Same here. I’m always finishing the previous week’s reading just as the new week is starting, and by that point, any discussion points I might have thought of have already been discussed.
Maybe the pace was a bit fast? Either way, I’m keeping up, it’s just not as leisurely as in the past.
By the way, this is easily the strangest and most disjointed book in the series so far. Saikawa was out of the picture for about five chapters there, there have been three murders but very few leads, and lots of down time. I still haven’t finished this week’s reading though, so we’ll see what happens…
I’ve found it mostly manageable—not too hard to keep up but tough to catch up. But then again this is pretty much the first time ever that I’ve only been reading one book at a time (in Japanese).
I like it when clubs push me to go just a bit faster than is comfortable.
The nice thing is that I don’t really get burnt out from Saikawa and Moe—sometimes with harder picks/less familiar styles the limiting factor is the amount of time I can focus more so than the time I have available.
Accounting for increased familiarity with the series over time as well, raising the speed slightly seems fine to me. I get that it’s a lot on top of other projects. I basically read only this for the last week or so.
On the other hand, I think last time the pace of 1 chapter a week felt a bit slow even?
And all because Mori didn’t create 50 page chapters for our sake.
I think with the previous book 1 chapter a week was fine for me, but this book has shorter chapters (or maybe I just messed up my calculations ), so I decided to suggest the 2-chapter approach. Haven’t looked into the next book yet, though, as it’s pretty far in the future still.
Usually I’m really bad at understanding Katakana words but for this one I did not even bat an eye as the literal meaning of “muffler = something that muffles” is very much along the lines of the German word “Schalldämpfer = sound reducer”. (Makes actually way more sense to me than to use it for a scarf, tbh…)
Also, my dictionary claims that “muffler” is also used in the technical sense, at least in American English
I don’t know anything about cars either and I was confused by マフラ as well!
In other news, here’s another one for the Saikawa and Moe bingo:
Saikawa gets someone nearly killed by withholding information
And hey! Some cute Saikawa/Moe relationship development. All aboard the ship train!
On the more mystery related side of things, I didn’t really understand how the device was attached (hanging on or from a shelf underneath the table??) and managed to pull the door and then detach itself. Anyone got a clear picture of how it works?
I must say I was pretty confused by that as well.
I think the general idea was that there would be a magnet at the far end of the thread, which would then close the locking mechanism of the door while being pulled across it. And then the magnet is supposed to detach from the thread (?) but afterwards it will not be found anywhere (??). Wouldn’t it just stick to the door mechanism when it comes off the thread?
And then the device pulls in the whole thread, and then there is another device that pulls the first one off the table (???). Really, I have no idea.
Mhh, my understanding was that the magnets stayed attached to the strings.
The device pulls on the strings which closes the door, then as it keeps pulling, the magnets detach from the door and get reeled in. The thing is, that would require quite a bit of force (just how much torque does this tiny motor have??), and it would require the device to be firmly attached, otherwise it would be pulled towards the door instead. Just rereading it now, the text also says 機械は、次第に自分自身も引っ張られる, so I guess it does get pulled in a bit, but there’s gotta be a limit (some length of string?) otherwise it’s never gonna do anything to the door.
Then a second servomotor (in the same device, as I understood it) somehow detaches the device. But the text really isn’t clear on the details
had to catch up with Kafka before continuing here 
), so I decided to suggest the 2-chapter approach. Haven’t looked into the next book yet, though, as it’s pretty far in the future still.
