You could satisfy your desire to check lists and give Natively a second book club if you did a manga reading club.
Also I’m in the midst of my Aozora short story (…and essay) Advent adventure! Link for those interested.
It’s a total grab bag so I make no promises that any given day will be a good read, but they’re all “under 30 minutes” and the bulk are <10 pages so quite doable day to day. The only thing I conscientiously did when making the list was leave out two authors I dislike and if I previewed the text and it looked like poetry I also left it out. I might still have to adjust some titles as I didn’t get a chance to preview everything, but hopefully it goes well!
The possible downside to this is that now I would have tons of interesting manga suggested by people now on my to-read list, pushing the stuff already on there further back.
A manga club’s an easy one, though; I’m surprised Natively doesn’t have one yet.
Started volume 3 of New Game today. I’m really enjoying it so far. A surprising amount actually considering I liked (but didn’t love) the anime. It’s really easy too, but with the bonus of being good practice for Kansai dialect since one of the characters has a relatively heavy accent (more than just the や and へん stuff that is really prevalent in media).
50% points back sale for many Manga Time Kirara series on Amazon right now. As usual, other sites probably have the same sale. Strangely, some series only have middle volumes on sale instead of the first volume. Here are the ones I recommend with the first volume on sale.
ぼっち・ざ・ろっく！ (actually 50% off instead of points back)
Volumes 4 and 5 of New Game were the only volumes on sale for that series, but that’s pretty convenient since those are the ones I’m up to next! Some other series on my wish list are on sale too, but I haven’t decided whether to get them.
It took me awhile to warm up to it, but I’m starting to enjoy 異世界の名探偵. The moral of this story is that while I’m not much into young adult fiction tropes, I’m a sucker for detective novel tropes.
Slightly better than the moral of the short story I read today, which might have been that otters don’t feel remorse.
I can definitely see a direct EPUB import and Vocab export tool.
I’m still updating the Anki Dojo addon that can convert passages to Anki cards directly (with audio, definition etc.).
Right now you can import text files, images, Kindle db, and csv (for Immersion Reader primarily), but I could definitely see a feature to import an entire EPUB book or select which chapters to import.
I finally finished 忘れえぬ魔女の物語, and ugh how disappointing. You know I was bored reading this book because I finished 14 volumes of manga between finishing the previous book I read and this one. When I’m enjoying the books I’m reading, I often only finish 1-3 volumes of manga in between. Here’s my review for those curious: seanblue's review of 忘れえぬ魔女の物語 1 | Natively.
Now I need something I know I’ll like, so back to 本好き I go!
Lightnovel has nothing to do with whether a book is thick or not. It’s more about the type of story contained, the target audience and whether or not there are pictures. In the west, they would generally fall under the classification of “young adult”, probably. I don’t think 小説 ever come in series of 20+ volumes.
But 本好き is great… I can also recommend the audiobook which is fantastic.
it’s included in audible’s 聞き放題, which is not expensive, imo. I currently can get 3 months for 99 Yen each or something. And the first month should be free.
It wont’ accept any of my cards in audible. I used to be able to get away with a JCB card, but my bank stopped issuing them. But they still allow me to buy them despite being “region locked”. Just not the subscription which is annoying.
As for the kindle, I get away by putting a Japanese address and a burner phone number I used to have, but the cards work just fine.
Amazon region locking really is the worst, I struggled with it briefly before realizing the 本好き audiobooks were available in the US and I could get everything I wanted from Kindle off of Bookwalker much more easily (even if their interface is a bit rough). I did set up an Amazon JP account at one point though, I think I found a guide for changing your country of residence and payment method without a real Japanese address or card, but unfortunately I can’t seem to find it now.
As a fun side note, you can have two amazon accounts in different regions with the same email but different passwords, and when you log into the app the password you use determines which account and region it connects to…
In the west, they would generally fall under the classification of “young adult”, probably. I don’t think 小説 ever come in series of 20+ volumes. 
