Week 1 - 明日の世界で星は煌めく - Beginner's Light Novel Club

Welcome to week 1 of 明日の世界で星は煌めく | L27 :smile:

Schedule & Links

Week 1 Jan 19 2025
Chapter intro & 1 (partial)
Pages 10 - 24
End Percent 6%
Ending line 翌日にあんなことが起こるなんて思いませずに + big asterisk
Previous week N/A
Next week Week 2
Home thread thread

Discussion ground rules

  • Any spoilers, for the current chapters must be behind spoilers or detail curtains. When we get further in you don’t need to hide details that were revealed in previous chapters.
  • Always mention where you are in the book when discussing, ideally by chapter so people reading different versions have a clear point of reference.
  • Feel free to read ahead if it’s exciting! But please refrain from spoiling ahead of the appropriate week :slight_smile:
  • If you have a question about grammar, vocab, cultural things, etc - ask! That can be part of the discussion too and I’m sure some folks would be happy to help.
  • Even if you don’t read the chapter(s) in time, you are still encouraged to post in the thread for that reading once you have finished it. I advise not reading ahead in the threads as you may see spoilers.
Are you joining us for Week 1?
  • I’m reading along
  • I’m reading along, but at my own pace
  • I’m just following the discussion
0 voters
2 Likes

So I suppose I could have looked at the cover more closely, but while I knew this was supposed to be zombie yuri, I didn’t realize that it ALSO had magic and a penguin familiar. :joy:

I don’t feel like we got a lot of plot this week, but despite it introducing kid that gets bullied, I feel like there was a lot of flavor added to that. I guess it’s not everyday that you get bullied because your dad is on some weird magician grift (I totally imagine him as Dr. Orpheus from The Venture Brothers if anyone gets the reference :joy:).

The reading level seems really approachable, especially reading along to the audiobook, so that’s also a big plus!

5 Likes

Question to people who read with text and audiobook at the same time, which seems to be the majority of us: do you stop and look up words you don’t know? I tried to read like that at first but it got annoying, i stopped looking things up unless I got lost completely (which didn’t happen in this portion but did later on - I accidentally read a bit too far)

Since the mc can use magic, who is to say it’s a grift? Honestly I assume at this point he is a real magician.

5 Likes

I jumped in on this book out of convenience.

Serious questions:

  • What / who is Yuri?
  • I seem to be reading a lot of female-based and then mostly fantasy novels (I do it for the language learning, not out of interest). Is that due to most readers on this website being female and preferring this content (with the likes and reviews)? I like sci-fi but it seems to be grouped with fantasy
  • Is there a curated list of books that have both audiobook and ebook available for us learners?
  • Is there just a normal non-ero non-romance heterosexual dude book club? (I am already chuckling at the low probability)

Yes, I often stop. How much I look up depends a bit on my mood. I also often stop because I found a good i+1 sentence to add to my anki cards.

I have the audible player open next to the book and just pause with space whenever I need to look something up and then just press space again, so it is pretty painless. Although I always wait till a sentence is finished before pausing. With some books it can be stopping after every sentence in the beginning until I get used to the repeating vocab.

I recently finished this book, so I will refrain from commenting but I will follow the threads :eyes:

6 Likes

:sweat_smile: i guess if my phone screen didn’t only work 33% of the time this would be less painful. I think for now I will continue without stopping unless I’m lost for this one. There are other books I’m stopping for every word.

3 Likes
response to shitsurei

I did the exact same thing :joy:

Agreed, I found it quite interesting, instead of “oof, another bullying arc/backstory”

3 Likes

From: Yuri (genre) - Wikipedia

“Yuri (Japanese: 百合, lit. “lily”), also known by the wasei-eigo construction girls’ love (ガールズラブ, gāruzu rabu), is a genre of Japanese media focusing on intimate relationships between female characters. While lesbian relationships are a commonly associated theme, the genre is also inclusive of works depicting emotional and spiritual relationships between women that are not necessarily romantic or sexual in nature”

This seems like a better question for the What are you reading today? thread

I don’t think so. You can use the search + filters to get a similar effect though: Japanese Books Difficulty List | Natively - that shows all light novels or novels that are either on Amazon Kindle JP or audiobook.jp

You can check the list of book clubs here: 🇯🇵 Index List of Book Clubs

4 Likes

I find it cumbersome to do that (even with Bluetooth and separate devices for audio and reading), and try to avoid it. I try to look up words without stopping, or just let them go by. If it majorly interferes with comprehension then I’ll stop.

Now that I have a Kindle, I’d be more inclined to pause, since I wouldn’t have to re-find my place afterwards

I definitely wouldn’t pause in that case!

3 Likes

Urg, I was planning to join for this book, but I’m already reading too many things.

I… am failing to process what that would mean.
What kind of topics do you have in mind? The non-fiction book club is reading something about culturally relevant words in the Japanese language, does that work? Also what would be an anormal […] heterosexual dude book club?

