Spoilers should always be hidden using spoiler blur.
When discussing a specific section, please mention where you are in the book, ideally by chapter so people reading different versions have a clear point of reference.
Feel free to read ahead if it’s exciting, but please refrain from spoiling ahead of the appropriate week.
If you have a question about grammar, vocab, cultural things, etc - ask! That’s a welcome part of the discussion too, and other readers will be happy to help.
Started this week and just reached howトロー was created. Bit gross, I guess. I don’t want to know how she obtained the first half of the ingredients
This author sure likes the [onomatopoeia/adverb]と pattern…
Also, hey, there is indeed a rabbit! Well, a rabbit-like thing, not sure if hyperkinetic (I will be happy if anyone knows the reference). Didn’t realize the head on the cover until now.
Especially considering that she is a traveling investigator…
Speaking of which, I wondered why she knew that, but didn’t know about the problems of the village. I guess that would make sense if (a) the outbreak has been going on for a while, (b) she came from there, or (c) investigators have (probably magical) means to directly communicate.
I’m enjoying the book start so far; it’s refreshing to have just straight-up fantasy without any of the modern isekai/video game trends. Easier to read than I thought it’d be as well, though there are a few turns of phrase that lost me that I should really ask about here. I enjoyed seeing 案山子; I was only familiar with the katakana equivalent before, スケアクロー.
From my vague memories of the manga I believe it is; each new chapter is a new area/monster. Not sure if there’s an underlying encompassing narrative thread, though.
Short story collections aren’t the same at all. They don’t have a consistent setting, and in fact often don’t even have a consistent author
Ah, no I see why you thought that. There will be a strong connection in the sense that the characters are the same. In キノの旅, the titular character travels to a new place each chapter and interacts with the locals. While there’s little progression, it’s still a consistent setting. A short story collection won’t have that, except for some exceptions (like collections based on a single franchise). But even then, they would not affect each other (as you noted before, they be literally a collection of short stories, not a novel).
I’m neutral with respect to accepting them or not, I just mean we aren’t inconsistent.
Anyway, my interest in the book has just dropped dramatically.
But there will also be a good side: I can pause the book and continue later w/o much of a memory problem about some plot.
Concerning difficulty: compared to when I read the first ten pages last summer, lookups/pages sank from 13.5 to 9.0 for the first ten pages, and only slightly went up to an overall 9.1 for the whole of the first portion of the book. So the book starts - like recently 涼宮ハルヒ - in the 9+ range.
Some thought about this reduction: I did remember some single words, but on the whole it is not very probable that I remembered that much out of nowhere to create a slide from 13.5 to 9.0, which means all in all 45 lookups less, as it’s about ten pages.
The reduction probably comes more from how learning by reading works, or I think it works, namely I come in contact with hundreds/ thousands of new and already forgotten words in one book and every time a see a word again I’ll get a bit more comfortable with it, even if I‘ll not learn it at that time.
So, what I want to say is, the first ten pages probably had some of the words I wasn’t yet that sure about in summer, but got more sure about since then, so that this time I no longer looked them up to verify my knowledge about them. They were already on the verge of being known in summer, though not quite there yet and just needed some recent consolidation which they might have happened to get in these last months including that summer read.
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