Wow, you’re right! I’m glad to see a bunch of people. 
I see you’ve been campaigning hard for werewolf as well. 
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Maybe they’re the werewolf
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Looks like the book to fit the spooky season won! 
Looking forward to reading it with y’all!
And by the way, regarding the starting date… now that we have a winner, maybe we should find out who wants to join this book club and read the book in physical form, and how long it will actually take them to get a copy? Depending on that, waiting a month before we start might be either unnecessarily long or too short.
I feel like the poll we currently have might be a bit too general.
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I’m interested in joining this book club 
I’ll be reading in physical form, and it should be arriving later this week.
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We can definitely do so. 
I’ll set up the new home thread and put the polls over there.
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We’ve just baaaarely squeaked by the “wait until 20 full nomination slots before cutting lowest 3” rule for nomination cuts. Here’s our nomination list for next round:
Nominations List
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May I do it instead? It was my nomination and I’d love to organize the book club.
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Whoops! I’ve got the home thread set up, but you can definitely run everything else! Schedule, weekly threads, all that good stuff.
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Gotcha, thanks!
And since I don’t see it posted here yet:
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Does anyone know of a good way to browse for japanese children’s novels? I was browsing imprints listed in the home post like aoitori last night, but I couldn’t find any way to distinguish between children’s books and like, light novels getting the full furigana treatment without looking up stuff separately. 
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I wonder if this site could be helpful? They only seem to sell children’s books:
Note that I haven’t investigated it in detail; I literally just stumbled upon it, haha.
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Ah, that works pretty well! I’ve been browsing. Their filtering options seem to be pretty limited. You can filter vaguely for age range but there aren’t genre filters within that so the nonfiction and stuff is all mixed in. At least it’s not 90% light novels though.
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I don’t know that you can search by this, but most of the kids publishing imprints have a key to what kind of book it is:
The keys differ publisher to publisher (and maybe by what books they’re advertising in the book you’re reading), but I imagine that the original books would all be children’s books.
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Oh, interesting I’ll do more investigating. I’m still getting used to navigating Japanese websites too, it’s possible some of the publishers had that information listed but I missed it.
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If it makes you feel better, I tried to find an efficient way to find these or sort as well and didn’t make good progress. When I asked my Japanese friend how Japanese parents find books for their children, she said that’s something a school librarian would help with since it’s not that straightforward. I thought you would like that tidbit 
Of course, people still get recommendations from other parents and friends, but especially due to the varying levels of kanji / furigana / childhood development / interests nothing beats a good librarian.
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Ah, great, so back to the ole ‘google the title to see if it’s a light novel’ method. Or the ‘guess the approximate age of the anime children on the cover’ method.
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One thing I do is look up a book I already know from Natively that is roughly at my level, or the school level, or style I want. Then searching on amazon or elsewhere and looking for the “similar books” categories often turns up other books of that style and level.
ChatGPT is turning out to be a useful librarian. I recently compiled a list of German authors whose books align with some of my past favourite books (in several languages), and whose books have been translated into Japanese. On top of that I then prompted it to come up with just as many suggestions written by female authors. Aside from one title that doesn’t seem to even be a real book, it looks like a solid list of works I otherwise would have never found. (For interest, first I made the prompt by describing my favourite books and what I liked, then I asked for similar books in German by German authors. Then I asked it include more female authors. Finally, I asked for which books have Japanese translations and additional books that would suit the overall request. I find ChatGPT does better with such a layered approach.)
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