理由 | L34 is a mystery story by 宮部みゆき which won the Naoki Prize in 1991. It’s quite a long one at 686 pages in my 新潮文庫 edition, and it seems to only be available in paperback or audiobook form. The back cover blurb says it uses ドキュメンタリー的な手法 as its narrative style.
This is going to be an informal readthrough in the style of the one we did last year for レベル7; we’ll do all the discussion in this single thread.
Start date and schedule up for discussion but I’m thinking about the same 30-40 page a week pace as we did on レベル7. (I’ll write up the chapter lengths in a bit - it has 21 chapters of varying lengths without internally numbered subsections.)
Tagging @cat and @Belerith but of course anybody is welcome to join in.
Those first few chapters are kind of awkward for length – we could do week 1 as prologue + chapter one = 52 pages, week 2 chapters 2 and 3 = 48 pages, but that gives two heavy weeks right up front. Or we could do prologue + 1, 2, 3+4 for 52,34,50 pages I guess. The laid-back option would be to do four weeks for prologue, ch1, ch2, ch3. There are no within-chapter section breaks so if we want to split a chapter it would just be picking an arbitrary paragraph end at some point.
Other than that, merging chapters 8+9 in one week and 10+11 in one week would deal with the other super short chapters without too much awkwardness.
I’m fine with whatever we decide, though I’d prefer to keep chapters intact. I’m in favor of merging the prologue with chapter 1 and the other weeks you mentioned.
If we’re all okay with 50 page weeks, we could merge even more, but I’m also fine with taking a bit longer to read. I just need to be done with the book before March since I’ll be leaving my physical books behind for half a year then, but if need be I can finish a tad early.
I’m also ok with 50 pages a week. I went ahead and ordered a physical copy as doing bookclubs where I’m only listening is always a bit strange (don’t know how to write character names, harder to refer back to things) but even if we start before it arrives I’m sure a chapter or two audio only won’t be too bad.
I’m also waiting for my copy to arrive. It should get here sometime during next week at the latest, but if you guys want to start right away that’s fine with me as well.
50 pages/week seems doable to me. Though I would prefer it if we don’t consistently go over 60 pages at the start (every once in a while is fine). Do we want to ramp up the speed towards the end or not?
I don’t think I can join until next year (so in ~2 months), but I guess the club will still be going on then, so I may join as well.
I know nothing about it and haven’t read the blurb. I just recognize the author’s name and the people in this thread
At 16 weeks, if we start on Saturday 9 November to give time for books to arrive, week 16 begins on 22 Feb, so we will be done before @belerith’s March deadline.
I might see if I can join in as well. Would still need to order a copy, and I’ve been really flaky with books lately, but I’d like to give it a shot at least for a little while.
I will join if I can find a copy at a bookoff here. That author usually has quite a big section, so I am optimistic. Should have seen this before, than I could have checked earlier. I got a different series by that author incidentally(悲嘆の門 | L30??). She likes to write long stories.
I started a smidge early due to having a bit of a weird schedule coming up and wanting to be sure I had time. I’m taking notes of names as I go. I imagine not everyone will come up again, but given how many keep coming up I’m glad I’m not doing this by pure audiobook, my aural memory for names (even in English) is so bad
Both this cover and cat’s remark make me wonder: Is this en ensemble cast style book?
I was thinking of starting early for a similar reason. I won’t have any time tomorrow and would really like to be able to read comments from the get go. But I know I’ll have ample time on Sunday, so I may yet be able to resist.
Oh, I Like that cover, actually. I’m not usually a fan of real people on my book covers, but that’s kind of working for me? They’re all so small it looks more like a mosaic.
I’ve been telling myself I should start early, especially once I saw that the very first sentence is like 75% police vocab, which I’m definitely going to have to look up, but then I went and started 秋の牢獄… So I need to at least finish 秋 first if I can; at least it’s an easy read so far.
Would still need to order a copy, and I’ve been really flaky with books lately, but I’d like to give it a shot at least for a little while.
But I know I’ll have ample time on Sunday, so I may yet be able to resist.