本好きの下剋上: Week 2 discussion

Join the Advanced Book Club here!

本好きの下剋上 Home Thread

Week 2


Start Date: August 22nd
Previous week: Week 1
Next week: Week 3

Reading:

Chapters 2 - 4 (おうち探索, 街中探索, 本、入手不可能) (31 pages/ 9%)

Discussion Rules

  • Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
  • When asking for help, please mention the chapter and page number. Also mention what version of the book you are reading.
  • Don’t be afraid of asking questions, even if they seem embarrassing at first. All of us are here to learn.
  • To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation, it’s fun! :books:

Participants

Mark your participation status by voting in this poll.

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m still reading the book but haven’t reached that part yet
  • I’m skipping this book

0 voters

5 Likes

As expected I have not had time to read this week. I think I only read one page so far haha. Next week I’m off three days, so I’ll read some then

5 Likes

So I’m done with the first of the 3 chapters. My thoughts so far.

Thoughts (minor spoilers)
  • I was really hurting about what she did to the parents futon …
  • The second door (not the half open one) seemed like a much smaller hurdle. I think the author dropped the ball somewhere or she got bigger by 10cm in like 5 sentences ^^

And I have another one of these sentences that I feel like i need some breakdown help with:
人前に漏らすよりは泣きながらおまるですれば、トゥーリに「。。」と褒められた。
How does this sentence make any gramatical sense?

And any help typing トゥーリ with IME without having to spell out each letter seperately would also be appreciated :smiley:

Thanks in advance.

3 Likes

The と indicates a quote, she is crying out loud (but internally :p) 「人前で漏らすよりは[…]」
The reason for the ellipse is that it can be obviously inferred from the rest of the sentence: it’s better to use the pot (おまるでする). And, as she did that, her sister praised her.

Like, you don’t want to type toxu-ri?

1 Like

Yes if there is something like dhi → でぃ but for とぅ that would be nice… But maybe I’m just being an idiot for not liking to type the x very much XD

It’s twu :ok_hand:

4 Likes

And done with the second chapter, this was a hard one for me. There was no difficult sentence like in the last one except for maybe some long, nested sentences. But the vocab utterly destroyed me. I had to look up basically everything she was describing. Took me nearly 2 1/2 hours for this small chapter -.-…

No particular thoughts on this one since I was not suprised by anything. The anime is pretty close to the book in this chapter.

2 Likes

How did they deal with the fact that 本 does not exist in the language (i.e. that マイン is speaking two languages)?

Also, unrelated but how does マイン know the word 読む (it’s not tagged as spoken in Japanese) if there’s nothing to read anywhere?

3 Likes

They simply don’t in the anime. Except for a really smalll scene in the beginning where the MOTHER talks chibberish before UranoMain gets Mains memories everything is said normally in Japanese. They changed quite a bit of the details in the anime, only the broad strokes are the same.
You schould be able to watch the first episode pretty spoiler free after this weeks reading, if you want to try it out.

That’s not exactly true. You have the numbers she reads at the market as example. It’s also not like NO books exist in this world. There’s just nothing in her memory so she can’t translate the concept… yet… But maybe the concept of reading came up with the 5 Year old main sometime before (at the market maybe?).

3 Likes

As in, she internalized the concept of reading (i.e. learned the word knowing what it means) without keeping any memory of characters? That sounds far fetched, but fine. At least now she knows how to say “book” as well.

Also, judging by the reaction of the old guy at the market, I wonder how long it will be until people start to think she is demonically possessed.

7 Likes

Yes you are of course right. That’s a part I dislike about this book so far. Small inconsintencies that hurt my overall immersion into this world. I sometimes catch myself thinking … huh. Like with my thoughts about this weeks first chapter.

2 Likes

That’s a bit surprising, I found the vocab in this book pretty common and mundane compared to any other books I’ve read. Not that I didn’t have to look up a bunch of words as well.

1 Like

Done with this weeks final chapter. So I can now preread stuff for when my shedule gets more crammed again next week.

