Ahhh that was such a good match. And the feels at the end of the chapter too…! Unsurprisingly, I’ve written most of a fic already. I also reread ch 3-2 because I wanted to see what exactly Yuni said about Wakatsuki’s offer that led to his fight with Chika before the match since I only remembered the broad strokes of it, and it turns out I used another line almost directly (or as much as a translation can be, at any rate) from another part of 3-2 even though I didn’t even remember that bit lmao
Anyway, I started ch 4 too, and I’ve got less than 90 pages left now, so hopefully it won’t be too much longer until I can move on to next4years! And hopefully there won’t be any more surprises that’ll punch me in the gut…
I had kind of thought that ch 4 would be the rest of the tournament and Chika would watch Keisei win and decide then that he would transfer there after all, but it turns out they head back that same night. I’m looking forward then to seeing how he does decide. I hope he and Yuni get to continue their convo from 3-2—Chika calmer and actually able to listen now, and to understand that chasing him away is the absolute last thing Yuni wants to do but he’d still support him leaving since he knows Keisei would be a better environment for him and his talent than Seiin. He compares Chika to a shark, because if a shark stops swimming, they die. Much as he’d like to always stay by Chika’s side and play volleyball together with him, he doesn’t want him to stagnate and grow restless and malcontent because he’s no longer aiming upward because Seiin’s holding him back.
Augh, my heart though. This one might be a doozy after all. Unless it’s saved for the epilogue.
Although I am wondering why the hell Hokao thinks Yuni, probably the most emotional person on the team, crying after they lost was surprising. That’s literally the least surprising thing that happened that match. Boy wears his heart on his sleeve, and his ADHD ass tends to feel things more strongly than other people. Plus, like, how vehemently he expressed his desire not to let it end here and to win during their last timeout? Like, of course he’s gonna cry, and of course he’s gonna cry in front of everyone. It’d be more surprising if he didn’t. Utterly baffled.
I finished it yesterday and I really liked it! It seems to me like I enjoy her male characters more, strangely. Her women are so over the top I have a hard time relating to them . So the titular story was the one that impressed me the least, and felt more like the stories from 嫌いなら呼ぶなよ - interesting premise but not entirely satisfying to me. トイレの懺悔室 was brilliant, and true horror. 人生ゲーム was also satisfyingly creepy and very clever - I expected it to develop differently, but instead there was something mellow about it in the end. Good story. As for the tiny introductory おとな, I wonder if it’s a true memory since she uses her name (something she’s done before). Also nicely creepy.
And now I’m torn. I really really enjoyed this book, but have mixed feelings about 嫌いなら呼ぶなよ. Should I keep reading 綿矢りさ?
By the way, finishing a book and not being able to fill a bingo box takes away from the feeling of accomplishment
edit: Actually, it could fit “bad cover”. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s so misleading. But probably not. Combined with the title, it works very well now that I think about it.
I would say you probably wouldn’t like other books from 綿矢りさ. She is famous for over the top and cringe female characters who lack common sense. I haven’t read all of her books, though, so there could very well be more ones like 憤死 lurking about in her bibliography. If I ever read one, I’ll let you know! I agree by the way that トレイの懺悔室 and 人生のゲーム were the best!!
Read 2.43 ch 4-3 today. With everything that happened (and/or the inadvertent extended break I’d taken from it), I’d forgotten it was still Chika’s birthday. This subchapter was really sweet, and also it rendered the latest fic I wrote redundant—as I knew would happen when I wrote it, but I still needed to write it anyway. And though I had Chika use 誓う (well, in my head, since I wrote it in English), Yuni’s the one who used it in canon! (Chika’s full name is 灰島公誓) Different things they were promising, sure, but still.
I’ve got ~50 pages left, but even though I know I’ve got 4 volumes’ worth more after this (2 tankoubon, but I’ve been reading the bunko, so 4 converted), I’m still getting that feeling of not wanting it to end. It’s not!!
Currently at ~75% (10th section). I reached a part with plot last Saturday, which was completely unexpected and propelled me forward. However, I stopped dead in my tracks around the 2/3rd of the book and progress has been a slog since then. I’m starting to find the long non-sensical rants a tad less funny at this point (although they are still funny).
