📚 😈 Week 18 | 図書室の怪談 | Children's Novel Club

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Welcome to week 18 of 図書室の怪談 - the final week!

Previous Week :backhand_index_pointing_left:

図書室の怪談
図書室の怪談326×500 52.2 KB

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Week 18 Feb 7
Chapters 悪魔の契約
Pages with text ~26
Ending Point End of book
Characters
Character Kanji Kana
224×226 57.5 KB
 樋口大樹 ヒグチ ダイキ
217×216 40.8 KB
 綾目 アヤメ

Discussion Guidelines

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Participation Poll
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:books: :smiling_face_with_horns: Home Thread for Ghost Story in the Library / 図書室の怪談 || Children's Novel Club
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Final thoughts on the book

It didn’t blow my mind, but it’s a fun book. I found that the stories inside the Devil’s book were a bit of a hit-and-miss, but the book does a decent job to enhance the overall mood with the thing about the stories starting to happen in reality.

I thought the whole mind-games with Ayane chasing our MC just to make him trust the monk were, while not particularly creative in a mystery novel, were interesting in a horror one.

Perhaps one thing that was problematic for me was that with our pace, we took so long to read the book that when in the final chapter the MC starts thinking about what happened in the very first story he read in the devil’s book, I could barely remember any of it since we read it months ago.

On a side note, I found really weird that the digital version has Tom Sawyer on it as an extra. I guess it might make sense given the target audience, but I feel at least a western horror story would have fit better. Edgar Allan Poe or something.

As a language learner, I thought it was pretty good exercise to get more used to prose instead of manga - still quite a number of dictionary look-ups for me but didn’t feel overwhelming.

Thanks to @soggyboy for running this club!

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Book finished!

My thoughts

Overall I think this is a decent book for beginners because the stories are nice and bite-sized, while the overall plot adds a bit of interest to keep reading (unlike a pure short story collection). Entertainment-wise I thought it was fine, I found it fun enough to keep reading until the end, although I felt like some of the stories were a bit repetitive- how many stories did we get where someone turned around and there was a lady standing behind them wearing a black/white/red dress?

Yeah :joy: when he was describing which stories happened already and which stories didn’t, I was like wow I don’t remember any of these :joy: Oh well. I think beginner club pacing is always a struggle for maintaining interest in the story, most books just aren’t meant to be read over 18 weeks, but there’s only so much we can do about that :person_shrugging:

Nice, glad to hear it!

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