100 purple level items! (that i’ve counted here, at least, only full length stuff that’s in volume format goes on the spreadsheet, no aozora shorts, no pixiv or 同人 comics unless they are in a 単行本 format somewhere)
I woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep, went over to my computer and already had it open, so just kept reading 一度だけでも、後悔してます。 | L23, ended up finishing the whole second volume before I noticed
Enjoyed the end of the first volume and the second volume a lot more than when I talked about it before, ended up being very cute
finished vol 3 as well today which finishes the series! I actually cant remember the last time I finished a manga series, even a super short one like this I’ve been reading a very wide spread of volume 1s, but not settling in to read a whole story start to finish. I think it only got better as it goes on. Starts kinda crazy, takes a lil bit to get the wheels spinning, and then really drives home a cute and sweet ending. Not for the squeamish or for public reading though, probably: those girls, they are, in fact, having sex. If it weren’t on natively already this probably would go in my alleged secret hush-hush personal stats and be obfuscated from public view, but since it is already on here I will dutifully mark them as read and grade them for the future yuri readers’ benefit
Then read volume 2 of 少女終末旅行 before bed, also liked this one a lot more than the first one. It’s really starting to get into the atmosphere that I was expecting/hoping for
beautiful, gorgeous, some extremely moving chapters, but man, that’s definitely a more somber take on these themes. ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 tackles a similar end of the world scenario watching the remnants of humanity slowly die out with a more melancholic but almost a fond or nostalgic vibe, and 宝石の国 ends on a much more optimistic note if you choose to read this series as Buddhist allegory (which I am).
Similar to both of those series, while the language might not necessarily be that complicated, I would not call this an easy read. It may not have a lot of text, but if you’re struggling to follow the literal stuff on the page you’re gonna miss out on how rich it can be. A good beginner learner series this is probably not, but a good extensive pick once you’re more comfortable reading things.
I really enjoyed it, but idk if it’s a series I can really recommend people to read unless you are in a very particular mental state. Even more than the other series on my slice of life list, this one really doesn’t sugar coat any of the lessons it wants to teach.
I didn’t really plan on reading this much today, but I’m heading home for US thanksgiving tomorrow and did not want to leave this series unfinished for a weekend
Needed a lil palate cleanser, didn’t wanna leave off on the uhhhh existential dread before bed, so picked something that I knew would be super sweet and easy
Read the first volume of this and aaaaaaaaa sweet sugar for my serotonin starved brain…
I think this might be my new first/early manga reader rec, at least for yuri fans. Extremely simple to follow, lots of repeated dialogue and setups, it doesn’t have furigana but it honestly doesn’t even need it, moves quickly, very sweet, and you’d get a lil prize at the end for finishing your first manga
It’s been a slow few days while I was at my parents place: did some aozora reading, little bit of manga, watched some stuff before bed, but was mostly being socially responsible.
I did get to briefly go to the arcade while we were doing some shopping, and picked up some new friends! Played a few rounds of music diver while I was there, along with some wacca and sdvx. There were a lot of general public/non-rhythm game people hanging around, and I gave a few of them the tutorial on how to get through wacca’s japanese only menus too.
But on my drive home, after listening to a few episodes of the history of japan podcast, I kinda felt like trying something I’d been pretty scared to try again. 大童 澄瞳 (おおわら すみと), the mangaka of 映像研には手を出すな! 1 | L30 did an interview on the マンガのラジオ podcast recently, so I’d saved it to my phone podcast player, but had been putting off listening to it because the last time I tried out a podcast like this I got totally overwhelmed For desk listening, I knew it’d probably be fine, but for driving and listening content? was not confident at all that I’d be able to follow anything they were talking about.
But it went ok! I could follow enough for the interview to be enjoyable to listen to, even if some of the details flew by me. I know that a big part of getting into radio content like this is just… listening to more radio content, but I have still been kinda reluctant to do a lot of it. I’ve gotten kinda comfy in my lil vtuber game stream listening bubble, but I will need to do more listening outside that, especially with people speaking more formally, if I wanna keep improving at listening.
Continued mainly reading stuff for the aozora advent the last few days, sometimes with some random manga or pixiv stuff on the side, and that has been going pretty well so far! I’ve really enjoyed reading all of the stories so far, and some are definitely ones that I wouldn’t have picked out myself so it’s a nice way to get exposed to new things.
Maybe it’s a little ambitious to think about this, but there is an older book that I’ve had my eyes on for a while that might be in this same vein:
This is a collection of short stories about Class S relationships that were originally published in one of the early shoujo magazines in the early 1900s by 吉屋信子. I’ve been thinking a lot about yuri as a genre this year, so of course I’ve seen this name pop up in a lot in sources and publications I was reading, but it felt like actually reading it itself was probably going to be one of those “mmmmm eventually” type things.
Noticed It was on bookwalker and had a coinback promotion, so I picked up the first volume just to see if it would be text selectable, and it is! Since it’s easy lookups, modernized kana, and consists of shorts that were intended for a younger audience… in principle it feels a lot more approachable now than I was thinking it would.
It’s 35 chapters/stories in the first volume, which is 163k characters long, so that works out to a lil over 4k characters per story, which puts each of those shorts in the same ballpark as the calendar picks so far. I haven’t test read to see how difficult her writing style is, but I’m thinking that by the end of the month I will have a pretty good handle on the challenges of trying to read older things, and will be in a decent spot to actually work on this.