I read a couple of manga on Sunday instead (from 神様はじめました (series) | L28) and read this week’s content for the 後宮の烏 book club yesterday, but I’m still going through a few pages of 吾輩 every day. ~150 pages left, so I guess I’ll be done this week, but it will really depend on the content of those last two sections (and my motivation).
I finished reading FLESH & BLOOD 14 | L35 yesterday; honestly I’m still going back and forth on my rating. Overall the book was good, but there were individual story-telling decisions within it I’m disappointed happened, and I’m trying to decide if it’s enough for me to bump my rating down to 3 stars. :S
Edit: I’m just going to bump this down. My grievances are many.
I don’t know if I can count it for book bingo; I’ll have to look at my squares and see if anything fits…
I don’t think we can see reading stats for individual books anywhere, right? I was interested in comparing my rate of pages read/day with this volume compared to other F&B volumes, but afaik I’d have to do that manually. I essentially finished #14 over a three day period (which isn’t quite reflected in the start/finish dates, since I read a handful of pages on day 1, skipped reading the next day, then read the remaining 95% over three days), so it’s a contender for “fastest volume of F&B read”, but I don’t know for sure.
I was supposed to be reading alongside @pyororon, but greed got the better of me and I wrapped it up early, so I’m going to wait for a bit before starting volume 15. In the meantime, I’ve picked up flipping through The Routledge Course in Japanese Translation | L30 since I’m interested in working on my own translation skills. I need to figure out what I want to do with Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication: A Self-Study Course and Reference | L0; I basically just never have enough free time to actually work through the book like I intended. I suppose I could flip through the rest and “finish” reading it, then leave a review and shelve it until I’ve got more time…
I actually read ahead of the club with 美しい彼 | L30 which I’m a bit proud of; it’s not super far ahead, just a week or two, but I felt like my reading stamina was holding out pretty well at the time. One bad thing I’ve noticed with leaving my novel-reading to mostly bookclubs is that I get really used to reading (comparatively) very short chunks weekly, and it feels limiting to my own staying power.
Read ch 4-4 and 4-5 as well as the first section of the epilogue (no subchapters for this one; instead, everything’s separated by asterisks). I’ll probably be finishing it tomorrow. It’s so good.
Losing my mind a lil
Oh my god. This is officially the series where characters leap down the stairs while racing to meet their boyfriends best friends.
In the first arc, we got Yuni leaping down the stairs racing to meet Chika (his former and future best friend)
In the second arc, we got Subaru leaping down the stairs chasing after Ochi (his future best friend)
Now in the third arc, we get Yumikake leaping down the stairs racing to meet Asano (his current best friend). And not only that, but Asano catches him in his arms. Kabei-sensei’s upped her game.
Now if we don’t get someone doing that in the fourth arc (I don’t even care if it’s a repeat, or if there’s no hugging involved), I think I’m gonna be disappointed.
It feels even more fitting now that I had Kouhei leap off the stairs chasing after Tomoki in the one fic I wrote for them. 2.43 really is just the series for that.
Oh yeah, I also read a little bit of Doubles⑤ today too! I’m looking forward to this volume. At 338 pages, I think it may also be the longest in this series.
I read a little more from 砂の女 today, but I was getting restless - my brain kept demanding the excitement of a new book. So I read the first paragraph of several books in my 積読 before happening on one I wanted to continue reading right there and then: 掏摸(スリ) | L31 (learnnatively.com). Good stuff, I always enjoy thief and pickpocket stories for some reason. Strange thing is, I’m realizing I’ve read it already. A long, long time ago, and definitely in translation, although I can’t find any trace of it. It’s not in my kindle library, that’s for sure. Did I ever have a physical copy that I gave away? Did I ever borrow it on kindle unlimited or from the library? I have zero recollection, but as I read I remember every scene like deja vu. Happily I don’t remember anything of what happens next, or even if I liked it or not. Nothing. I just know that what I’m reading right now already exists in my memory. Such a weird feeling.
