Who would have thought I’d get to make two book clubs with 
in the title 
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It was a beautiful and crisp fall day where I am today, and perfect for reading. 
I ended up finishing all of 水たまりで息をする | L29 and enjoyed it a lot! I have a similar lifestyle to the main character, living a busy life away from nature in a city, so parts of the story were very relatable and it made me think about the nature’s role in my own life, amongst other things. I think I will keep pondering on about this book for a while. Another hit from 高瀬隼子 for me and a solid recommendation!
Now I will be starting 汝、星のごとく | L34 by 凪良ゆう after it has tragically spent approximately one year on the TBR part of my bookshelf. I really enjoyed 流浪の月 | L31 so I’m also hoping this is great, as it’s only the second 非BL book I’m reading from her now.
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Well, I only had time to go through ~150 pages, but my first impression is that they did my girl Comtesse du Barry dirty. She literally went from prostitute to maîtresse-en-titre of Louis XV, working her way up one bed at a time. That’s like the most hardcore 下剋上 stuff I can think of. You may say that it’s morally dubious, but, meh? Give me just one other way she could have done it. Plus, it’s not like there weren’t other women lining up just for a chance to become maîtresse-en-titre, all with better birth/blood/title/what have you. Not only did she get there, she stayed there until the death of Louis XV. The manga makes it sound like it just happened. Ah, and real life du Barry single-handedly tanked the French economy with her dresses and jewelry, and I love that for her (literal 傾国の美人).
Also, the manga tries to portray her fight against Marie Antoinette as petty, but in her case losing face is pretty much a matter of life and death. Even in the manga, Marie Antoinette just waltzing in to the top without having to do anything annoys me.
I do like Oscar, though, but there’s way too little of them (?) in the story so far. Hopefully that soon gets better.
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Feel like those gant charts would be a cool default stats output for natively (for past books obviously)
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Right now I’m reading 聖女？ いいえ、やったのはこっちのくまです！ ～可愛いもふもふくまさんと行く異世界浄化旅～. According to jpdb, it’s the easiest web novel they have. I suddenly became interested in them once I learned about syosetsu, so I’m trying to work my way up the difficulty ladder. Then soon, I’ll be able to pick a story myself
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I read the first two chapters of きらきらひかる | L33 today, and it’s oddly harder to follow than I would expect for 33. I suppose I just need to adjust a bit to the writing style. I don’t feel like I’m necessarily lacking facts so much as the intended emotions 
I also have read the first quarter of 天久鷹央の推理カルテII: ファントムの病棟 | L35 which is the second in the series. It remains mindless fun that I can plow through quickly without taxing my brain. I was delighted that I didn’t guess the solution to this case early like I did the last two, but I did guess it well before it was revealed and the ‘proof’ scene took place.
I’m going to pretend that binge reading a silly hospital drama is just preparation should I ever be in Japan and need medical help 
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The urge to just skip the rest of this story is getting stronger. It turns out that the bit immediately after where I left off was a ten page description from the criminal’s point of view of the crime that resulted in his imprisonment, which I got about halfway through before feeling I’d had enough for the night. The fact the story originally disposed of “why is this guy in prison” in a brief unemotional paragraph or so at the beginning had made me think “at least the author isn’t going to drag the reader through that”, but nope, he was just saving it for later.
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too real 
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I was in the mood for some light breezy essays, so I’m reading 夢のような幸福 | L30?? by 三浦しをん. (By the way, can I put in a good word for light breezy essays? Great JLPT study material, because there’s some rhetorical stuff that’s more common in nonfiction than in fiction and you’ll miss if you’re just reading novels, and you learn a lot about Japanese culture.)
This particular volume isn’t really hitting for me - I’m not that interested in manga that I’ll never read or Miura’s quest to get the perfect frilly blouse. But I’m reading one essay in particular about the movie T.R.Y., and I have to quote from it here.
(I’ll post my own translation below.)
どんな映画に対しても愛を持ち、少しでもいいところを見つけて褒め
よ、と故淀川長治先生はおっしゃった。私も同感だ。何について語るにし
ても、その対象への愛がなければならぬ。愛がないのなら黙して語らずに
おけ。
いま自分の心を点検するに、私にはこの映画へのあたたかい眼差しはあ
ると思う。少しでも多くの人に観てほしい。そして語り合いたいのだよ、
この映画の愛すべきヘタレぶり)について! ああ、今日ほどだれかと
一緒に映画を観にいけばよかったと思った日はなかった。どうでしょう、
淀川先生。 わたくしめにこの映画について語ることを許可していただける
でしょうか?
(天国と交信中)。そうですか、では。
ええと、先生からお許しが出たので、『T.R.Y.』のとっておきの
見どころをお教えしよう。 これを聞けば、きっとみんな映画館に足を運び
たくなるはずだ。
My translation
The late movie critic Nagaharu Yodogawa says that you have to love every movie, to find even one small thing to like and praise about it. I agree with him. No matter what you’re talking about, you have to have love toward your subject. If you don’t have love, just shut up about it.
