Due to the nature of this book I don’t believe spoiler alerts are necessary, but still make sure to write where you are when you discuss things since you want to give context for people to know what you’re talking about and where to look for it.
Schedule
Week
Start date
Chapter
Pages
Page count
1
May 25th
まえがき and 序章
14-32
19
2
June 1st
1
33-53
21
3
June 8th
2
54-81
28
4
June 15th
3
82-101
20
5
June 22nd
4
102-119
18
6
June 29th
5
120-141
22
7
July 6th
6
142-162
21
8
July 13th
7
163-184
22
9
July 20th
8
185-209
25
10
July 27th
9
210-237
28
11
Aug 3rd
最終章 and あとがき
238-275
38
Membership
Will you be reading with us?
Yes
Yes, but I might start late
Maybe
No
0voters
Unless there are a lot of people reading along, I plan to keep the whole read-through in a single thread, rather than one thread per week: it’s much less effort to manage that way, and avoids sad little threads with just one or two comments.
So, what pace do we want to read this at? This is a Natively L35 book with 275 pages. It has a まえがき, a 序章, nine main chapters which are typically 20 to 30 pages long with three subsections each, a 最終章 and an あとがき. So it should be easy to find breakpoints that fit our chosen pace.
Please select all the speeds that you would be happy reading at:
Slower than 10-15 pages a week
One chapter every two weeks (10-15 pages, likely 20-22 weeks total)
One chapter a week (20-30 pages, total 11 weeks)
More than one chapter a week (up to 40 pages a week)
I think the consensus on that is “one chapter a week”. I generally favour going a bit slower if that helps to increase the set of people who participate, but @shablul was the only person voting for one chapter every two weeks, and nobody else said they were OK with a pace that slow. Looking at the exact page counts for the chapters, they’re almost all much closer to 20 pages than 30, at least.
The “one chapter a week” schedule would be:
Week
Chapter
Pages
Page count
1
まえがき and 序章
14-32
19
2
1
33-53
21
3
2
54-81
28
4
3
82-101
20
5
4
102-119
18
6
5
120-141
22
7
6
142-162
21
8
7
163-184
22
9
8
185-209
25
10
9
210-237
28
11
最終章 and あとがき
238-275
38
The last week is long, but it’s the last week. (The actual final chapter is 29 pages, and the あとがき is 8 pages.)
I vibed so hard with the introduction Such a mood.
I’m really excited to read the section on Meiji Japan and reading, since I’ve read academic articles on it in English before. Meiji Period reading culture is fascinating and it’ll be interesting to see how the author approaches covering it in Japanese for a general audience.
Since this was just the intro, it’s probably not representative of the whole book’s difficulty. With that being said, I’m finding it very approachable so far. I listened along with the audiobook while reading.
If this is any indication of the rest of this book, I will probably bail after the Meiji section, cuz this was incredibly boring! I’m not sure if the narration is making it worse, or it’s really just the content itself. So I may just try the Meiji portion without it, and see how it goes. (the narration is fine and clear, it’s just very flat/monotone)
This week we’re reading the まえがき and 序章, which is 19 pages in my copy.
We’ll do discussion for the whole book in this thread, so I’ll post one of these “week N starts today” replies every week as a reminder of where the group is in the read-through and as an orientation for people reading the thread in future, but feel free to post thoughts or questions even if they’re not in the “current” week – just say what part of the book you’re at.
I liked the start. The book sounds promising so far.
I’ll probably watch 花束みたいな恋をした as well and report on it.
However, I disagree with the sentiment of social class indicating who would want to read a book, especially in the 21st century where books are cheap and you can often get terabytes for free off the internet.
To give an example: I have friends whose families are well off but don’t like to read. I genuinely think that the only indicator for reading affinity is personality. Like whether you would prefer to read the book or watch the movie adaptation.
I think at least some of it runs in families: if you grow up watching your parents read books for leisure, I think you’re more likely to do that too. And some of that correlates a bit with social class. Plus there’s social pressure: if none of your peer group reads, you’re probably more likely to drop a reading habit.