Looking at my goals, I could actually just make 2025 the year of Class S if I do this for a reading challenge, read Flowers as my long visual novel, and read/watch a bunch of マリア様がみてる
I checked the Amazon preview, and read part of the first story, plus scanned a bit of the second. If it’s any indication, it’s probably around マリみて (L29ish) difficulty so far; somewhat more sophisticated, but the writing style itself is pretty accessible. So I wonder if the person who rated it had the version without modernized kana, or something? But this feels worlds easier than say 薬屋のひとりごと | L38 or even ソードアート・オンライン | L33 despite some random archaic(?) vocab. Curious to hear your opinion if/when you do a test read.
Ooh - maybe we should make a Class S club? (no pressure, just cool to see someone else express interest). I forgot about Flowers… maybe I should try playing that soon? Was thinking of watching マリみて S2 sometime soon as well (I’m reading book 1 in lessons, but that’s a very slow thing, since it’s only 1 hr per week)
I like the idea of a club to snag some recommendations and discuss stuff, but I’m notoriously bad at actually sticking to long term reading schedules Have a hard time pacing myself and end up either just waiting until the end and catching up all at once, or reading way ahead and then not being able to talk about it and forgetting discussion points that I wanted to bring up by the time the club actually gets to them
My hope was that it was gonna be somewhere around that range, but I didn’t want to actually put a number on it until I’d read at least one of the stories As I was scanning through I was thinking to myself that it really shouldn’t be that much harder than 30/31/32 where a lot of these aozora shorts with modern kana have landed, but was thinking maybe there’s difficulty in other read-between-the-lines or cultural reference ways that I was missing. That’s promising though!
Actually I’m the same (including some of the ones I’ve run ). So it could be an informal club, or maybe even just a Class S Discussion Thread or something
Cool! Any thoughts as to whether “informal club” vs “discussion thread” makes more sense as a format? I’m leaving towards the former, tho I’d have to take a look around to get a better sense of how these things actually run
Interesting to know. I’ve largely ignored Aozora until now
Informal would probably make more sense to me, especially if it potentially includes such different formats of (still specific) reading material. Also not sure what the precedent is for club stuff here, but on wk the discussion/appreciation threads tend to be less focused on any particular set of things and informal clubs are more about a group of people reading the same stuff just not really at a schedule pace
Last night I looked into a new source for reading things that I hadn’t really thought to try before, but might actually end up filling a really good niche for me.
I’ve primarily been using pixiv to read comics and look at fan art for things, but I had for some reason never tried to open the novels portion of the site. It turns out there are just a lot of what basically amount to short fanfiction stories on here, some are standalone one shots but many are long running series. They run contests for different genres and have prize listings for if you care about quality, but if you just want to read a bunch of stuff from a particular series, can also just go in through the tags.
But like, there’s a lot a lot of content posted here, like a truly staggering amount for the big popular fanwork series, and there’s a ton even for relatively small things. When I said that if you get into touhou the sun might burn out before you finish reading all the touhou stuff, that wasn’t even accounting for this These aren’t necessarily the highest quality, but for me right now I think that’s actually a good thing.
With reading manga, the way I got better at reading manga was by reading a huge variety of texts extensively, many of which I didn’t particularly care if I missed things here and there.
With listening, the way I got better at listening was by just listening to a ton of different streamers extensively, coming in and out of comprehension without worrying too much about stopping to catch every single joke.
But with reading text/books so far, I haven’t really had something like that. I’ve read 朝日新聞 articles, i’ve read some aozora shorts, I’ve worked through a few books relatively slowly with yomichan looking up tons of words and searching for grammar points, and a bunch of things like that, but nothing I’ve read has really felt truly extensive the way I sometimes read manga or watch streamers.
It’s not like I only read manga extensively, or only listen extensively, at the same time I’d still be working slowly through harder manga, or with listening I did have some things (mio, mostly mio) that I cared enough about to really stop and very intensively listen to what they were saying, but I think for me I’ve had a lot of success in having both an extensive source and an intensive source, kinda bouncing back between them.
That is all to say: of what i’ve read so far these are like just like eating popcorn, and I can read them as extensively as I want to and still get enough enjoyment out of them to feel they are worth reading. I don’t think they’re gonna get character tracked or anything on the spreadsheet, just be a nice side thing to know is there and that I’m probably reading in the background.
Edit: It ended up being like 2 clicks to copy almost exactly the same table I’m using to track aozora stats and use it for this without much format changing, and since pixiv does just display the character count on the page, might as well. Although these stats may not get shared with the public very often
If you find a way to use tags for filtering on pixiv, I’d be so happy.
I wished so much Japanese fanfic writers would come over to AO3, it’s just better tag filtering in every way there’s a lot of Chinese fics being imported, so I still have hope here
It is nowhere near as nice as the tags on ao3, unfortunately
But of the fic that’s on the public facing internet, this appears to be where the japanese community landed, I can’t really seem to find anywhere else that’s not private/request access type posts. But, I’m also not very good at looking for things, so maybe there’s another better place out there
I’ve been reading a very wide spread of volume 1s, but not settling in to read a whole story start to finish. I think it only got better as it goes on. Starts kinda crazy, takes a lil bit to get the wheels spinning, and then really drives home a cute and sweet ending. Not for the squeamish or for public reading though, probably: those girls, they are, in fact, having sex. If it weren’t on natively already this probably would go in my alleged secret hush-hush personal stats and be obfuscated from public view, but since it is already on here I will dutifully mark them as read and grade them for the future yuri readers’ benefit 
there’s a lot of Chinese fics being imported, so I still have hope here 
