually more interesting than the premise would have you expect. It’s not just an endless series of street races and a big chunk of the page count is actually people talking. You don’t need to know or care about cars and racing to enjoy this manga.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- No furigana but also no tricky kanji usage, I don’t think I’ve had to do a single kanji lookup reading through the first half of the first volume. I think generally pre-2000 manga tend to avoid complicated, low-frequency kanji because they actually used to handwrite a lot back then…
- Time capsule for 1990’s Japan with cord phones and cassette tapes.
- Interesting and distinctive visual style.
Cons
- The first few chapter are pretty slow-going which is a bit annoying in a book club setting where we’ll probably just read one chapter/week. That said since this is a relatively easy manga we could also go faster.
- Text density is a bit all over the place, some dialogues can be quite dense while the racing sequences have very little text by comparison (see screenshots below).
- There’s a significant amount of hand-written text that can be challenging to parse. I personally like this type of practice but it can be frustrating at times:
- The series ran from 1995 to 2013 and is made up of 719 chapters compiled in 48 volumes. Completing it is a massive undertaking. If we were to start an off-shoot club it would take us over 13 years to complete it at one chapter/week.
- The manga doesn’t automatically start blasting Eurobeat at full volume when you open it, you have to do that manually every time.
Pictures
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What even is the point at this point, really? Next you’ll tell me I’ll have to run myself and it won’t even take me to the 90s.
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I’ll commit to providing the soundtrack if it gets picked.
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Is it me or is this a… deja-vu? 
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I just finished the first volume and I think I need to disclose that the last few chapters build to a massive cliffhanger that’s only resolved in the first few chapters of the second book.
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Status on the IMC!
The current pick ぼっち・ざ・ろっく！ has read 5 / 13 chapters, so far with a pace of 1 chapter per week. If the pace stays the same, the book will be done on Feb 8th. If at some point the pace is increased, the book could be done during the month of January.
So anyways I think we should have the next POLL soon.
Get your nominations in before the new year (2 available spots), and I will post the poll for the next book around January 3rd!
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きみのせかいに恋はない
Natively: Level 27
Summary
Japanese
花井チカ、高校生。仲の良い同級生の君嶋に告白され、付き合うことになった。けれど私は、「恋愛感情」がどんなものなのかわからない。性欲もない。ノリがよくて明るい君嶋のことを、ときどき何を考えているか理解できない宇宙人のように感じてしまい、上手くいかない。恋愛一色の周囲の友人たちは、私は「まだ運命の人に会っていないだけ」って言うけれど、本当にそうなのかな。迷いながらも進学した大学で、とある人物に会って…？ 恋愛感情って絶対にないといけないの？ 普通ってなんだろう？ 当たり前ってなんだろう？ その先にあるものは――？ 世間の言う「普通」との狭間で揺れる、少女の物語。
Availability
Physical: Suruga-ya (possibly limited availability since it’s a doujin)
Digital: Kindle | Bookwalker
Personal Opinion
I read a lot of LGBT+ manga (primarily yuri, trans, and trans-adjacent topics like gender swap), but I’ve not read a manga where asexuality is the primary theme. It has shown up as a secondary topic in other manga I’ve read, but never as the main point of the narrative.
I don’t know anything else about it, including whether the Natively level is accurate.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Topic that’s not often discussed in manga
- One-shot, so no need to get invested in a series
Cons
- Physical copies may be limited since it’s a doujin
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Vote for the next book - now!
The poll will close automatically in 7 days.
The IMC is currently reading ぼっち・ざ・ろっく！, last week of reading is February 8th but might be before, if the pace of the club speeds up.
Can I vote?
If you are interested in joining the next book club we run, you can - and should - vote!
Difficulty Scores
Difficulty scores come from Natively (if available). Natively is a large community of language learners where users rate the difficult of books they’ve read against others they’ve read and uses an ELO system to determine the relative difficulty. Because of the rating system the ratings without ?? should be reasonably accurate, but the levels with ?? are just an initial guess that must be taken with a pinch of salt.
How does the vote work?
The poll will close automatically in 7 days, on Saturday, January 10th.
You can vote for up to 5 options.
You can change your vote at any time by clicking ‘Show vote’ at the bottom.
The book with the most votes will be our next pick.
Have a look at the nominations:
- The nomination post for each manga is linked in the poll (the number link [1.]) and is also in the first post of this thread
- The Natively link is also in the poll, the “LXX” link
- There is also a Natively list of the current nominations
Time to vote for the 6th pick of the IMC 
- クプルムの花嫁 (1. — L??)
- NANA―ナナ― (2. — L29)
- ３月のライオン (3. — L31)
- ミステリと言う勿れ (4. — L31)
- CITY 1 (5. — L26)
- ご注文はうさぎですか? (6. — L24)
- 幸せのマチ (7. — L26?)
- 蟲師 (8. — L29)
- ふしぎの国のバード (9. — L29)
- 棺担ぎのクロ。~懐中旅話~ (10. — L25)
- ふたつのスピカ (11. — L24?)
- ハクメイとミコチ (12. — L28)
- ちびまる子ちゃん (13. — L27)
- 日本の歴史 1 日本のはじまり 旧石器~縄文・弥生~古墳時代 (14. — L26)
- 銀の匙 (15. — L30)
- 海月姫 (16. — L26)
- 魔入りました!入間くん (17. — L28)
- 頭文字D (18. — L26)
- きみのせかいに恋はない (19. — L27)
0
voters
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Recently stumbled upon this video:
and that made me want even more to read Mushishi (蟲師).
Good luck to all the picks! And especially to NANA!
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Make the next poll 5 minutes.
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Mushishi needs just a bit more time to overtake Nana!
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Hey !
I found this forum while searching for good manga to read for learning Japanese, and it’s awesome to see so many people here as passionate as I am !
So far I’ve only read a few chapters of とんがり帽子のアトリエ and One Piece on my own, and since I’m just in time for the next book vote, I picked Nana and 3月のライオン as they’ve been on my reading list for a while now, and I’m even more motivated to read them in Japanese while improving with everyone ! 
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Well, so far, plenty of people have remembered why Twin Spica almost won the last poll. Keep it up. 
Looks like we’ll be speeding up this week, which means our final week will start on January 18th.
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I just wish it wasn’t such a long series. I’m generally much more inclined to read a series that’s only 3-10 volumes.
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