When I search my heart, I think that I can turn a warm gaze upon this movie. I want as many people as possible to see it. I want to tell them of this movie’s lovable suckassitude! I have never wished so hard that I had not gone to the movies alone. Well, Yodogawa-sensei? Will you give me permission to talk about this movie?
(On the phone with heaven)
Oh, OK.
Well, Yodogawa-sensei has given me permission, so let me tell you about the ace up this movie’s sleeve. I know everyone who hears this is going to want to rush to the movie theaters.
(The ace up the sleeve is just that they cast a particular famous Japanese actor as the Japanese emperor, which proves I don’t have the necessary context to get what Miura is putting down - nevertheless, I do love these few paragraphs!)
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Hey I’m back once again with another goal for myself 
I am currently sitting with 1390/1500 volumes of manga for my goal for the year but today I also decided to once and for all finish reading the light novel of 冴えない彼女の育てかた (series) | L32.
So from today until the end of the month I will (try to) read all the volumes I have left. This means:
25th → vol 8 
26th → vol 9
27th → vol 10✅
28th → vol 11
29th → vol 12
30th → vol 13
Today it was the first time I read one whole volumen within a day and I don’t have much time so this is going to be hard. But I will try my best!
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1500 volumes 
Is that completed within the year, or all time?
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All time hahaha, I started the year with 1000 so that would be 500 volumes read within a year 
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That’s amazing!! My goal is 50
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Okay, volume 2 (out of 5, there are many editions with different volume counts) of ベルばら has been fun so far! I do like the plot much better.
Reading has been slow, though, because every time something happens, I go on a wikipedia binge to see If it’s true, partially true (a lot of things have been simplified or streamlined by the author; also the daughter of the Countess de Polignac, who should be a Duchess at that point, is named Aglaé… Charlotte is the name of her mother instead, but I guess it was easier to put in katakana? 
) or just fiction.
I hated French history back in junior high, but I’m having a lot of fun right now. Weird.
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Good luck with that goal!! 
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My goal’s 25 novels this year, but I’m at 23 already, so I should probably bump it up again. Maybe 35? I’ve been finishing 3-4 a month since May (before then I was lucky if I finished 1 lol)
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Dang. An entire LN per day? Sending you tons of sugar or something to fuel that brain of yours. Good luck!
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I started reading 戦前昭和の猟奇事件 | L30?? again because when I tried reading it sometime last year I found it terribly difficult. I put a lot of it down to being overwhelmed with unfamiliar vocab, but now rereading it I have a lot fewer unknown words, but I still find the sentences oddly difficult to parse. I can get them, but the way the clauses are linked keeps giving me pause.
Here are two examples:
事件発生から二十二日後の九月十一日、元雇い主である五木田太郎吉の家で、張り込んでいた多古署の河野昱太郎巡査に見つかった熊次郎は、追いすがる河野巡査を持っていた大型の鎌で殺害。
隣村との境にあり、前年の国勢調査で〝発見〟された戸数二十七戸の地区が、〈殺人鬼・熊次郎を出した村の村民にはなりたくない〉と、代表が隣村への編入を県に請願したという（九月二十一日付東日千葉版）。
I wonder if this is just how nonfiction commonly reads in Japanese Anyone with more experience reading nonfic please let me know if this is totally normal or if this book is just a bit unusual. FWIW I believe that second example is paraphrasing the source it gives, not quoting.
I also tried, again, to read #ある朝殺人犯になっていた | L32 and found I disliked it just as much now as I did 2 years ago. I think it’s time to donate this copy instead of letting it rot on my book shelf.
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The first paragraph feels pretty awkward to me on a first read, but once I read it three times I thought, “Yeah, that’s a normal sentence, I guess.” The second feels really normal for this style/genre of Japanese nonfiction. (Scholarly nonfiction and other things that are more 堅い in style than personal essays, let’s say.) Relative clauses stacked on top of each other in ways that sound quite odd if you’re not used to that. Jay Rubin’s book “Making Sense of Japanese” has a good chapter on how to parse long sentences with too many relative clauses.
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Thanks for the insight! I’ll probably just keep driving on through the book then, and take it all as practice for this sort of writing. I’ve heard that book recommended a lot, but I think for now I’ll see how I do with these types of sentences just by exposure and constant dissection. (That may sound tedious but I’m actually looking forward to it )
The book is ~250 pages so relatively bite sized, but it’s also definitely the most scholarly nonfiction I’ve read so far. My only other nonfic exposure is web articles, 死体は語る | L30?? (pop sci), and パパ活女子 幻冬舎新書 | L34 (essay style commentary with lots of interviews).
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