Yeah, I thought that might be a problem. To be fair, most of the difficulty comes from the military vocab; the writing is not that difficult in my opinion. There’s a ton of difficult words that are just replaced with katakana on the side, so you don’t even have to read the kanji. Once you get accustomed to some of the military kanji, it’s not too bad.
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When I read the book, I found the kanji much easier to deal with than the katakana. They give you the direct meaning of the word, while the katakana is an English-sounding SF word.
Example: 知覚同調 versus パラレイド.
The kanji literally tells you what it is, while the katakana is just ???
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Okay, fair point. 
But there’s also stuff like 青玉、 翠緑、雪花種、 指揮管制官、 無人機、 侵入警報 where I feel the interplay can help. 友軍機 as well. But I guess most of these words don’t have that difficult kanji. Just helps with solidifying the meaning.
And there’s a ton of furigana, even on more common words. Honestly it’s sometimes even annoying.
TLDR; eazy peazy, let’s get that rating down
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86 is on audible, so I might consider it. I just need to look up what the story is about. I am not a huge fan of military plots. 
Edit: seems to be some sort of dystopian story with a military POV.
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You should officially nominate it if you think so.
There’s also a genocide/discrimination angle to it that’s pretty interesting, from the little I read of it. IIRC the author based parts of it off of events from WW2.
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86―エイティシックス―
Author: 安里 アサト (Asato)
Summary
Japanese
第23回電撃小説大賞《大賞》受賞作、堂々発進！ 最終選考委員と、編集部一同をうならせたエンターテイメントノベルの真・決定版！
サンマグノリア共和国。そこは日々、隣国である「帝国」の無人兵器《レギオン》による侵略を受けていた。しかしその攻撃に対して、共和国側も同型兵器の開発に成功し、辛うじて犠牲を出すことなく、その脅威を退けていたのだった。 そう――表向きは。 本当は誰も死んでいないわけではなかった。共和国全85区画の外。《存在しない“第86区”》。そこでは「エイティシックス」の烙印を押された少年少女たちが日夜《有人の無人機として》戦い続けていた――。死地へ向かう若者たちを率いる少年・シンと、遥か後方から、特殊通信で彼らの指揮を執る“指揮管制官（ハンドラー）”となった少女・レーナ。二人の激しくも悲しい戦いと、別れの物語が始まる――！
English
The San Magnolia Republic has long been under attack by unmanned weapons from the neighboring Empire. Against this onslaught, the Republic has also deployed similar weapons, narrowly avoiding great loss of life and impending disaster-or at least that’s how it seemed.
The truth is that it has never been possible to have no casualties. Young men and women drawn from the Republic’s supposedly non-existent 86th district are organized into the “86 unit” and then ordered to pilot the “unmanned weapons” before heading to battle.
Length: 344 pages
Availability
Ebook:
Rakuten Kobo
Bookwalker
Why are you nominating this book:
Received very favorable reviews from readers as well as critics. Anime has also gotten praise. There was some interest over at WK ABC but it eventually got dropped from the polls. I’m also really into harder sci-fi, and this looks like a great first jump into a Japanese sci-fi book (which seem to be a bit on the rarer side). I heard the later books fall a bit flat, but that the first book is great as a standalone, as well.
I think the author has some kind of thing for tanks and vehicles of war. She seems kind of a history enthusiast so interesting to see some of the details put in the world and machines.
I think the difficulty can put some people off, but I think a lot of it comes from the rarer military vocab. A lot of it is using the same kanji, so you do get used to it and can often infer the meaning. The normal dialogue is not too bad. The book is also VERY generous with furigana.
Sample
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Does anyone know the current publication status of 86? I see 13 volumes on Amazon, with the most recent published a few months ago, but it’s called “86 Alter.1”, which makes me thing it’s a side story of some kind.
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How did you input the text w/ furigana here?? That’s cool
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It’s this extremely gross mess:
(Not sure how to quote that without actually applying the ruby, haha.)
It would be nice if Discourse had an auto-inserter you could use; “paste the kanji in this input and past the furigana in that input” kind of thing.
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On-going according to wikipedia
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If you put formatted text in between two of these guys ` then it displays the formatting as plain text, like so:
<ruby>青玉<rt>サファイア</rt></ruby>
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Ahhh, so the raw HTML then. That makes sense. That would indeed be a nice utility, and a very easy one to code. Fwiw one can feature request here: Request new features for Discourse - documentation - Discourse Meta . Afaict there hasn’t been a feature request for it before.
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Ah, ` was the secret sauce I was missing. It was on the tip of my tongue, but I just couldn’t pull it to mind. Thanks!
Here we go.
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@暁のルナ I was surprised it actually worked out like this by just copy-pasting from the e-book viewer straight.
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epubs are just html files at heart. 
(try opening one like an archive to see what I mean :))
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Yeah, of course. But it’s always a bit finicky how it turns out since visually the selection only includes the word(s). On phone it doesn’t include the ruby, at least. And that how dictionaries have to handle lookups ignoring it.
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I started reading the second volume today and I would say the difficulty rating is actually deserved. At the very least, it is on par with other things I have read at that level.
That being said, since there’s such a heavy focus on fighting, it’s very easy to plow through (for me at least; the thing that slows me the most when reading is day dreaming about the future developments of character relations… not much of that while fighting)
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Okay; since 2/3 of folks said they didn’t care and 1/3 would like the extra time to order physical copies, we’ll go ahead with this scehdule:
Which means that nominations are officially open for advertisement! There are currently seven slots open for nominations!
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I have one I’d want to nominate, but I dunno if anyone would be interested in it. (Those familiar w me might be unsurprised to learn that it’s 2.43.) It’s sports, which it doesn’t look like anyone else has nominated, and not a particularly popular one besides; the clubs over on WK specifically want more popular books. Also the tankoubon ed is 1 vol but the bunko ed is 2, and I dunno how that’d work with this club
(for some reason I often seem to get more into things that are less popular than things that are more popular, but then I still naturally want to share them…)
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I’d say there’s no better way to gauge interest than to nominate! We don’t really have any real requirements for nominations at the moment, and I at least always appreciate seeing variety in the nominations. As good as I’m sure 本好き is, it’s pretty old hat by this point.
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