Just to be clear - absolutely everyone here is welcome to join. “Beginners” is just to denote the level, and differentiate from the other LN club
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It’s mentioned a few times in the story, to explain why he knows X or Y. But his behavior matches that of other people, while the main character of 男性向け isekai tend to stick out, so it doesn’t really matter.
As a content warning, there are sexy scenes (but no sex) in the story but I only read the webnovel version, so I’m not sure if there are any in the first volume. There are also dark themes but that should be in volume 2 (and probably beyond, but that’s as far as I have read in terms of content).
I really enjoyed ~volume 1. After that, though, (well, spoiler)the main character is basically all powerful, so it became kinda boring. That being said, I might get back to reading the webnovel at some point.
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I’m more okay with that then you seem to be, although I got to admit that’s a shame. I felt like the struggle of the main character made the manga at least a bit more unique that the usual isekai fare.
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Agreed! I really enjoyed that part. But it makes sense that it cannot go on forever.
Well, actually, the author could have throttled the main character though 
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Plenty of nomination slots still open… But in the meantime, I want to get a general idea of:
What’s a good reading start date?
- January 1st
- January 14
- January 28
- Other (please comment)
0
voters
How much time do folks need between the end of voting, and start of reading? Specifically wondering wrt folks ordering physical books
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Signing up… Given my initial goal joining natively was to read a book and I still haven’t achieved that… Time to get fired up
Also I have to say I think it will be tough ;__;
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It will depend on the nomination for me to whether I sign up or not, but the first two weeks of January would be hard for me as I’m planning a trip.
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Book:
Is there an ebook available?: yes
Is there an audiobook available?: yes, from audiobook.jp (link in the natively page)
Is there an all-furigana version available?: I am not sure
(Optional) Is this book available in Korean?: Yes
Summary - Japanese
友達のいない少女、リストカットを繰り返す女子高生、
アバズレと罵られる女性、一人静かに余生をおくる老女。
彼女たちの“幸せ"は、どこにあるのか。
「やり直したい」ことがある、“今"がうまくいかない
全ての人たちに贈る物語。
Summary - English
A girl with no friends, a high school girl who keeps cutting her wrists,
A woman who is criticized as an idiot, an old woman who lives out the rest of her life quietly.
Where does their “happiness” lie?
There are things I want to do over again, things aren’t going well right now.
A story for everyone.
Why are you nominating this book: I’ve heard more than once that this was a good first book, which got me interested. It’s quite popular, and has generally good reviews (particular for the learning potential; regarding enjoyment, there are a few mixed ones), but I thought the premise looked interesting. I think that the fact that it’s not an isekai/adventure/fantasy also helps in terms of language learning of more day to day vocabulary.
PS. this is classified as a novel, not light novel. I have to admit that even after reading what the difference between both is, I still don’t really understand. If it doesn’t fit into the club though, I can remove the nomination.
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Book:
Is there an ebook available?: yes
Is there an audiobook available?: no (or at least didn’t find)
Is there an all-furigana version available?: yes, but according to natively it’s significantly different
(Optional) Is this book available in Korean?: i’m not sure
Summary - Japanese
小磯健二は憧れの先輩・夏希に「4日間だけフィアンセの振りをして!」と依頼され、長野県の田舎に同行することに。その夜、健二に届いた謎の数列を解いたことで世界が一変し!?
Summary - English
From Anilist: When timid eleventh-grader and math genius Kenji Koiso is asked by older student and secret crush Natsuki to come with her to her family’s Nagano home for a summer job, he agrees without hesitation.
Natsuki’s family, the Jinnouchi clan, dates back to the Muromachi era (1336 to 1573), and they’ve all come together to celebrate the 90th birthday of the spunky matriarch of the family, Sakae. That’s when Kenji discovers his “summer job” is to pretend to be Natsuki’s fiance and dance with her at the birthday celebration.
As Kenji attempts to keep up with Natsuki’s act around her family, he receives a strange math problem on his cell phone which, being a math genius, he can’t resist solving. As it turns out, the solution to the mysterious equation causes Oz, the program that controls nearly every aspect of life to be hacked into, it’s up to Kenji and his new “family” to stop the hacker before it’s too late.
