Cells at Work! 🦠 Book Club ・ Past the finish line!

Join the Absolute Beginner Book Club Here!
View this book on Natively!

Welcome to the Cells at Work!! :microbe: Book Club!

Strep throat! Hay fever! Influenza! The world is a dangerous place for a red blood cell just trying to get her deliveries finished. Fortunately, she’s not alone… she’s got a whole human body’s worth of cells ready to help out! The mysterious white blood cell, the buff and brash killer T cell, the nerdy neuron, even the cute little platelets – everyone’s got to come together if they want to keep you healthy!

View the nomination post here!

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Where to purchase

Digital: BookWalker, Amazon
Physical: Amazon, CD Japan (only in bundle)

Schedule

Week Start Date Chapter Page Numbers Page Count
Week 1 26 Nov Ch 1 part 1 0 - 12 13
Week 2 3 Dec Ch 1 part 2 13 - 27 15
Week 3 10 Dec Ch 1 part 3 28 - 42 14
Week 4 17 Dec Ch 1 part 4 43 - 59 17
Week 5 24 Dec Ch 2 part 1 60 - 73 14
Week 6 31 Dec Ch 2 part 2 74 - 87 14
Week 7 7 Jan Ch 2 part 3 88 - 101 14
Week 8 14 Jan Ch 3 part 1 102 - 118 17
Week 9 21 Jan Ch 3 part 2 119 - 135 17
Week 10 28 Jan Ch 4 part 1 136 - 154 19
Week 11 4 Feb Ch 4 part 2 155 - 173 19

Vocabulary and Grammar

Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.

Trigger Warnings

Details
  • ““Blood”” (more like bacteria goo)

Live Readings

If someone wants to organize live reading sessions, tell me about it

Discussion Guidelines

Spoiler Courtesy

Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.

  1. Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
  2. Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
  3. Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.
Instructions for Spoiler Tags

Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1, Pg. 1”]).

Hide Details results in the dropdown box like below:

Example

This is an example of the “Hide Details” option.

The “Blur Spoiler” option will simply blur the text it surrounds.

This is an example of the “Blur Spoiler” option.

Posting Advice

  • When asking for help, please mention the page number, and check before posting that your question hasn’t already been asked. As the threads get longer, it becomes more convenient to use the Search function, which is located in the upper right corner of the forum. It is the magnifying glass which is near your profile picture! The best way to search is usually to type part of the sentence you are confused about, and select “in this topic”. This will show you all posts within the current thread which has that string of text.

  • Be sure to join the conversation! It’s fun, and it’s what keeps these book clubs lively! There’s no such thing as a stupid question! We are all learning here, and if the question has crossed your mind, there’s a very good chance it has crossed somebody else’s also! Asking and answering questions is a great learning opportunity for everyone involved, so never hesitate to do so!

Page numbers

Page numbers are few and far between, so I’ll be using images mainly to show the ending pages. Both the Kindle and the BookWalker versions seem to have their page numbers as 2 + the original page number (so 44 instead of 42)

Membership

Will you be reading with us?
  • Yes
  • Yes, but I might start late
  • Maybe
  • No

0 voters

Which version will you be reading?
  • eBook
  • Physical

0 voters

Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to be notified when weekly threads get posted!

11 Likes

The Bookwalker link points to a limited free offer that is no longer available. The correct link is this one:

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Luckily, I’ve already purrchased it and read it, but would be very happy to re-read it together with others, so I’m in! :cat2:

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Of course, I never get the links right it seems :joy: Thanks for noticing

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Filled in the schedule, I’m open to suggestions. Once again I went through the book and counted the pages with any meaningful text on them (while hxh had grunts only pages, this one has goo sounds). For the first two stories, it should be on average 13 pages of text each week, then 17 for the rest of the weeks.

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Second last page of the first week’s reading looks quite full on. Wonder if maybe changing it so it’s part of the second week’s reading may be better - so 13 then 15 pages?

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Hey, I will be joining this book club

Has someone some insights to share about Kindle Vs Bookwalker ? Which one do you prefer and why ? :slight_smile:

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Well, I’ve never tried Kindle, so I can’t be sure, but I do like Bookwalker.
I can read it on both my computer and my phone (there is an app for android), and I also really like that it allows you to read first few (a considerable amount, actually) pages of any book for free, so that you can better decide whether it’s a book you want to buy :sweat_smile:

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I like bookwalker a lot because I can actually zoom in on the text on both phone and computer, so it’s much easier on my eyes.

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Yeah, being able to zoom is something I really like too.
I don’t know if Kindle has a similar feature or not though.

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No idea, actually. The only Japanese title I tried on kindle back in the day, I couldn’t zoom in on, but I haven’t really tried kindle all that much because I use kobo for non-Japanese books anyway.
Maybe there’s not that much difference – perhaps someone more informed can say something about that :blush:. I just really like bookwalker’s interface and all.

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You can zoom in on the kindle apps for computers (at least apple ones) and iPad/tablets and at least the newer kindles also allow you to zoom in.

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Kindle probably has better dictionaries for novels; but I am not sure how much it does better for manga.

Bookwalker doesn’t have a desktop app, and I don’t think it can be read offline on desktop. On the opposite side, I am not sure how much Kindle can be read in a web browser.

Kindle probably has a larger collection. I saw a Tofugu’s review recently – The Best Japanese E-Book Retailers for Japanese Learners. Kobo isn’t in the review, though.

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I use Kobo as well for regular books so I’m not familiar with Kindle.
I agree with you @tenizey. I have one book on bookwalker for another bookclub and the interface looks indeed neat.

I just had an issue with the app on my tablet, sometimes it seemed like it didn’t properly downloaded the pages and they stayed blank for quite a long time. So I wondered if it was readable offline. :thinking:
Also for some reason, the app seemed to be by default on what I believe to be Mandarin Chinese. Not sure why, I will try to find a solution but it’s not easy to navigate when I can’t read anything in the menu haha

That’s true ! You could basically read the first few weeks of a beginner book club to see if you like it before actually buying the book.

I can see how it would be usefull for novels. But for Mangas, I think neither Kindle nor Bookwalker recognizes words as text, or am I mistaken ? I feel like they treat manga like images.

Well, I’ll will probably stay with Bookwalker for this one. Thanks ! :pray:

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If you need OCR / text-search, @ChristopherFritz should know that well.

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If you’re going to be using a phone to read, I really really suggest kindle over bookwalker. It’s a bit harder to set up (because you sometimes need a VPN), but it loads faster, has a great phone app and you can actually properly select text if you’re reading a non manga book.

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Kobo/Kindie Purchase :arrow_right: remove DRM :arrow_right: Mokuro :arrow_right: Yomichan/Migaku/etc.

Result

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Edit: Added Kindle so it doesn’t look like it’s Kobo-only.

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This same thing can be done for kindle too

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Thank you for sharing, That is some valuable informations, especially when I will start reading materials with less Furigana !

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It definitely makes manga without furigana more approachable, as looking up words with unknown kanji takes less than a second.

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