Congrats! Huge accomplishment! 
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Congratulations! What did you think of reading your first real book?
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Today I have a 4 hour flight so I’m going to try and read 冴えない彼女の育てかた 2 | L31 in that time. If I get tired I’ll switch to the next unread 名探偵コナン volume.
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Thanks! Yeah, I’m really happy too!
Thank you!
I have to admit that this book in particular felt a bit more like a chore near the end, but I’m both glad that I started it and that I was able to finish it! It’s not just a nice accomplishment, but I also learnt a ton with the help of the book club, and being able to read it gives me the confidence that I’ll be able to read other stuff around that level too 
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Woah, that’s a bold claim you are making! Don’t you know that the kkkbears pride themselves in the bear book being one of the easiest for learners? I hope this isn’t a denial of the “the supremacy of くまクマ熊ベアー and the genius of くまなの” 
Speaking of 赤川 次郎, it seems that most of their books aren’t terribly difficult. The obvious one for me would be 吸血鬼はお年ごろ | L26 because 吸血鬼 but the high volume count terrifies me. If I read just one volume, it’s over, I’m reading them all. So, I think I’m going to have to put that one off for a while. 
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Just finished 本好きの下剋上~司書になるためには手段を選んでいられません~第一部「兵士の娘1」 | L31. It was great. Loved it. And it was much easier than I expected. (Audiobook is great, too.)
I thought about immediately starting the next volume (since there are like 29 to get through), but I don’t want to burn out on the series, so I am reading a palate cleanser in between.
I have seen 夜カフェ 1 | L24 mentioned quite a bit and it should be a really easy read for me. Also: At 50k characters It’s short. (Compared to the 160k characters that was 本好き😰)
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Glad you enjoyed it! Keep in mind that the series is in arcs, so there are really good points to stop at for extended breaks. The names of the arcs are definitely spoilers, so be careful about that, but I can share the arcs in terms of book ranges if you want to know.
(Also, there’s only a few books left to be published to wrap up the series!)
Oh, also I’m kind of curious how you rate your books. I saw you gave it 5/5 in terms of language learning and entertainment, but only gave it 4/5 overall. What other factors do you consider when rating books?
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Thank you, but I have watched the anime and that goes to book 7 or 8, if I remember correctly, so I am good for a while yet. I’ll just take a break when I feel like it, since I know how the story progresses anyways but I might come back to you once I have reached volume 8… in a year or so… 
My star-rating is very subjective. Most books will be 3 stars (=good, but nothing special). 4 stars is really good and 2 stars is not worth your time. (If I give something 1 star, it’s basically toilet paper in my opinion. 
) 5 stars only go to books that are all-time favourites. I don’t think 本好き is perfect (it’s unnecessarily lengthy in parts, for example) but I do think that it’s an entertaining read and the language is useful. 
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Great, thanks for sharing! I never even fill in the entertainment rating, because for me the overall rating and entertainment rating are pretty much one in the same. I fill in the language learning rating for the first volume of a series most of the time, but I don’t bother for subsequent volumes, and it has no influence on my overall rating. So you could say I also rate very subjectively. 
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Well, one of the easiest doesn’t exclude other books from being as easy (or easier).
Also, if I had a time machine, I would have recommended 乙女ゲームの破滅フラグしかない悪役令嬢に転生してしまった... (series) | L26 to myself as a first book. So I am denying 
(the supremacy and genius part, I mean)
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Actually, I think its just a notch above くま🐻
The first chapter was incredibly easy though. Kuma kuma repeats a lot of the harder vocabulary which really helps too
赤川 次郎 has written books for various ages, but his style is generally easy to read. Some of his older books have some odd readings and kanji usage such as 停る and 屛風 though.
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Don’t tell the bear fans that I said this but I think I would much rather read the villainess book over the bear book. 
The bear book just has too many books! If I run out of super easy stuff one day, kuma three times bear is the last thing I would turn to.
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Today I finished かくりよの宿飯 after only three weeks, so I’m quite happy with that! It was my fourth novel in Japanese and I really enjoyed reading it. But I think I’ll take a break now and read some manga for a few days, haha.
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Finished 夜カフェ 1 (quick and easy as expected, good for beginners and surprisingly engaging) and started 本好きの下剋上 2, which is even longer than vol 1… 
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Just wait for volume 3 
(I’m pretty sure volume 3 is by far the longest, at least up to what I have read.)
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I’m working through conversation connectors and confident keigo by Olly richards. Just finished confident kanji, amazing adjectives and adverbs and 101 essential Japanese verbs yesterday so working through these two now.
The stories are simple enough (n5-n4 grammar) but the topic of the book gets progressively more difficult as you go. For instance in confident kanji the kanji used progress through n5-n1 level.
My next read will be another set of graded reader books then go on to some more kanji books for the moment.
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I started with
some days ago. It’s rather difficult for me, because there are still so many kanji without furigana that I don’t know. I’m trying to read around 5 pages per day. Probably will reread this one at some point.
On the more easier side, I’m trying to read a chapter of 夜カフェ 2 each evening. Depending on how much time I have.
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Going off of how many people have it wishlisted, it seems that a lot of people (including me) want to read that book. Let us know how it is when you finish!
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Recently, I have been reading 吸血鬼の劣等感 | L31 because my burning passion to read more 吸血鬼 cannot be suppressed by a single book. I’m about 50% through and honestly don’t really like it so far. Maybe I should stop gambling with weird obscure 0-review Amazon books. 
The last 吸血鬼 book I read, 恋する・ヴァンパイア | L31 wasn’t amazing but at least the ridiculous plot was “funny-bad” at times: “Let’s let the bad guy vampire man sleep in our home because he says he’s a part of the Asia vampire association! So what if he has no credentials? Vampire murders start occurring in Japan right after he showed up even though it’s been established from the beginning of the book that there are absolutely no other vampires in the country? I’m sure he has nothing to do with it!”. That sort of dumbassery.
吸血鬼の劣等感 feels like one of those books where the main character is the least interesting. Her only “personality trait” for the first quarter of the book was “handsome man blood good, ugly man blood bad eww”. It kinda just repeated a cycle of “go to shit job I hate” → “go to lunch with stupid airhead friend” [insert tons of food vocabulary I don’t know] → “go home and drink hot foreign man blood wine” [insert even more food vocabulary I don’t know]. Got tiresome pretty quickly. It’s taking me longer than I expected and I just want to get it over with at this point. 
I “started” NHKにようこそ! | L33 because I accidentally read more of the preview than I meant to(I felt like reading anything else than the book I was currently reading), so I thought I might as well just count it as reading even though I know I probably won’t finish it for a while.
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