That’s what I did too, I’ve been back-filling my challenge list the whole time I’ve been doing this challenge, and because of it I’m just now starting to do the actual Level + 1 in order
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I was so excited to find this thread! I’m a new Natively user and had just made my own list for a +1 challenge. Excited to have a place to follow along with others doing the same thing!
Sadly I typed up this whole post with the links and then it told me I couldn’t post more than 2 links yet as a new user 
I guess I’ll just put the titles for now and come back and put the links in later.
| Level | Book | Type | Finished |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 | ふしぎ古書店1 福の神はじめました | L23 | Children’s Book | May 22 2023 |
| 24* | また、同じ夢を見ていた | L24 | Novel | Jun 6 2023 |
| 25? | カレーライス 教室で出会った重松清 | L25?? | Short Stories | Current |
| 26* | https://learnnatively.com/book/a93506cde2/ | Children’s Book | |
| 27 | 世界から猫が消えたなら | L28 | Novel | Jun 12 2023 |
| 28* | 逃げるは恥だが役に立つ 1 | L32?? | Manga | Feb 2023 |
| 29 | 宇宙兄弟 1 | L29 | Manga | July 12 2023 |
| 30 | https://learnnatively.com/book/246a8a0685/ | Manga | Jul 5 2023 |
| 31 | https://learnnatively.com/book/a0b19f1ea1/ | Novel | Current |
| 32 | 木洩れ日に泳ぐ魚 | L32 | Novel | Current |
| 33 | https://learnnatively.com/book/74ebd64b2d/ | Novel | |
| 34 | https://learnnatively.com/book/5cc882d1e4/ | Novel |
A surprising number of these have changed level already since I started the list like a week ago, but for now I’m just counting them anyway 
I marked their levels with an asterisk to show that they don’t match the current level rating. Maybe I’ll go back and fill in more gaps later. Also, I added カレーライス, so I’ll be the first to grade it.
Reading 容疑者Xの献身 in Japanese has been a personal goal for a long time after I fell in love with the movie, so it feels like a really motivating end target! I think I could technically get through it now if I wanted (I’ve started it before and made decent progress), but I think it will be so much more enjoyable to build up to it a bit more and be able to read it smoothly with less dictionary use. Once I get there I’ll have to form a new goal so I can add more books to the list!
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Man, I hope Discourse is able to fix their links soon. Seeing posts like yours make me sad it’s still an issue, haha.
Oh I’m glad you mentioned something! That’s a bummer that it’s a Discourse-wide problem, but I was scratching my head trying to figure out why only two of the links were displaying correctly 
How long has that been going on?
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Hmm. Feels like a couple of weeks now, maybe? Maybe just a week or two? I’m honestly surprised that two of your links are showing up right, haha. I wonder why.
Well, I went and just manually added the hyperlinks with the book titles so it’s less of an eyesore now 
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oh gosh @meagstudies this is a really wonderful idea! i hope it’s not too late to add a home post and reading updates to this if the challenge was started last year (꒦ິ꒳꒦ີ) my goal book is level 35 so i think this is a perfect way to get there!
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It’s absolutely not too late to start! This is the kind of challenge that you can start and end at any time, there’s no deadlines or anything. Looking forward to seeing your home post! 
All this activity in this thread lately reminds me I need to get started on an L27 book…
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Out of curiosity, which links? The only links i’m seeing still render correctly are ones which I suspect have been cached. We got no bites on my discourse question, so i’m not sure.
I probably could take a look at the source code, see if I could figure out where that mechanism is… but the mechanism should just pulls from the page title, not too completed
Wikipedia for example: Japanese language - Wikipedia
Do you mean cached here on the forums or cached somewhere more broadly?
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I also noticed what @seanblue mentioned the other day. I was linking things in one of the book club threads and it rendered perfectly: [寄稿] 電子と紙のどちらで買うのが作家さんのためになりますか？問題｜此ノ木よしる｜pixivFANBOX
I suspected no one has posted that exact link about book royalties for physical vs ebook here yet.
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On the forums. Thanks for the link.
Well, I did find the api endpoint which calls an inline one boxer mechanism … which eventually calls a crawler that has a lot of logic. I tried moving my title tag higher on the html document as it seems like the crawler only takes the first 20k chars, but the one box is still coming back null.
I’ll try to see if there’s a better way to diagnose issues. But you’re right that one box doesn’t seem to be entirely broken, just for Natively. Thanks for those links @cat @seanblue
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When inspecting a Natively page vs the one I linked it looks like this:
and if I expand that first script it’s quite large:
meanwhile the pixiv site looks like this:
If you’re pulling in a generated script which is placed higher than the title that may be causing the 20k limit issue
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… so perhaps i’m losing my mind. I swore I just pushed out a fix for that and confirmed it on production. Let me rerelease
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well, i guess i didn’t release that change and now it’s fixed! 地獄少女 1 | L21??
Phew. I’m glad that bug is fixed 
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Thanks for the good work, everyone!
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I started skipping around a bit because I’ve never been able to read just one book at the same time
After また、同じ夢を見ていた | L25 I was excited to read 世界から猫が消えたなら | L27 because I was intrigued by the premise. I started カレーライス 教室で出会った重松清 | L25?? around the same time so I’d have a physical book and an e-book going. カレーライス is a bunch of short stories centered around students I assume are around middle-school age. I don’t dislike it, but it’s not the most enthralling read, so once I finished 世界から猫が消えたなら I picked up 謎解きはディナーのあとで | L31, not realizing it was also in short-story format. It’s harder for me to maintain momentum with short stories, so then I started SPY×FAMILY 1 | L30 to have something more engaging to read. I thought it would be pretty difficult reading at this point, but I’m speeding through the first volume! After I finish it I think I’ll try to finish one of my other books before starting a new volume.
I started my level+1 challenge with level 23, which felt really easy for me but still fun to read (I’ve stalled out on マジック・ツリーハウス 1 恐竜の谷の大冒険 | L20 because I think it’s just a little bit too easy to feel worth reading - especially since I already know the story). I had to look up a lot more words for my level 27 book, so I assumed I was approaching the upper limit of difficulty which would allow me to easily pleasure-read. But I’m finding that 謎解き, which is a good 4 levels higher, is still possible for me to read without feeling like vocab/grammar are significantly hindering understanding or enjoyment!
I don’t know if I was just a stronger reader than I thought when beginning the challenge, or if going up a level at a time has been developing my reading faster than I thought it would, but it’s an exciting discovery nonetheless. If I can read level 31-ish books, I’m not far off from my target book! I also feel a lot more comfortable than I did before about potentially jumping in with a book club that’s around the lower 30-ish levels, so that unlocks even more ways I can enjoy reading in Japanese 
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What’s your target book, out of curiosity?
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It’s the last book on my list - 容疑者Xの献身 by 東野圭吾. It’s been a special story to me ever since the movie blew me away when I first watched it several years ago. I loved the concept of having a mathematician and physicist face off, made especially juicy by the fact that they were friends in college, I loved how the depiction of the mathematician felt less stereotypical and rang more true to me as someone who loves the subject, and the twist at the end made it all even more mind-blowing.
I did read the English translation years back, and honestly, I enjoyed the movie a bit more. I preferred having more ambiguity about one of the main character’s feelings and intentions, because I think it made the ending better. But I still want to read it in Japanese and enjoy the original work that inspired it all!
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