Book three of Moon Trick finished! This is the first Moon Trick I get to actually update on Natively, haha.
A bit of background on Moon Trick: from what I’ve read so far, it’s an extremely fluffy found-family slice of life story, with no real overarching plot behind it. The story centers around 斗哉 (とうや), a young man who inherited a unique set of genes from his mother: every night, after the sun sets and if the skies are clear, he transforms into a random animal (and sometimes non-animals). Obviously unwilling to tell anyone around him (his family knows, of course, and one middle school friend) and feeling like he’s unable to live among normal people, he decided to stop going to school after graduating middle school to live in a cafe (located in an unnamed forest) run by his uncle.
The story from there moves onto 斗哉’s reaching out to others and meeting other people with similar conditions to him; we’ve been pretty consistently meeting a person a chapter or so, and so far I’ve actually been okay with the pace of the story and characters met. One of my usual big issues with stories like these is that they throw characters at you, willy-nilly, and don’t give them much more screentime or depth to their character after their initial introduction. Honestly it’s been trending like that so far in Moon Trick, so we’ll see how I feel as the story evolves, but I’ll say for now that I’m still quite enjoying myself and meeting everyone.
100% of the main cast is, so far, male, and the author definitely enjoys drawing her pretty boys, haha. Everyone’s very close, but I’m feeling like it’s unlikely it’ll move into any more BL territory than deep friends/maybe a bromance or something. Full furigana on all kanji, and considering how early in my Japanese learning career I started trying to read it, it’s probably a fairly good beginner read. You’ll get a small dose of animal and entertainment industry vocab, and mostly just daily life stuff otherwise.
(This turned into a pretty good overview. I think I’ll post it as a review for the first volume… )
We progress ever onward. This part of the story is so heavy, though… I’m really glad I’ve got Moon Trick to alternate with. Speaking of, I’m anticipating having very little time to read tomorrow, so I’ve been reading chunks of Moon Trick 4 ahead of time. The books are conveniently a constant 3 chapters per book, and I’ve read the first two in anticipation of tomorrow.
I also had a plan to read D.Gray-manキャラクターランキングブック キャラグレ! | L30?? after finishing DGM 22; it’s a DGM fanbook. There’s no real need to read it between 22 and 23; it released in between those two volumes, so I thought it’d be nice, but I don’t know if I can/want to read both it and DGM 23 in the same day. You guys might be seeing a rare other manga update from me.
(And if I could get another kind person to break my post streak, that’d be groovy.)
I should spend much of the rest of this year catching up on my backlog of physical manga. I did just order a bunch of manga a couple weeks ago, but that was mostly for a book club on a fixed schedule. Similarly, I will buy more manga in October because the next volume of my favorite series is releasing, but the rest of the order is going to be a series I’ve already read digitally, so not giving me more to read.
The latter of which is pretty complicated and a slow burn, so also may not read all three volumes this year (series is still ongoing). The former is the only full manga set I have physically that I haven’t read yet, so most likely I’ll read that whole series.
Read most of the 小百合姫, and on/off progressing through Thirdless.
Read through Fate/kaleid liner プリズマ☆イリヤ ドライ!! | L27 4-9 (it’s finally manageable). It’s been really good, and finally is comfortable for me (with lots of lookups). I only own up to vol 12/14.
Read 悪いが私は百合じゃない 1 (Adult) | L20 .- the ecchi and sex scenes are decent, but I’m not particularly enthused so far. If vol 2 doesn’t grab me, I’ll sell the series at BookOff
Read vol 1 of 閉じたの国のホロン (fantasy yuri with genderqueer lead)… I can’t actually tell anyone’s gender rn
Yona club is on 暁のヨナ 46 | L27 - I’m not looking forward to later parts of the book
Anyway that puts me up to 73% of my collection used/read, and I’m not allowed to order books again for 2 months… So lots of room to make more progress!
I’m back! Saturday was mega busy for me, and today was bit of catch-up for me in other areas of life; for example, finishing Saturday’s manga. I went to all that trouble to pre-read and couldn’t pick up the book anyway. Oh well, it made finishing the volume today easy. And since today was pretty full as well, I picked an easier manga instead of DGM for today’s pick, just something to zoom through.
