Intermediate Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: セーラー服と機関銃

This isn’t that bad, all things considered, but yeah unless you get really lucky it’s always a lot.

I was happy to snag some used Japanese books for $5 and $7 with free shipping off non-Japanase Amazon (!) recently. In the grand scheme of things that’s pretty normal for a used book, but here it felt like a steal…

Yeah, I was just eyeing that one as well… On one hand, if I really like the series I’m getting it for about $75 instead of $130 new. On the other hand, if I don’t like it, I’ve spent $75 instead of just the $10 it would cost to get the first volume.

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For those interested in voting or stalking, the beginning book club poll is up.

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@ditto20 @seanblue @Radish8
Well, I just moved some stuff around and added the guidelines and proposal template.
(I modified slightly the guidelines, but both are basically a copy paste of the beginner book club).
I don’t think I have broken anything.
At least, we can start putting up nominations now.

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Thanks! Is 350 still a bit long though? I was originally thinking 300, so the expected pace could be 15 pages a week instead of 10 pages a week to take the same amount of time. (Not much difference in the end though.)

Also, I think we should still hold off on nominations until we see what wins in the beginner book club, just to be sure.

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So that means I can fire away, right? :wink:

おおかみこどもの雨と雪

Light novel, slice-of-life

Summary

It’s about a young student who falls in love with a werewolf (he’s really nice though) - they have two children (called 雨 and 雪) together and the story is basically about the children growing up. Which is slightly more exciting than raising “normal” human children…

Availability

amazon.jp - this is the version with furigana but there are others as well
ebookwalker
ebookjapan

Personal Opinion

Pros and Cons for the Book Club

Pros

  • I’ve watched the anime some time ago, and while I did not really understand much back then, I recognized quite a number of the words. To find out more about the difficulty level, I just read the first two pages, and I’d say they were definitely simpler (grammar-wise) than 時をかける少女. Of course that might be different later on (e.g. I know from the anime that there is some decent keigo communication going on at some point), but in general I expect the book to be quite accessible to many.
  • The book is 2nd place in the FloFlo wishlist, so maybe the vocab list will be available there at some point… :wink:

Cons

  • I don’t know if the topic is appealing to everybody; it is basically a story about how two children grow up and find their place in the world. There are some interesting twists and difficulties in general and due to the fact that they are wolf children, of course, but it’s not like the action-packed superhero manga or something.

Pictures

These are screenshots from the ebook (the edition with full furigana). I guess the pages of the physical book are much smaller.

First Three Pages of Chapter One





Additional Pages



Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this book?

  • No effort at all
  • Minimal effort
  • Just right
  • Challenging
  • Impossible, even with everyone’s help
  • I don’t know (please click this if you’re not voting seriously)
0 voters
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Well, はたらく魔王さま was ~315 pages long, so it feels weird to put the bar lower than that…

For nominations, I was thinking of putting up stuff that aren’t already on the beginner poll. (Reminder: I recently bought a bunch of books thanks to the new year’s “ultra sale” at book off; I can singlehandedly fill the recommendations if I feel so inclined :stuck_out_tongue:) (I don’t)

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You guys also read that really fast though, right? I thought the point was to find a more middle-ground pace this time around.

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20 pages per week. I think it’s still fine at 15 pages per week :man_shrugging:

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It doesn’t seem all that likely something harder will win with what the poll currently looks like, but I don’t mind waiting either. For how long will the poll in the beginner book club run?

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I realise you guys might want to keep the historical member lists for posterity (or you may not!), but do you think for future picks you’ll move towards the poll-based model of the Beginner Club?

Edit: two further questions after doing some initial tidying.

Do you want to keep the specific purchasing instructions for each book in the OP of this thread, or provide that kind of information in the OP of the particular book’s discussion thread?

Similarly, there are some instructions of how the discussions work - do you want to keep those in this OP, or provide that information in the discussion threads?

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Is 350 still a bit long though? I was originally thinking 300, so the expected pace could be 15 pages a week instead of 10 pages a week to take the same amount of time. (Not much difference in the end though.)

Thumbing through a couple of the light novels I own, a fairly large percentage are in the 300-350 page range. I feel like limiting down to 300 would cut down on options a fair bit. (e.g. 君の膵臓を食べたい @ 324 pages, or 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 @ 307 pages)

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Usually around 3-4 days.

Considering I was the one that nixed the member list in beginner book club (and I haven’t seen any ill-effect) I think we should do the same here.

Yeah, I realized this as well after posting. Two books that I’m considering suggesting are also in that range, so 350 might be better after all.

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I removed it at first, then put it behind a detail section as a kind of template, then I put it back.
I.e. I don’t know, but I feel it’s crowding the post for no good reason. So I’m in favor of removing it, but didn’t feel like making that decision unilaterally. (Like you I guess :p)

I think keeping old lists isn’t a bad idea, same with the old proposals, just putting it in a separate “historical” section or something.

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Also chiming in to your questions regarding the OP.

Thank you so much for helping to clean things up on our thread. Not just you Radish8, but everyone! I think it’s encouraging to see people improve to the point where they are confident to move into this group!

Like @Naphthalene said, I can’t speak for everyone, but since you’re going through the trouble to do it, I say use your personal judgement to remove/hide parts that take away from flow. I’m sure if there’s something that’s removed or hidden that one of the legacy members takes issue with, we can always go through the edit history to restore those part later.

I can’t wait until I can be more than just a wallflower on this thread.

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Thanks for your input, both!

What I’ll do for now is create an archive section for both the member lists and old nominations, and I’ll pop the purchasing information in there too. Then when the next books starts up you can use that information to populate the OP of the discussion thread and we can delete the specific purchasing information from this thread.

I do agree with @LucasDesu that it’s not as if anything is ever lost forever, what with the edit history, so we can always revert any changes that people object to. Though the book club threads tend to get edited so often that it becomes hard to find…

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It doesn’t look particularly likely any of the harder books will win in the beginner book club and I’ll be away from home for a while after tomorrow, so anyone mind if I nominate something now(or well, in a few hours, more likely) instead of waiting until the poll in the beginner book club is done?

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I’m totally okay with it :man_shrugging: どうぞ

Go for it! Better early than not at all.

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It’s seeming unlikely that I’m participate in the next beginner’s, so I’m anxious to see what pops up here!

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