Well I didn’t quite finish this volume of 2.43 before my CDJapan order got here with 13 more books as planned, but I still finished it the same day, so that still counts for something, right? But aaaaa it was so good. There were some bits of the epilogue that were somewhat bittersweet, but mostly it was just sweet, and I am going to go melt into a puddle now and sob over how far Chika’s come. I don’t know who was fooling, thinking I could read anything else right after this.
(I feel like there was a different one I wanted, but I don’t save very many reaction images and I couldn’t find it, so we’re going with this one)
I learned today another word that has a ま行 ⇔ ば行 variant. I knew 寂しい (さびしい / さみしい) and 寒い (さむい / さぶい), and now there’s 煙る (けむる / けぶる), though Shirabe has the けぶる reading marked as obsolete. (It doesn’t have けぶたい marked as obsolete, but my IME still doesn’t like it, and it doesn’t like さぶい either and it’s also not marked as obsolete.)
Been reading through ボクガール (series) | L23 and started ぜんぶきみの性 1 | L22 . They’re both TSF ラブコメ, and while I have some criticisms and annoyances with ボクガール, I’ve been overall enjoying it. ぜんぶきみの性 I’m on the fence about. It seems like it’s trying to be serious while funny and ridiculous at the same time, and it just hasn’t quite hit it for me yet… But it has potential, and I’ll give it at least one more volume to see, once I’m done with ボクガール
In pursuit of a bingo square I am reading 迷い猫オーバーラン! 拾ってなんていってないんだからね!! | L30?? because it has been in my TBR pile the longest. There’s a reason it has been in the pile for two decades, which is that it’s a really bad book I originally picked it up almost at random in a book off back when I was not good enough at reading to be able to quickly judge whether a book was any good. It’s a ラブコメ LN whose characters are all just collections of tropes – the protagonist is the usual school kid with no particular distinguishing features, there’s the tsundere childhood friend with a tendency to cartoonish violence, the daughter of a rich family who looks like a loli, etc etc. Plus there’s a strong streak of juvenile male humour in there – protagonist gets his face squashed into somebody’s breasts / accidentally walks in on a naked girl / catches sight of somebody’s panties, etc. So I read 60 pages of it back in the day and got fed up and put it back in the pile. Picking it up again this week, I find it’s still pretty terrible, but I read faster these days and it’s only 250 pages. I’m about a third of the way through it now.
I ended up dropping ファーストラヴ | L30?? this week since I just was not getting absorbed into the story for whatever reason. It was a library book, so dropping it was a no brainer. I always feel a bit of guilt dropping a book I’ve actually paid for and will try to hang on longer, but free ones don’t come with such problems.
I also finished the first section of 堕落論 | L44??, 日本文化私観. This entire book is a collection of philosophical criticism and essays and it both readable and difficult at the same time for me, so it’s right in that sweet spot of language growth. I actually read through the entire section first and didn’t catch everything, or found myself rereading sentences and unable to parse them even with a dictionary. So, I ended up rereading them together with audio accompaniment (bless all the voice actors of the world who have free readings of classics on YouTube), and then listening to the audio accompaniment alone, and that really helped. There are also a few videos analyzing that particular section on YouTube, which helped me understand even further what 坂口安吾 was getting at. I’ll keep chewing on this one, slowly making my way through with audio and analysis videos or essays.
I wrote so much about how I’m reading it that I didn’t write what 日本文化私観 was about, though! It basically asks what Japanese culture is, what tradition is, how important it is as well as what beauty is and what is artificial or not. All of that is explored through a variety of different topics such as architecture, traditional clothing, sumo, maiko, performing groups, buddhist temple construction, temple gardens, castles, and a dry ice factory and prison. To really boil it down to a sentence or so, 安吾 argues that Japan isn’t losing anything through westernization, because it is still Japan and and the people are still Japanese, so they can’t lose themselves and utility and convenience will always trump aesthetics and become the core of people’s daily lives (and therefore culture) – or something like that lol It’s a lot of “that’s just uh, like, your opinion man”, but also interesting to ponder (and I wonder if he and 谷崎潤一郎 ever threw down, because it felt like the anti- 陰翳礼讃 in parts as I wrote in my last rambly update).