ホテル・メッツァペウラへようこそ is a Harta series I’ve taken a particular looking to; it’s also slice-of-life, though in the very different setting of Finland. (Check out my review of volume one here!) (Also, the physical volumes of this manga are nice.)
Here’s my first pic of my completed-manga-for-this-month-shelf:
Thus ends my brief foray into my ホテル・メッツァペウラへようこそ stash; there are 4 more volumes in the series so far, but I don’t own them, so I’ll have to wait until my next order of JP manga. I suppose I’ll get back to Moon Trick tomorrow; I did indeed start D.Gray-manキャラクターランキングブック キャラグレ! | L30?? , but I have a feeling in going to be too busy over the next few days to finish it before starting DGM 22.
I can’t believe I’ve managed an entire manga per day so far! Here I was in July, thinking, “wow, it’d be great if I could get two manga per week read in August!”. Here’s to many more to come!
I finished Fate/kaleid liner プリズマ☆イリヤ ドライ!! | L27 12, and don’t have the next two volumes. Considering reading digitally, but actually the story just hit an 一段落, so I might just wait until I have the physicals eventually.
Dropped 悪いが私は百合じゃない 3 (Adult) | L20 midway, and I’ll be selling the series to BookOff. The writing is really boring - even for a harem - and the MC has no redeemable/likeable qualities. I regret buying it.
Phew; I’m loving this part of the story we’re in, but each book feels like it’s successively getting denser and denser with the scenery and illustrations, not to mention text. The books aren’t hard to read, per se, but they do just take a while as I try to take it all in. I need to get back to pre-reading a volume the day before, just to ease the day-of load a bit. Looking forward to getting back to the chiller Moon Trick tomorrow, haha.
Pre-read may not be the best term to use here, sorry; basically I’m starting the book before the day I’d planned to read it so I can read a few chapters ahead of time, thereby decreasing my load on the day of.
I finished Fate/kaleid liner プリズマ☆イリヤ ドライ!! | L27 12, and don’t have the next two volumes. Considering reading digitally, but actually the story just hit an 一段落, so I might just wait until I have the physicals eventually.
Dropped 悪いが私は百合じゃない 3 (Adult) | L20 midway, and I’ll be selling the series to BookOff. The writing is really boring - even for a harem - and the MC has no redeemable/likeable qualities. I regret buying it.
Man, I’m super tired today; I’m putting in some extra effort though, to not only read my manga for the day, but start reading DGM 24 for tomorrow and the next Moon Trick for the day after that. My Saturday is going to be yet again busy; I should have an hour or two of reading time in the morning, so I’m going to try to make sure I only have one or two chapters I need to read that day.
I think I’m getting close to where I put down Moon Trick years ago; this volume I still recalled certain events from, but I’m rapidly running out of “when did that happen again?” memories, so we’ll see. DGM is the same way; another couple of volumes and it’ll all be 100% fresh for me! (Instead of just mostly fresh, haha.)
My Timcanpy dolls (from this series) make their appearance! I can’t tell how long I’ve had these guys; the little one in particular I got as a gift many years ago now, haha.
Finished the novel, making good progress on the anthology. It’s a nice way to get to know some more detective series (and writing styles), would recommend. It’s also great as a palate cleanser for in between. The stories are all between 25-30 pages and the prose is not all that difficult. Aside from maybe the edo period one, the vocabulary has also been really approachable imo. Maybe lower to mid 30s?
As for my KU library: I actually started one of my non fiction books, プロの小説家が教える クリエイターのための語彙力図鑑 | L30?? yesterday. Seems like a breezy read so far, though it’s definitely more a book for specific/occasional look-ups than a straight read-through. There’s a 2 page spread per entry, and I’ll just keep going bit by bit. So that’ll take some time.
I also downloaded 狼と香辛料 18 | L37 onto my reader, the first after story volume. Looking forward to starting on that just as soon as I get caught up with the 光の帝国 | L30?? BC over on WaniKani.
This is the first Moon Trick I get to actually update on Natively, haha.
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Speaking of, I’m anticipating having very little time to read tomorrow, so I’ve been reading chunks of Moon Trick 4 ahead of time. The books are conveniently a constant 3 chapters per book, and I’ve read the first two in anticipation of tomorrow.
No real comments this time, I guess, just sleepy vibes. 