@morteasd Yes certainly its not like the words are super obscure. But since I just came out of a pretty long hiatus last month and have not read many books before its still challenging. My vocabulary is simply lacking in every regard. These “flowery” verbs you don’t often use in speech, the nouns for simple things (Hairpin) or just the onomatopea. Sure I can jump over the onomatopea I don’t know and I could certainly look up less words than I do (e.g The stuff I understand but don’t know if I have the correct reading) but I prefer to look up everything and hope that 20% or so stick ^^

It’s not that I’m complaining. I knew it would be challanging for me to keep up with this bookclubs pace (at least after my holiday) but I welcome the challenge.

Nothing much to say to the 3rd chapter. Maybe just that she really is a city girl. Coming from the countryside myself; I’ve seen pigs being slaughtered. Yes it’s not pleasent and the smells on farms can sometimes be bad but fainting from that is a bit… city like. It will be hard for her in this medival-like world.
And finally she has a goal again. Not that anything could get between her and books though ^^

6 Likes

Just finished this weeks chapters. Again I don’t have too much to talk about, but I can say with confidence that the vocabulary in this book is much easier than Re: Zero. The grammar also remains pretty manageable. That’s not to say I don’t have to look up half the words in the book, but in Re: Zero it’s rare to fina a sentence where I don’t have to look anything up.

I am taking much the same approach. I feel like about 5 or so words a day are sticking, and once they stick, they stick really well. Even though I have a physical copy of the book, I am reading an eBook using Yomichan so I can look up words much more quickly without disrupting my reading.

As a complete city slicker myself, the smell at a butchers shop with refrigeration is mildly unpleasant, I can’t imagine being in a market with unrefrigerated meat. And they’re bloodletting in the shop too (I don’t know why but I feel like that would smell really bad). Plus I’ve heard the sound of pigs squealing in movies and TV and I find it a very unpleasant sound. I probably wouldn’t faint in this situation (given that I’ve never fainted at all), but given that Myne already has a weak constitution it’s not that surprising to me.

4 Likes

I have questions from chapter 2 that I’ll come back to, but this one from chapter 3 is bugging me right now.

Chapter 3 question

井戸のある広場は、集合住宅のような高い建物に四方を囲まれていて、一本だけ表通りに繋がっている道がある。決して広くはない、薄暗い路地を抜けると、大きな通りに出た。

I’m having a really hard time figuring out the whole street situation…

  1. 本 is a counter for streets?
  2. There’s one street attached to the main street.
  3. Is the 決して広くはない、薄暗い路地 the street that’s connected to the main street? Or does a 路地 not count as a street?
  4. I’m not quite sure which meaning for 抜ける I should be using. “To go through”? That’s the only one that seems to make sense.
  5. I wish I had a picture of what this looks like. :sweat_smile:

Interestingly, 書かれた was written in the 『』, but I also thought it was weird that 読む wasn’t tagged as such. Maybe it’s just because you still read numbers and also because in a world with little writing maybe kids hear the word “read” but not “write”. :man_shrugging:


Often authors get better at continuity with more experience. Hopefully that’s the case here.


Funnily enough, when I was reading this part of the chapters, I thought how this would never translate well to the anime (which I haven’t seen). I’m not surprised that they just ignored it, but this kind of thing is one of the reasons that written stories can be better than visual ones.

3 Likes
  1. Yes
  2. Yes
  3. Yes, it counts as a street, just more specific.
  4. Kind of, more like to leave the road. So, when you leave the road you come out on the main street.
  5. There’s a map in the front of the book. :smile:
11 Likes

That’s the main one, yes. You also have:

一筋(すじ)、一条(すじ・じょう)

Source: 【みんなの知識 ちょっと便利帳】ものの数え方・助数詞【た行−と】 (You’ll have to scroll to とおり)

Right.

The first one. She is talking about the place (is it called a square in English?) with a well just in front of their group of habitations.

Yes.

Bad ASCII art to the rescue!

|---------|          |             |
|           |_____|             |
|    @   |‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾|  main    |
|           |          |  street  |
|---------|          |             |

With the @ being the well.
The place around it is just buildings except for the small path.

ALSO ASCII ART IS HARD

And I got leebo’d by @catbus while trying to make it orz

12 Likes

That’s convenient!

There’s a lot going on in the map, so having the ASCII drawing is actually useful too!

3 Likes

Sorry! Your ASCII map is good though. :laughing:

5 Likes