7 Likes

That’s likely the closest one!

1 Like

Very diplomatic answer. Lots of familiar names in here so I thought that I would ask. Thanks.

2 Likes

I agree with that based on the prologue. I guess I was talking from the point of view of the first chapter before we get to the magic. :slightly_smiling_face:

Seems like you’ve gotten a bunch of good answers to this so I’ll add that I mostly do or don’t depending on how well I’m following the book. For this I stopped a few times, but I probably looked up about 10 words total in the reading. I also pre-studyied some the vocab with jpdb, so that did help.

I also sometimes stop because my comprehension is a teensy bit slower than reading speed. I’ll hit pause try and think if I understood it after the pause, and if not look up a word or two.

This is my ideal. I wasn’t quite there in this reading session but I’m hoping once we get past the introductions that’s how I’ll be reading the rest of the book.

For readers on mobile, when I’m reading harder books I often will do split screen on my phone with the audio and the book so I can look things up more quickly. I’m on Android, so ymmv on iOS. This book is a comfy enough level for my Kindle and my phone on my lap for audio, which I definitely prefer.

I looked yesterday when I added this book and I have 20 books in currently reading :dotted_line_face:

On the other hand, if you read this later this year it can be a past bookclub bingo square :grin:

6 Likes

I’ve found the filters to sometimes be a little wonky when searching for audiobooks.

It’s not particularly curated (hence the title), but I used to keep a list of books with audiobooks.

https://learnnatively.com/list/d0a742aaa4/

I got tired of sorting it and I haven’t added to it in a few months. I’m also not 100% sure all of these have ebooks, but I’d be surprised if more than one or two don’t since ebooks are much more common than audiobooks.

6 Likes

No idea if women like fantasy with female leads more than men do, and no idea if that’s the reason (?) you seem to be reading a lot of it despite not wanting to. I’m a man and “fantasy with female leads” sounds perfectly fine to me. Either way, it seems to be easily avoidable? However you discover a book, you can look at the tags, the cover and the description, and if it seems like something you don’t enjoy you can decide not to start reading it.

Sci-Fi is a tag you can search for. You can also ask for specific stuff in the Seeking Recommendations thread.

Almost none of the book clubs are oriented around romance and I’m not sure there are even any around ero. I don’t know what “heterosexual dude book club” means and what books would be read there.

Just go to the clubs whose concept (medium/genre) sounds interesting to you, vote for the books you want to win, and read with the club if a book you like wins?

Apart from the Natively book clubs you might also enjoy the Wanikani book clubs. They are usually oriented around difficulty level, so a wide variety of manga/books are read. (Natively book clubs seem to be oriented around medium/genre.)

Also feel free to start your own book club! E.g. you enjoy sci-fi? Make a sci-fi book club!

2 Likes

Quite the cliffhanger sentence to stop at. For the audible audio book the stopping point seems to be 13 minutes into chapter 1 or 20 minutes from the beginning.

Week 1

I didn’t really pay that much attention on what I was voting for. Just Yuri, Audio book L27, something with stars. I didn’t notice the two school girls were carrying a machine gun, a magicans staff and a penguin.

Quite liked it so far. I had to laugh when the penguin cheerfully interrupted the gloomy narrator. Not sure how much horror there is going to be. The prologue and the gloomy narrator made me think it has a horror mood and I was reminded of 裏世界ピクニック | L33 which I sometimes consider reading (it’s quite a bit more difficult and I watched the anime in translation and I suspect the show doesn’t give the books justice).

Not quite sure what a 焼け焦げたバイク is. 焼け焦げた sounds like burnt food to me. Not sure how a burnt bike would look like or what would cause a bike to burn.

Yes. I usually read with audio player and book in split screen (works on android, iOS and pc) or with audio on phone and book on another device. I think it’s fine as long as you don’t look up words in every sentence. I also sometimes look words up while listening without pausing, but I think that’s mostly a bad idea.

5 Likes

I imagine something like this, but a motorcycle instead.

Burnt up cars are a very apocalyptic aesthetic, so I didn’t really think twice about that description. :slightly_smiling_face:

5 Likes

That look more like a war zone thing to me. With apocalypse I’m thinking more rusted and overgrown than burnt. It doesn’t help that バイク can also mean bicycle/自転車🚲.

1 Like

I’ve repeatedly heard the anime is not good, but that the manga (L27 iirc) is a pretty decent adaptation.

It’s pretty rare that it would get used for bicycle, at least in anything I’ve read. I’m pretty sure it’s only used for motorcycle in this book

3 Likes

Depends on the apocalypse reason and time since it happened to me. Considering we have the same mc in the 焼け焦げたバイク description as before it started, I don’t know how much time it would have had to sit around and rust for.

Same. I don’t think I’ve heard it used as a synonym for 自転車 before. チャリンコ (or just チャリン) is the next word that comes to mind for a bicycle.

4 Likes