Thanks for the offer - I’ll actually be reading the English version haha. I’ll just have to do as @eefara suggested and search by date within the book.
Ah, in that case, if you subscribe with your email to Dracula Daily, then you don’t even need to buy the book. The day’s portion will be automatically sent to you.
I used it to help double check my understanding of the Japanese
We could read this together! I’m already reading another very long book currently (銀河鉄道の父 | L30??) and it’s pretty slow going. Maybe when I’m done with that we could do 自転しながら公転する?? Just so I’m not reading two 500 page books at once.
Same really, but I only own それから… I guess I could just buy the other two, but that defeats the purpose of trying to reduce my TBR.
I am fairly certain that they are possibly, likely on aozora. so unless you insist on physically owning them, ebook should be freely available.
Gladly. I am in no hurry, so whenever works well for you. I have 2 bookclubs starting on April 1st, so it’s not like I am going to be bored anytime soon.
I may be delayed but at least I found it 2 weeks prior to start
this looks awesomeeee
not sure I’ll read in Japanese (too big a list over there, but I might do the English reading or maybe I’ll try looking it up in other languages)
I was meaning to read Dracula for years now, this is a good opportunity
Excellent! Honestly it doesn’t matter to me if people read some/all of it in English; it’s going to be super informal, and Dracula’s the perfect book to jump around and read different sections in different languages anyway.
I’ll likely set up the home thread next week; there’s not going to be much setup on my end, and there’s no need for an explicit schedule, so it’ll be a pretty quick home thread.
I have a seed of an idea for a book club (or maybe just a couple of informal readings), partly inspired by this post:
Rough idea - Korean books in Japanese crossover
Thinking behind this
I’ve really enjoyed the few modern Korean books I’ve read in English.
It feels like there’s a tonne more Korean books available in Japanese translations (Korean → Japanese is probably a lot smoother than Korean → English).
I also feel like some of the themes and space that people like 村田 沙耶香 or 今村 夏子 write in is also a big trend in Korea.
E.g. The Vegetarian by Han Kang, or Familiar Things by Hwang Sok-Yong, totally fit in the same vibe as a lot of the books in the profoundly weird book club.
I’ve seen some Japanese/Korean shared books posts, but they seem to mostly have been either classic English novels (e.g. Harry Potter), or Japanese books. I would be nice to have some books where Korean readers could read in the original, and Japanese readers could read the translation.
Caveats
Korean books is quite a broad category, maybe some people who would love to read Korean sci-fi, won’t be fussed about Korean mystery, and vice versa.
Selfish caveat, atm my max reading level is probably somewhere around L31-32 in Natively, so possibly keeping it to the slightly easier side might be nice.
Let me know what you think! (Open to thoughts/suggestions too!)
As a multilingual bookclub, then I would love to participate by reading the Korean version. The L30 is definitely too hard for me right now though, so it’ll all depend on the book pick. Either way, if this is a recurring bookclub, I may join for a later edition instead, once my level is higher.
I’d be interested, just depending on what books end up being read. It would be an interesting experience to be the odd one out language-wise in a club for once, I think.
It’s a shame inter-language book linking isn’t a thing yet on natively. I.e. you can’t go to (say) Harry Potter and be linked to all the other foreign language editions currently on the site. Finding some relatively easy way to figure out if there’s a JP translation of a book would be the first step in the meantime, I feel like.
Maybe https://learnnatively.com/book/97aa75fedf/ (Japanese title 誰にでも親切な教会のお兄さんカン・ミノ)?? I haven’t read it yet but I think it’s either profoundly weird or horrible people doing terrible cringe things (also love that genre). Don’t know the Korean level though.