After a long time, here is my second Korean book of the year: 바보 동자 | L21. I’ve technically read other books since January, but then they were mostly small picture books, as well as novels that I haven’t finished yet.
This one is technically also a picture book, but it does have a lot more text and vocab than your regular picture book so I’m counting it. This was a pretty enjoyable read, and it turns out, when you add children to a story about monks, funny things happen!
I finished 迷い猫オーバーラン! 拾ってなんていってないんだからね!! | L30?? today, as my “been in the TBR pile the longest” book: I’m pretty sure it’s been there over a decade. I stand by my opinion that it’s not a very good book, since its characters are mostly a thin bundle of cliches (especially bad when the book is more about character interaction than plot), and juvenile male humour isn’t my thing. But it did settle down a bit after a rocky start, and the ending was surprisingly heartwarming. (The LN series made it to twelve volumes, so it clearly has an audience who liked it. Maybe if you like harem-ish comedy you might like it?)
Read かわずや１ today for the Read 1 vol in a day prompt… as you can probably tell from my review I did not enjoy it.
last week I finished 極主夫道１３, which is a Wanikani BBC spin-off club I run (which hey… now’s a good time to join! you have ~6 months to catch up before vol 14!)
Read some more manga recently. Almost a bingo, just got to find something free… maybe とつくにの少女 1 | L21?
Setting is a workplace: スーパーの裏でヤニ吸うふたり 1 | L25 - discovered the first volume was free for a limited time and binged it. I really liked it! Not usually a fan of romance but it helped that they were actually working adults and Sasaki’s exhaustion is a mood.
Oldest book in TBR list: 大海原と大海原 1 | L20 - gotta be Wadanohara, which is the very first native material I tried to read back in 2021 (thanks to the wanikani ABBC) - I only got through ch 2 before I stopped my japanese studying again. This time around I read most of it in a day, and might continue with vol 2.
Funnily enough, the reason why I even decided to join the Wadanohara book club despite not having studied Japanese for a while was because I was really surprised there was a manga adaptation - I’m pretty sure it’s based off of the RPGMaker game which I watched a let’s play (in English) of a long time ago!
Notes: This one took me a bit longer to read while I juggled it with life, uni research, and my first foray into vertical-text novels (it’s been rough ahaha). But マグメル was perfect to read alongside my hectic days, being a gentle slice-of-life about working in an undersea aquarium. There was just a hint of deeper plot points, but not so intense that there was trouble picking it back up after a few days’ absence. I learned lots of names of deep-sea creatures while falling in love with the aquarium through the eyes of the main character („• ֊ •„) If you’re looking for a kind and gentle read that is both beautiful and otherworldly, I definitely recommend this one. (Thank you @pyororon for rec’ing this to me!)
It somehow feels like I haven’t updated here for ages. I just finished 掏摸(スリ) | L31 (learnnatively.com) and I think I’ll use it for my “has won an award” box. It has won the 4th Kenzaburo Oe prize, a prize which was awarded only 8 times, from 2007 to 2014.
I just finished 新! 店長がバカすぎて | L30??, which fits both “finish a series” (although it’s recorded separately from the first book on Natively; I have sent a feedback about it) and workplace setting. It also had no reviews/gradings and TECHNICALLY I read it over the course of 24h (I read a bit of it at the time I got it from the library, but started from 0 yesterday evening and finished it during my lunch break today). I guess that matches the definition of “in a single day” (but anyway, I just needed 3 boxes and that’s 4).
Books: 麦ふみクーツェ | L34 New to me author, added to natively by me, in a single day, award winner, no reviews/ratings 私小説―from left to right | L40 Non fiction, random from my TBR, new to me, “for free” (from the library) 痴人の愛 | L42 for free (for real), new to me author, book club, bad cover; BINGO IN ONE 地獄くらやみ花もなき | L31 Debut, added by me, “for free”, new to me author, (non-human protagonist?), no reviews/ratings 吾輩は猫である | L48 Highest natively level, non-human protagonist, longest in TBR (nearly 10 years!) 新! 店長がバカすぎて | L30?? finish a series (although the author hints at the end that their might be another sequel), workplace setting, in a single “day”, “for free”, no reviews/ratings.
I used all the prompts and all TBR qualifiers. On top of the plain “random from your TBR”, I added “ultimate random”, that is, picked randomly from the entirety of the Natively library. In my case (because I rolled those dice already) that means the book here. (I had to do so to remove a redundancy but still get 64 prompts)
Anyway, I’m planning to do this one vanilla, one entry per box. I’m allowing myself to use anything (novel, LN, manga) BUT not the ones I have already used in the previous grid.
I guess that means I have to fill some boxes already, with the other things I read this year…
I was going to try and finish my “longest in TBR” book today, but instead I saw this 50% coin back sale, bought あひる | L28 (learnnatively.com), started it and finished it.
Please look forward to my report on the bear-cub fun!
