🕵️‍♀️ 推理小説読書会 📚 Mystery Novel Book Club 👮‍♂️ Preparing to read 赤ずきん、旅の途中で死体と出会う!

I dunno how reliable that list is… For instance,トリック sounds like the j-drama (there is a novel, but not by Mitsuharu Yanamoto) and 猟奇的な彼女 appears to actually be a Korean romantic comedy.

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ChatGPT is a certified liar. I’ve tested it before and it happily makes things up. I once asked it to give me a list of 横山秀雄’s best works and it gave me stuff by 東野圭吾 and コンビニ人間 :upside_down_face:
Other similar tests are the same. I won’t take it’s “recommendations” for books. I’ll stick to humans.

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As 告白 is wrapping up week after next we’ll be doing our usual pattern of taking a week break, then voting for 1 week, then giving 2 weeks for people to obtain books should they want physical copies.

:calendar: What that means in terms of dates:

June 26th: Voting opens

July 2nd: Voting closes (coincidentally, this is also the date of the JLPT)

July 17th: First week for the chosen book

:pray: I’ll need a volunteer to open the first week’s thread for me as I’ll be traveling that week. If anyone wants to volunteer now I’m happy to have you, but I understand if people would prefer to see if a book they like gets voted in first.

:arrow_right: Nominations can be found here and removed nominations as well as the nomination template can be found in the top post. We stop accepting nominations at 20, so we have 4 remaining spots.

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Editing to split into two posts!

If I may, I’d like to make two nominations :slight_smile:

Book: medium 霊媒探偵城塚翡翠 | L33 (learnnatively.com)
Is there an ebook available?: yes!

Summary - Japanese

死者が視える霊媒・城塚翡翠と、推理作家・香月史郎。心霊と論理を組み合わせ真実を導き出す二人は、世間を騒がす連続死体遺棄事件に立ち向かう。証拠を残さない連続殺人鬼に辿り着けるのはもはや翡翠の持つ超常の力だけ。だがその魔手は彼女へと迫り――。ミステリランキング5冠、最驚かつ最叫の傑作!

Summary - English

Hisui Shirozuka, a medium who can see the dead, and Shiro Kazuki, a detective writer. Combining spirits and logic to derive the truth, the two confront a series of corpse abandonment incidents that have caused a stir in the world. Only Hisui’s supernatural power can reach the serial killer who leaves no evidence.

Content warnings if known

Unknown

It got a great review on a blog I read:

Mystery Writer and Medium Detective Duo (medium) (jtalkonline.com)

I am pretty sure Ho-ling also reviewed it on his blog pretty enthusiastically! Personally I do enjoy Japanese mystery short story collections as they are very satisfying to work through.

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Could you split these into 2 posts? :sweat_smile: Reason is that we link to the nominations for people to read and 2 in one post would be confusing.

edit: also Medium does have an ebook available

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Thanks for picking this up! Corrected, and I have edited so that it’s just Medium in the original post, will add the second nomination below :slight_smile:

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Book: 眠りの森 | L30?? (learnnatively.com)
Is there an ebook available?: No

Summary - Japanese

青年刑事が追う踊り子の美しくも哀しい秘事華麗な舞を舞うバレエ団のプリマが
正当防衛とはいえ、レッスン場に忍び込んだ男を殺害してしまった。
捜査に当った青年刑事は次第にあるバレリーナに魅かれていく。
加賀恭一郎シリーズ.

Summary - English

A beautiful but sad secret about a dancer pursued by a young detective A ballet prima performing a brilliant dance
Even though it was self-defense, I killed a man who sneaked into the lesson hall.
A young detective who investigates gradually becomes attracted to a certain ballerina.
Kyoichiro Kaga Series

Content warnings if known

Unknown, but Keigo Higashino doesn’t tend to go heavy

Why are you nominating this book: Keigo Higashino tends to write pacy thriller/mystery books that are pretty comfortable to read; there are always plenty of twists to keep you going and the vocab and grammar tends not to be too difficult. Although this is the second in the series, I have read on different blogs that for this series it doesn’t really matter, each book is a standalone. I also love ballet and books about the theatre world!

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Thank you! Have added them both on the nomination list. I did bold the ‘no’ for the ebook on the 東野圭吾 book just because I watched one of his books get nearly voted to win on the WK forums Advanced Book Club, then someone mentioned, “hey, you all know this is only paperback, right?” and then a bunch of people rescinded their votes :sweat_smile: So I just don’t want people to miss that fact, it’s not that I have anything against paperbacks

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Ahaha fair enough!

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Yes, I’m afraid that unless Higashino gets over his ebook aversion I won’t be reading any more of his books (other thatn the one I read in translation years ago). Paper books are too much trouble for me, Japanese ones especially. :person_shrugging:

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Yeah, it can be very expensive to obtain them in quite a few countries, and outside of that IIRC you particularly don’t like having to deal with physical books in any language.

I own…far too many physical books :joy: I need a new book shelf. I just donated a bunch of manga I was never going to read to the local library (they were still in their plastic excluding volume 1) and also have a pile of read books I don’t care to keep to deal with too :sweat:

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Not to divert the thread, but yes, I started appreciating ebooks at a period of my life when I moved around a lot, and moving or donating hundreds of paper books was very clearly a problem. I read a lot, and ebooks is the obvious solution. Paper books take up space I don’t have, and I have no one around where I could donate Japanese books specifically. Plus shipping cost, wait, harder lookups, etc etc.

Back on topic, I would gladly volunteer for posting that first thread regardless of whether I read the book or not (In fact, have you thought of delegating that duty anyway to the person nominating the book? Being in charge of every book in the club must be a lot), but I don’t know yet whether I’ll also be travelling at that time - it’s not unlikely. Will know closer to the date.

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I never get as attached to books I read as e-books so I am still a paperback supremacist, regardless of the inconvenience and expense of trying to get Japanese books in my country :melting_face:

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These forums aren’t quite as active/regular as WK - I don’t think all of the original nominators are still active on the forum :sweat_smile: I don’t mind posting the threads as I have it down to a science well, template at this point, but if anyone wanted to run the club for a book they nominated I would be fine with it so long as they maintained the basics (ran polls, tried to post the threads on time, no authority tripping :stuck_out_tongue: )

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Authority tripping? For running a book club? :rofl:

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You laugh but I’ve seen it! So far only in English book clubs but man, give some people any power and their head expands.

It’s why I try very hard to keep a light touch here and give reasons for why I do certain things and try to be flexible and accommodating. I’m always on alert for, “am I becoming [ that person ]?” :rofl:

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Sounds scary. :eyes: And unpleasant.
I’ve never experienced it or can even imagine it, but then I never took part in book clubs before WK book clubs, so my experience is very limited I guess. :sweat_smile:

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It was a mix of policing the discussion (must listen to their opinion above others, they wanted to be right, not just to share thoughts) and overriding majority desire for what they wanted because they were the ‘leader’. Think scheduling and such.


:sweat: I swear it’s on the topic of book clubs!

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:rofl: :zipper_mouth_face:
Sorry for monopolizing the conversation, forum bot…

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What e-book aversion? There’s like 90 books from him in the Kobo store… Besides his lesser known works written in like the 80’s (like Nemuri no Mori), there’s e-books pretty much for most of his works. Not having one for Masqueirade Hotel is a bit weird, I admit.

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