🇰🇷 🇯🇵 Home Thread for 本好きの下剋上 / 책벌레의 하극상 📚 🪱

I’m 2 weeks late to this conversation, but reading through the history I found a couple things I want to comment on.


While her response is obviously extreme, it didn’t feel unnatural to me. This was my interpretation:
One fact I think is very important to this whole interaction is that at this point, マイン’s fever is incredibly strong and she has to constantly exert effort to keep it inside (the metaphor of squeezing it into a box). She’s exhausted from this constant strain, and from the frequent painful flare ups that last multiple days, and there’s really no sign of it ever going away or even improving—in fact, it’s only gotten worse with time. On some level she’s probably resigned to the fact that it will kill her eventually.
It’s in this moment that ルッツ confronts her about the original マイン, something she briefly wondered about herself at some point in volume 1, but never came up again. The idea that she’s living in someone else’s body, a real person she even spoke to once, is a horrifying thought that she’s been avoiding for months now. On top of that, the fact that she’s basically been deceiving everyone around her has also been revealed. She can easily imagine that if ルッツ told anyone else, her current life would be as good as over anyway.
All this stress compounded into her response. On top of that, since she’s actively working to keep her fever from flaring up, she really could “just stop” and let it consume her at any time.

On a more lighthearted note, about the phrase

「お金は取れる時に、取れるところから、取れるだけ、取っておくものだ」

@Naphthalene’s translation is good, but I think the nuance is slightly different. ベンノ is reprimanding her for not taking enough money, and emphatically telling her the “correct” way to think about money.

Overall structure of the phrase:
お金は △△ものだ。= Money is a △△ kind of thing.

And then 4 clauses that all emphasize the verb 取る
取れる時に、= Whenever you can take it
取れるところから、= From wherever you can take it
取れるだけ、= As much as you can take
取っておく = Take (even if you don’t have a particular use for it yet). This one directly modifies もの, turning it into “something you (should) take”

So, with context phrases for emotion, I’d translate it something like

"マイン! Money is something that you should take any time you can, from anywhere you can, as much as you can! Got it?

I think everyone got the meaning already but I really like this phrase so I took the chance to pull it apart :smiling_face:

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Ah, I probably should’ve asked before, but: @shitsurei did you want to keep volume 3 discussion here? Or would you like me to set up a new thread for it? I figure if we decide to continue reading the series it would be prudent to set up an offshoot thread, but I wasn’t sure if we should just go ahead and do so for book three or not.

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Maybe keep it here to finish out the arc and start the new arc in a new thread? I don’t feel like we’ll be talking so much to need a new thread per book but a thread per arc makes some amount of sense :thinking:

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Sounds reasonable to me!

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Considering each arc introduces things that would massive spoilers (usually as their actual title…), that seems prudent.

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@shitsurei I’ve officially started volume 3 and have finished chapter 2! This is going into my daily listening slot, so besides some days where I’m feeling extra tired or burnt out on listening I should be more-or-less consistent.

Anyway, I propose we install a new rule where whenever マイン eats/cooks/thinks about/even mentions a tasty food, we also need to eat it ourselves. To make sure we’re properly understanding the text, of course. :plate_with_cutlery:

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I’m getting started today. I was usually reading 1-2 chapters a day of #2 last month depending on how much we were talking about papermaking vs actual plot :joy: so I’m aiming to have that same schedule.

And I’m down for tasty food book club :yum:

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Ok I read the prologue and the first chapter and holy info dump. I ended up reading the English language sample since I was too lazy to figure out what Freida was actually saying :sweat_smile:

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Lmao, I somehow purged what 本好き knowledge I gained from volume two and had to sit and think when I started vol three, “who’s フリーダ?” :rofl: I think I’m back in the swing of things, though.

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That’s how I was when I started #2. It didn’t take me very long so I’m sure you’re right and you’ll be fine from here out :laughing:

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Was watching the anime with some friends and told one of my friends in the middle of the part 2 episodes of the anime “No really, don’t look up the titles”

Of course, he looked up the titles, thinking “How bad can it be?”


I’ve read volume 3 (well volume 5 and 6 of the junior edition, which cover the same part) recently, but I might join back in with you when you get to part 2.

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Yay, the more the merrier! We’ll be sure to @ you once we make the new thread for part 2.

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Similarly, volume 22 (I think; the first volume of arc 5) came out when I started reading arc 2. The ads at the end of the volume gave me all arcs titles and I thought “whyyyyyyy”

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I guess one advantage to the fact that my Japanese reading ability is mostly not automatic and I need to focus on it! Can’t accidentally read spoilers if I need to focus on reading them.

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Question for vol.3 ch. uh, 6? (These chapters need chapter numbers) Chapter title is 冬の始まり. I don’t understand; the normal method of clothing alteration is to pull apart the entire piece, cut it to fit, then re-sew it? They don’t hem because it seems too 豪華?

And unrelated to that chapter in particular and just a thought in general, but I’ll put it behind a dropdown just in case.

Thoughts

The more I read about マイン’s handicrafts ((very general book 1-3 spoilers) soap, clothes, shampoo, hair ornaments, cooking, etc.), the more I don’t believe she should actually know how to do all this stuff. We’re told she was a consummate bookworm, to the point where friends and family worried about her being kidnapped or run over when she was out in public because of how little attention she paid to the everyday, and I can’t see her devoting any kind of brain space to remembering how to do anything with her hands. Sure, her mom forced her to make soap or whatever, but she just ends up feeling like a cliche when she pulls out all these amazing inventions no one’s ever thought of.

We are seeing the world through quite a small scope, granted; it’s just マイン’s little slice of it, so perhaps others wouldn’t be as impressed as her family and friends, but that doesn’t help the feeling of cliche that I mentioned before.

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They don’t hem because it would look bad (the 晴れ着 is supposed to show the sewing skills of the mother, can’t really do that). マイン proposes to grab the fabric in a few places and sew in her trademark (?) cloth flowers to make it look like it’s by design, but then it would look like they used a lot of extra fabric on purpose (plus the flowers), which would be a display of social status (which they don’t have), thus 豪華すぎる.

Here’s what it looks like (I guess it’s a spoiler)

Summary

It’s addressed in the future. I have thoughts about it too, but they would be spoilers…

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Aaaah, that makes much more sense, thank you.

Interesting. :thinking:

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@shitsurei The chapters ルッツの家庭教師 and オットー相談室 were really good, and the next chapter is probably going to be as well. :eyes: Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

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I’ve been dragging my feet after the cake and bath chapters :sweat_smile:.

I should have some time to read a few chapters this afternoon if I don’t just impulse read all of さよなら絵梨 in one go.

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Lol, I totally understand.

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