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Audible会員プラン聴き放題対象

Very few titles on audible are not 聴き放題.

Can confirm, this happens to me too, and I signed up normally on the website without VPN. So it’s not a VPN or not VPN issue it’s just an audible issue. Going through either the audible or amazon site let’s you add it without issue, though.

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Tangentially, Audible JP is driving me nuts with region stuff lately… Even with a VPN, I can never figure out when it’s going to let me get stuff or not… I guess next time it lets me, I’ll just download anything I could potentially read someday

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Technically, almost all the audiobooks from outside of Japan that I tried were not part of it. I guess it’s not really relevant here, but still :sweat_smile:

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I finished the first chapter, and yes, it definitely is a wild ride. Or descent into madness. I’m loving it.

Soon after what I described above, it took quite a turn: He returns home only to find the mother of the stolen phone’s owner waiting for him inside, and treating him as her son. It very much looks like he literally stole the guy’s identity, even in the mother’s consciousness? Then at the end of the chapter it gets even crazier, but I’m not revealing anything more. :slight_smile:

I wanted to say I’m getting Luigi Pirandello vibes (One, No One and One Hundred Thousand), but to be honest I have no idea where it’s going. :eyes::popcorn:

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ささこい latest volume… It’s one of my favorite yuri series, and also on the easier side! The anime is coming out in April as well!

(If you buy it digitally, there’s a separate 第44.5話 bonus story that’s really sweet and adorable as well: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B0CXX2R8FK/)

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I finally finished all 56 vols of 犬夜叉 | L23!!! That’s my longest series so far. Started 恋より青く 1 | L20 vol 2 (not on the site yet) and おとなになっても 1 | L27 (coincidentally same author as 青い花 and 放浪息子).

I’m gonna start back on 弱キャラ友崎くん Lv.2 | L28 tonight (with the audiobook), and then NHKにようこそ! | L32’s book club is right around the corner. I also might read 七海みなみは輝きたい 弱キャラ友崎くん外伝 | L26 which is 3 volume manga spinoff for Tomozaki-kun, since I have a lot of feelings about how S2 of the anime played out (it relates to the second half).

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I shamefully admit that I am very fine with only getting the basics of the tech babble. :laughing: So as long as I know what’s going on with the plot and the crime - and I think he writes clearly enough usually - I don’t go for full understanding of the technical details.

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I don’t know that I’ll read this, but… For any ホリミヤ fans, the original webcomic has a book form too: 堀さんと宮村くん | L25. The first volume is free to keep on Bookwalker until April 18.

It’s a very different vibe - lots of colors and all handwriting (no furigana). If anyone has read both formats, I’d be curious to hear your impressions / if there’s any relevant differences (I don’t mind tagged spoilers). Looking at the preview, it’s a much nicer presentation than reading it on the website

Update: I started reading it. While the plot seems to be identical so far, the manga adaptation really fills a lot out, but also leaves out and/or re-orders some things out (or might be reordering them)… otoh, I appreciate seeing some of the humor in the original 4-koma format. This version is a lot harder to read, and probably good practice for someone who knows their kanji, and wants to get better at reading the more handwriting/cursive style text. The rougher and sparser art style also requires much more attention to detail to follow what’s going on

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Finished 星へ行く船シリーズ3カレンダー・ガール | L30 - got a bit bored towards the end, but still a decently likeable series (that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend).

Starting 後宮の烏 2 | L35 - so far so good. Hopefully I absorbed some of the vocabulary from the last one…

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Finished 堀さんと宮村くん 2 | L26. Really enjoying it (with the usual reservations), though the handwriting is inscrutable at times!

Started ソードアート・オンライン ユナイタル・リング (1)) | L24?? manga, since I came across it in 少年エース | L25 magazine, and really enjoying it! It’s the latest (and my favorite) SAO arc. It doesn’t have an anime adaptation yet, so it’s nice to see it illustrated! If you’re interested in reading the LNs, it’s a good stepping stone, since you can pick up a lot of the in-game/other world vocab.

Finished 恋より青く 2 | L20 - latest volume of a cute high school yuri. MCs are a bookworm, and a girl looking for something to do with her life.

ささやくように恋を唄う: 9 | L21 - my favorite yuri series. Love the way the arc concluded. Counting down the days till the anime as well!!

トモちゃんは女の子! 1 | L21 - I can’t get into the anime for some reason, but I’m enjoying it as a 4コマ

半熟女子: 1 | L25 - a rather quirky yuri that has both unrealistic and well-done elements (this review on MAL covers it pretty well (with some general spoilers)

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I finished TRPGプレイヤーが異世界で最強ビルドを目指す 9 上 ~ヘンダーソン氏の福音を~ | L40 which I planned to use for my “finish a series” bingo (as the last published volume of a series) but the next volume came out 10 days ago… So I just started reading it.