Why are you nominating this book: I read the manga of summer wars as a teen and really enjoyed it, so it has a special place in my heart. I was hoping to read it again, this time as a novel. I personally think the story is fun and quite original.
The only downside is that it’s rated with a difficulty of Level 25(?) and has 351 pages, so I worried it may be harder than expected.
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I also think light novel vs novel is pretty arbitrary, and am fine including books that seem light novel-like, even if they’re not strictly in that category on Natively.
If folks feel otherwise, feel free to chime in, but otherwise I’ll add it to the list when I have a moment
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I think there’s overlap with children’s / light novels as well - I’ve seen a few that are listed on Amazon as children’s books, but Anilist classes as LNs (based on the publisher). I’m not that bothered about it, but it might be an idea to have a rule that a book can only be nominated for one book club so there isn’t overlap…?
Here’s the Korean version of one of the nominations:
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Thx for the Korean link. @snowwater can you add it into your post?
I appreciate the intent, but I’m not planning to have such a rule. If there were a direct request from another club, I’d discuss/consider it.
The whole reason I started this club was b/c it seemed unlikely the < L30s were going to get picked anytime soon in the original club. So that would be a bit self-defeating.
Also given the steadily growing number of book clubs here, that might not even be sustainable/possible in the long run.
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For me, if I don’t have it, it’s now around 8-10 weeks for delivery so I’ll only vote for books I have or are on the way. Ordering now, I’m looking at at least second week in January.
I have some nominations to add just haven’t yet. I’ll try tomorrow. Last few days have been pretty hectic.
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There’s a book I read last year that I sort of assumed was a LN since in my head YA = LN, and it feels like a shoujo romance in novel form, but it’s on here as a regular novel and that it doesn’t have any illustrations probably supports that categorization. At the very least, it is a youth novel, though. It’s L27, and if no one objects to me nominating it, I wouldn’t mind rereading it.
Also, if I’m interested in reading the pick and I don’t already have it, I’ve mostly been using CDJapan lately and delivery generally seems to be within 2 weeks after ordering unless something’s on backorder, but if it gets here late I shouldn’t have too much trouble catching up. ~L30 seems to be the upper limit of my comfort zone currently.
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Imo if it seems/feels like a LN to you, you can go ahead and nominate it. Tho feel free to wait for other’s input, if you want.
Noted… Looking forward to the recs
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Same here… I have and will read stuff higher than that, but 26-30 seems to be my comfortable “I’m fine without translation” place right now.
Btw, I’m impressed by everyone reading physical novels. I only tried it with 本好きの下剋上 cuz there was an audiobook, and even then I still reread it (without audio) digitally. Lookups just seem way too frustrating otherwise… How do you deal with them? I realize eBooks are a super recent thing… I guess I’m a bit あまえん坊 in this regard
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Speaking of lookups, is there a good guide here or elsewhere as to translating books into something i can plug an elookup thingymagig into? I went into the rigamorole last year with Calibur when I was starting out (only to immediately flame out…) but I don’t know if Amazon’s ebook tomfoolery has advanced to the point where it’s shut that option down (god, DRM…). Though if Kindle’s built in dict is enough maybe that’s fine, all I really need to know is the pronounciation tbh so I can look it up elsewhere like I do with manga
I read with physical books when I first started reading in Japanese and it was a huge pain in the ass. So glad I switched to digital, even if sometimes it makes me a bit lazy.
From the rest of your post I don’t really get what you’re looking for, but e-reader kindles (e.g. Paperwhite) have good built in dictionaries and also allow for sideloading additional dictionaries. There are other approaches, but if you have the physical device just using it is by far the easiest approach.
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Basically it was a lot of messing around with converting to ePubs so I could run whatever lightweight yomichan instance worked with kiwibrowser, if I remember correctly. But if a Kindle works, I’ll just use that probably.
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I know you can plug epubs into https://reader.ttsu.app and use browser popup dictionaries, but that requires you to have the epub, which may or may not be feasible if you’re buying books for Kindle.
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