Rotten to the core.
Happy to have more spoiled apples in this barrel 
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1st volume of 女装してめんどくさい事になってるネクラとヤンキーの両片想い 1 | L25 is available to read for free, if someone is interested to read ahead of the Book Club.
https://bookwalker.jp/de630fc34b-9a7f-4fc6-aaf6-c6dba8530aa8/
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Ayyye! 
This is my first book club, so I’m really looking forward to it! Since I came too late to vote, I’ve decided to just read this one without looking up anything about the plot beforehand just to keep things interesting lol
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I get a lot of my ebooks from honto書店 and they recently put together a BL section they named すわんぷ 
Edit: The name is apt because I learned that there’s a secondary, slang meaning for 沼: 没入して抜け出せない趣味の世界。
…Sounds about right, I’d say, lol I’ve been into BL since middle school, so almost 20 years now!
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For anyone interested, there might be an informal book club for 美しい彼:
Also just discovered that some BL magazines offer trial compilation ebooks with the first chapter of several series included. Below are the honto links, but they’re also available on amazon.
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“Gush”, what a name lol 
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BL University now has a recommended reading list! 
I’ve added @bungakushoujo @Biblio @eefara @shablul @Naphthalene as collaborators, feel free to edit the list as you see fit. If anyone wants added/removed as collabs, just let me know. 
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Adding the following regular case sentence since it wont let me send just the capital one,
and now for the main body:
THERES COLLABORATORS NOW??? YES PLEASE THANK YOU!!!
edit: I noticed the books so far are more about the genre as a whole rather then BL, is this the theme?
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Yeah, this list is just for non-fiction about BL - although we could have a “BL University” series if there are other themes the book club members want to collaborate on? 
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roger doger
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It’s back! 
Awesome idea, thanks for setting that up!
Some ideas that pop to mind:
- Foundational BL (focused around really early stuff that’s seen as a genre-definer; Moto Hagio, etc.)
- Nostalgia bait for a certain demographic (a list for what was deemed “popular enough” in the early 2000s and actually made it to the west.
this is all going to be hardcore stuff, isn’t it…) - The current hotness (a list of what’s popular as of the time of writing to give those interested in trying out the genre a
safejumping off point) - BL anime/move list (or as close as you’re going to get for what producers are will to show on television)
- Modern genre-definers in Japan today (more difficult, but could be interesting if we could figure out what’s considered the current “canon” for Japanese readers. I would imagine a mix of what’s popular now + specific titles released earlier this century. )
If we need to set up a mini-bookclub or whatever in order to do research for all this… I don’t have much of a life these days anyway. 
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You’re getting me all excited for these lists now! 
I’m sure scouring back through this thread will give us lots of titles for “nostalgia bait”, and I’m sure https://www.chil-chil.net/ will have lots of useful lists for popular manga/LN titles, both past and present.
Some questions:
- Do we want the titles to start with BL University / BLU (wasn’t that an English BL publisher back in the 00s?) followed by the theme?
- Should we have a separate thread, or are people happy for discussion to continue here? (Personally I think book club threads are pretty dead between periods of nominations/voting, and we’re not expected to have start the next round of noms until the second half of the year, but others might want to keep it separate)
- Who wants to be added as a collaborator? I took the liberty of adding a few people for the first list, but if we’re going to be making several, I think it would be better to have people opt in.
- Do people want to discuss list ideas before creating them? Since this is a collaborative effort, I think it would be nice to get input before making new lists, but I’d like to hear others’ thoughts.
ETA: I know BLU sounded familiar…!
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I was just about to say, yep! I owned a few volumes by them back in the day.
I’d be fine keeping the discussion here. Like you said, book club threads are pretty dead between voting phases, and it’s going to be triplely worse for us since we had that 3-way tie. x.x
I don’t mind being added for future lists! o/ Can’t guarantee I’ll always be able to add much, haha, but you’re welcome to add me.
This also sounds like a good idea to me; also helps keep us from having eight different lists with one entry each on them. 
That’s the fun/frustrating part of making fun lists for stuff in a language you’re learning: generally the pool of what you’ve read/seen is too small to be the only source of discussion, so we have to band together to fill in the gaps!
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While we’re waiting for others to chime in with their thoughts, I think we could probably get started with this:
There were lots of titles bandied about when we were discussing it a while back, so I don’t mind having a look through the old posts.
You could set up the list and write a short description (if you don’t mind, that is) - we can always add/edit things later.
We may have to think of a short description of what BLU is and link to this thread… So I’ll have to include something in the home post (collection of BLU lists).
This should be fun!
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Here we go!
I’ve added you and @shablul as beginning collaborators; haven’t gone back through the thread yet to see who else we were chatting with. Let me know if you’d like to be added as a contributor, mystery reader!
Feel free to edit title/description/etc. I put something down to have something, but it’s not necessarily the best way to phrase things.
It would be nice if this particular list was ordered by release date, so you could have a chronological overview of things…
Question: when English is added to Natively, should this list be entirely for the English version of the properties, since I think quite a bit of our reminiscing focused around the NA market iirc?
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Thanks for setting up the list - love that title!
I’ll add the manga I’ve come across so far. I’m up to this post:
Seems like we veered off onto mangaka rather than specific manga.
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One thing we may need to discuss, speaking of Naono Bohra, is how tight we want to be between featuring officially-published stuff and stuff that made an impact through fan translations (at least, I’m only familiar with her through fan trans). I don’t know if there’s going to be any good way to gather numbers/impact from fan translations, but we’re also not obligated to cite hard numbers anywhere… I don’t know, thoughts? At the very least it could be difficult (but interesting) to try to track down original release dates of fan translations…
(Side note: fan translations as a community is so interesting; it’s a shame I bet there’s very little academic investigation into it, and a lot of that history is very likely already lost…)
No Discourse, this is too important to be hidden away in DMs!!
Edit: I’ll add info to the Early Western Canon list in bits and pieces. I am ordering it by earliest NA release date at the moment, so don’t panic if you see stuff jumping around. I need to add the Loveless anime, but I’ll need to wait for it to be approved first.
Edit edit: I wonder if a list of lists would be a thing in the future. 
Could help with BLU list organization
Ah, and I made the list level upper-intermediate, since I figured there would be a wide range of stuff, but honestly 99% of this is likely to be manga, so I could probably bump it down a notch.
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Personally, I’d put them altogether on one list - I’m sure most people consumed Japanese media through both official and unofficial channels (and those unofficial channels were probably monitored by English-language publishers to find out what was popular anyway).
I think we can only really look to how much was translated by fans to gauge how popular something was - I can’t think of another way of measuring fan translations. Generally, I think authors that were popular had a lot of their stuff translated and the translations were spread widely over different sites (although who’s to say it wasn’t just very dedicated fans and only a tiny audience?).
BLU needs to organize an archaeological dig site at historic LiveJournal. 
Can’t it tell this is SRS BSNS!!!
I’ve been able to add new items from their item page - I’m guessing it doesn’t show up in search?
I think tags would probably cover most cases. We’ll need to add a BL University tag to our lists!
For the lists I’ve made, I’ve added multiple level tags to cover the range of titles, I don’t think you need to stick to only one level tag if there are items at vastly different levels.
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