Overall, I think this volume is my favorite in the series.
The series itself is still enjoyable, in an uneven way. There are parts I really like and parts I really hate, rather than everything being uniformly bland. For instance, I like that the main character is actually enjoyable, rather than being an incel stand-in. On the other hand, the world building is really poor. It feels like the author read the wikipedia page of the HRE and slapped elves and vampires on top.
Despite his best effort, the author is also not very good at making believable female characters (e.g., one character getting her hand pierced through by a dulled blade and shrugging it off saying that getting your hymen broken is more painful; now, I never got my hand stabbed through, regardless of the quality of the blade, but I’m still going to call “doubt” on this one; at least, she does say that a close female friend, not in public) BUT they are still much better than whatever it is you get in your average 男性向け light novel.

I think the most frustrating is the way the illustrator depicts the girls/love interests:
The author: “Character is able to gender swap but looks kinda androgynous”
The illustrator: “BOOBIES GO BOIN’!”

The author:

The illustrator: “BOOBIES GO BOIN’! also she has somewhat round shoulders I guess”

The author: “Character is a hard drug addict, while there are remnants of her past beauty, she looks like a cadaver, just skin and bones”
The illustrator: “BOOBIES GO BOIN’! also she has a visible collarbone, that’s what ‘just skin and bones’ means right?”

And so on.
(I guess it just feels silly rather than annoying at this point)

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Hey, at least it kind of passes the Bechdel test!

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Hmm, kinda, but there’s still a man implicitly mentioned in this conversation.

It’s okay, though, the series still passes the test (although barely). The best pass is a spoiler, so I won’t give details, but it involves one character telling the other she should get a promotion. There’s another scene after a fight between two female warriors. Ah, and two female characters have a game of the in-world equivalent of chess and discuss it afterwards (although only one line is actually “spoken” outside of narration).
There may be more that I forgot about, but still, not great considering how much text I went through (about 4500 pages so far).

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Erm, what? :eyes: Maybe she did that with a dulled blade too? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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Just finished ブライト・プリズン 学園の美しき生け贄 | L32; pretty good. Not necessarily mind-blowing, but the author’s got a decent setup, at least, and I went ahead and purchased book #2 to read down the line. Here’s my review:

Spoilerish summary for the first, idk, let’s say first third of the book to be safe: kid becomes a 神子 in the secret sex cult he was raised in.

My two next focuses will be 神去なあなあ日常 | L33 (am about halfway through; put it on temporary hold since I was on vacation the past week) and FLESH & BLOOD 15 | L35 (somehow already about halfway through as well; put it to the side briefly to wrap up ブライト・プリズン).

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I binged the Manga CLAMP PREMIUM COLLECTION X 1 | L19 yesterday. I adored CLAMP manga when I was a teen (but have never read X!) and reading stuff from them now makes it a mixture out of nostalgia and still liking the core elements of CLAMP in terms of how they lay out their stories, what their characters are like, the art style, …

I then bought all of カードキャプターさくら クリアカード編 | L18 because bookwalker is running a sale on the full set currently.

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Speaking of CLAMP, I need to get back to ツバサ: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE | L25 one of these days. xxxHolic | L25 is also on my list (have read them both in English before).

I love their art style in general, but especially in Tsubasa :slight_smile:

Update: this got me to start again! Also I love their cover art so much :heart_eyes:

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Last night I read ten pages of 虐殺器官 | L37 , which is about as much of that book as I find I want to read in one go. Then I thought I’d read a bit more of 遠巷説百物語 | L42 and by the time I next looked at the clock it was nearly half past midnight…but I only had another five pages to the end of the first story in the book, so I finished it anyway :slight_smile:

It’s odd how one book is five levels harder than the other but I find it much easier in practice to get stuck into reading it.

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when a book hooks you, it hooks you good. it’s such a rare treat as an adult, I find. :face_holding_back_tears:

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I finished reading 地球とは何か 人類の未来を切り開く地球科学 (サイエンス・アイ新書) | L30?? this morning. It was mostly good, but the author seems to completely ignore renewable energy and nuclear power in the natural resources section, which I found pretty weird.

I liked the book, but I don’t really think I have the stamina for long non-fiction like it at this point. I really slowed down to reading a small section a day, until I got to the point this weekend where I decided I just wanted to be done with it.

Next up for me are some manga (I want to do a proper intensive read of 放浪息子 | L27 ), then some novels I picked up a while ago.

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