So, yesterday, I finally finished 吾輩は猫である | L48 and I have to say that overall I liked it a lot, but the end really took me by surprise.
The plot is just brutally wrapped up, the main characters go on some random rants (not really surprising at this point, to be fair), one of which saying that art is going to die because of individualism: whatever one person likes and think is art will just be boring garbage to others because everyone is too different. Then the titular cat just dies, while saying why even struggle, it feels so much better to just let go. The end.
I can’t help but wonder, is that related to something that happened in real life? I know that the content was actually serialized, did it get bad reviews leading the author to just give up?
Moving the following here since it’s more relevant:
That would have been a great end too! And he could have still just ended the story here.
Anyway, as a way to change my mind, I started reading TRPGプレイヤーが異世界で最強ビルドを目指す 1 ~ヘンダーソン氏の福音を~ | L45?? for the silly reason that I absolutely do not believe that it is level 45. After reaching the end of the free preview, I just took the plunge and read one third of the book.
There’s some very suspicious loli content in it, such as an 11 years old girl topless in the color illustrations at the beginning. On the one hand, she has been a very fun character so far and sus content has been very few so far. On the other hand, sus content hasn’t been zero so far, which is… not great.
Now, the writing is pretty good otherwise for a light novel and it’s a stonk; line goes up type of story, which I do enjoy in general. The book is on thin ice so far, but I’m still reading.
I haven’t read that one specifically, but I thought that 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 | L43 (by the same author, and similar cover art style, for what it’s worth) was overgraded. My assumption is that the non-sensical nature of the content bumps the difficulty up.
However, there’s nothing weird or non-sensical with the LN I am reading. The prologue is written in a somewhat flowery language, but that stops immediately after, going done to 31~33, I would say. Even the flowery part is level 38 at the highest.
I haven’t read 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 | L43, but I can assure you that 四畳半神話大系 | L43 was not overgraded. It used expansive vocabulary and never went simple when a complex way of expression would do. This is not true for all the author’s books however. For example きつねのはなし | L32 (learnnatively.com) was quite straightforward, and while I think 32 may be a tiny bit lower than it should, it wouldn’t be higher than 33-34 at the most (going by gut feeling, I have no idea what objectively differentiates these levels). On 夜は短し歩けよ乙女, I remember someone reading it and thinking it was a breeze, then giving up at the last chapter because it suddenly got very difficult.
I remember that it was extra nonsensical, but the text didn’t particularly change in terms of difficulty. I had to blink twice and re-read some sentences to make sure I got it right, but I don’t know if that counts as “difficult” (well, not more difficult than the rest, I should say).
I’m working through オールドファッションカップケーキ at a snail’s pace. It’s far, far above my comprehension level when it comes to kanji. It’s nice reading something too hard for me though. It reminds me of the last time I read a difficult manga and felt completely overwhelmed. Recently, I read that manga’s sequel and felt surprised it was so simple. Now reading this new manga, I’m just excited to know I’ll be able to read this one easily too one day.
. So the titular story was the one that impressed me the least, and felt more like the stories from 
I agree by the way that トレイの懺悔室 and 人生のゲーム were the best!!
I originally picked it up almost at random in a book off back when I was not good enough at reading to be able to quickly judge whether a book was any good. It’s a ラブコメ LN whose characters are all just collections of tropes – the protagonist is the usual school kid with no particular distinguishing features, there’s the tsundere childhood friend with a tendency to cartoonish violence, the daughter of a rich family who looks like a loli, etc etc. Plus there’s a strong streak of juvenile male humour in there – protagonist gets his face squashed into somebody’s breasts / accidentally walks in on a naked girl / catches sight of somebody’s panties, etc. So I read 60 pages of it back in the day and got fed up and put it back in the pile. Picking it up again this week, I find it’s still pretty terrible, but I read faster these days and it’s only 250 pages. I’m about a third of the way through it now.
It’s a lot of “that’s just uh, like, your opinion man”, but also interesting to ponder (and I wonder if he and 谷崎潤一郎 ever threw down, because it felt like the anti- 陰翳礼讃 in parts as I wrote in my last rambly update).