This is a Guardian article about a survey done in 2014 in the UK: it found that “on average, the higher the socio-economic group that someone is in, the more often they read: 27% of DEs never read books themselves, compared with 13% of ABs, while 62% of ABs read daily or weekly, compared with 42% of DEs”. So I think the correlation is definitely real.
But also anybody (including almost certainly everyone reading this) who reads books more than occasionally is unusual. Yougov did a survey in the UK on this a couple of months ago: 40% of people in the UK didn’t read a book at all in the last year, and another 23% read 5 or fewer. I don’t know what the statistics for Japan are (aren’t they supposed to be a big reading country?) but it wouldn’t surprise me too much if a fair slice of the people on this forum are above the median Japanese person for reading books in Japanese…
Yougov also found that you’re more likely to read for pleasure if you’re middle class rather than working class, if you’re a woman, and if you’re older. These are all more biases than big gaps between the groups though.
I’d be surprised if that wasn’t the case, since most of us have to rely much more heavily on media for acquiring proficiency, due to not living in Japan, and thus not hearing/seeing Japanese non-stop
Yep, I found some stats from a Japanese survey, and as long as you read more than one book every six months you’re beating the average Japanese person:
Relevant to the argument the preface is making, note how the “don’t read” category goes up for men as they get out of their 20s and then goes down again in the 60+ category that includes the retired (with a full 20% of men in their sixties reading 11 or more books in six months).
My other question reading the introduction was “how much of this is just Japan’s awful work culture?”. A graduate entry level job in IT shouldn’t require being in the office from 9 in the morning to past 8 in the evening, and in a more sane country with a 9-5 type workday that’s three extra hours back every weekday…
Reading ahead a bit; I may speed through this one and post a bunch of thoughts all at once.
Week 2 Thoughts:
It was interesting to hear a bit about the connection between self-help books/magazines and urbanization/generally changing work culture in the Meiji period. I liked the Soseki excerpt for the bit about libraries.
However, I feel like the author could be going deeper than she is into the details. I guess that’s what the sources she quotes are for, and I’ve written some of them down to check out later.
Lots of stuff on 修養 vs. 教養. While I was already familiar with both terms and their relationship to the publishing industry in the Meiji/Taisho periods, it was interesting to read about the specific relationship to salarymen and working culture.
I’m having mixed feelings on the book so far. I think I would find it much more interesting if it were all new to me. However, since it’s taking a lot of information that I’m already familiar with and interpreting it in a slightly different direction, it’s a bit redundant feeling.
If you’re interested in the 1910 性急な思想 essay that the author quotes from, it’s on aozora, and it’s not very long.
It’s always nice to see a quote from 三四郎 | L40 – I recommend the novel for a view of the intellectual side of Japan in that time. The book Sanshiro borrows at the end of this extract is by 17th century author Aphra Behn, who Wikipedia describes as “one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing”. One of the main purposes of a Meiji era Japanese university library at the time was to provide access to the Western literary canon and other books; the copy Sanshiro borrows will have been in English, not translated.
…but it is pretty brutally difficult. I think I kind of understand the point he’s making but not very confidently. (It also feels like the essay is in part an entry in an ongoing literary argument, so not having the backstory about the different intellectual camps makes it a bit trickier too.) Side note: the Wikipedia page about 石川 啄木, who wrote the essay, notes “Ishikawa wrote some of his diaries in a Latin script transliteration of Japanese so that his wife could not read them”…
I feel like I understand all the words, but to get at what he’s saying and even break down the sentences I need to think a lot. This sort of essay would benefit a lot from visual cues. If I had a printer available I’d print it out and mark the text like was recommended in ‘slow reading’.
I read this week’s part over 2 sessions so I have a hard time remembering what I read the first time, but admittedly the author goes over so many tangents and sub-topics that I’m not sure I understood what she was trying to highlight.
Does anyone have a summary of all of the points raised this week?
The only thing that I fully understood was that self-help books only appealed to lower-class workers and not upper-class (who would have thunk it?)
I fail to see how that relates (or most of the topics admittedly) to the main theme of the book but I guess that’s to be discovered in the later weeks.
One more slightly bewildering note was the author highlighting the classism themes in 花束みたいな恋をした, it being your average run-of-the-mill romance movie, I had no such impression. I fear the author might be a bit too indulgent in her own writing.
Such a mood.
