Well, I finished volume 10 of Banana Fish and my interest is starting to wane. I’m going to read something else for now (and finish my BING(o) grid, finally) and maybe get back to it later.
If there’s any BL (even subtext), it is just too subtle for me. I guess you could make your own headcanon that the main characters actually have feeling for each other and just don’t realize it, but that’s not in the content (so far… but I’m already halfway through the whole thing and since the focus is on action/conspiracy, I don’t really see anything happening anytime soon, or even at all).
In terms of classification, I’m still baffled that it was published under a Shojo label, but I could see it being Josei, thanks to the large amount of good looking guys we get (also guys expressing their feelings; that doesn’t feel very Seinen to me). I guess it was published there because that’s where the author usually published her stuff?
Got up to vol 20 of 38, in らんま1/2 (series) | L23 and decided I need a break for now. I really loved it when it started, but at this point the volumes are very hit or miss. I have trouble rooting for Ranma & Akane most of the time (their relationship is super messed up), and really wish Ukyou was the fated pairing.
So I started reading 犬夜叉 1 | L23 since I’ve been loving the anime way more than I was expecting! I’m reading it digitally for now, but can’t wait till the physical volumes get here!! (The first 5 vols are free to read on Bookwalker till 2/29, btw). Oddly, I find Inuyasha way easier to understand language-wise.
Inuyasha was my youth and I still love it to this day. It does go on for longer than it should, but the entire thing is just so beautiful and characterful that I can’t complain. Nobody draws expressive characters like Takahashi does.
This week I have off of work (school holiday), so I’ve been getting a lot of reading done in both English and Japanese. I was a bit annoyed that I’ve had so many books I’ve been reading concurrently (it was up to eleven last weekend), so I’ve been trying to reduce that to one in each language at a time.
I wrapped up ことばと文化 岩波新書 | L35?? , which I had previously kinda read back in college. I think it was pretty interesting, and would recommend it to anyone into linguistics. It can be a bit long-winded and there are some tangents, but some of the tangents are pretty good (there’s like a whole chapter where the author talks about how the English shoot their dogs).
Today I got ahead of the book club and finished https://learnnatively.com/book/2c1e37ec2e/ . Spoilers: Overall I liked it. I was able to get the gimmick pretty early on, as soon as 南さんhad a reaction to the class observation. I think it’s a bit of a stretch that by apologizing she saved her parents from dying in an accident (I get that that’s explained at the end, but it still feels like too big of a consequence), and I feel like the book’s understanding of the causes of self-harm are a bit simplistic. Everything with アバズレさん was great, no complaints there. I’m a bit confused about the おばあちゃん version of her though. Was that her actual future self? Because おばあちゃん was happy with her life, so she didn’t have to change anything. But then in the actual future she ends up with 桐生くん, but he was just a friend to おばあちゃん. I didn’t like her ending up with 桐生くん, it felt too neat and tidy to me, I preferred that おばあちゃん had a life and family unconnected to her elementary life, like she was able to move on and make new relationships. I’ll still be joining in the discussions as we go along, but just didn’t want to drag the reading of the book out through June
The end is in sight for the junior novel 本好きの下剋上第一部１. Since I have some time off work, I’ll probably push forward and finish it this week. I don’t think I’ll immediately start the second book, because I have another novel on the go with the WK IBC and want to see how that is for time when I’m back working again.
For the WK IBC I’m reading セーラー服と機関銃 | L30 and started week 1 this week. So far this has been harder than 本好き, between the language being newish to me and not having furigana slowing me down (even though I’ve finally got my ttsu + yomitan setup going compared to bookwalker’s “select, wait for popup, then yomitan”). I’m also going along with the current ABBC (https://learnnatively.com/book/866768e8d7/) and BBC (https://learnnatively.com/book/0f5d164515/) book clubs, but I’ve gotten to the point where these two take minimal time investment (15-25 minutes a week).
I’ve been occasionally dipping into manga, so the two I have in progress are 【マンガ】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 「本がないなら作ればいい! 」 4 | L25 (which I own a physical copy of) and 放浪息子 5 | L26 which I’m reading digitally.
And lastly, I’m currently attempting to play Persona 3 Reload in Japanese. I’ve just unlocked Tartarus.
Another person using Persona for immersion! I started playing P4 recently as my first game.I was surprised by how easy the vocab is, all lines being voiced is great too
Good luck with finishing that book : )
I started reading https://learnnatively.com/book/1b49320e57/ in addition to all the other books I have going since it is a library book and I need to return it before its due. I’ve read a lot of Murakami’s full length novels and a few short story collections during my reading career despite the fact that I’m actually pretty lukewarm on him (why do I keep reading his books 
), but 一人称単数 came out around the time I got serious about reading in Japanese and I’ve always vaguely wanted to read it, so here we are. The first short story was a pretty typical “basic male protagonist sleeps with mysterious girl once + vibes” Murakami story and, while it had some nice nuggets here and there, it felt pretty stale and derivative of a lot of his other work. I also didn’t like 女のいない男たち at all… I just don’t think his short stories are that great? Maybe if you haven’t read any of his other work it would feel less repetitive and be a nice intro into his world. 
This post somehow turned into me panning 一人称単数 and Murakami short stories 
but I shall keep reading onwards anyways since it’s easy enough and the stories are short.
Finished はじまりの町がはじまらない | L32 - It wasn’t great, unfortunately.
Moving on to 白銀のソードブレイカー ―聖剣破壊の少女― | L31 - I’m a big fan of the author - his writing style is always so easy to follow and he gets straight to the point. Hoping to regain a bit of momentum from this because just haven’t felt very enthusiastic about reading lately.
Aw man. The premise sounded fun.
But instead, it’s gone for this wibbly-wobbly approach where it’s largely about solving the problems, but they’re mostly nonsensical problems, with nonsensical solutions. I’m not someone who tries to nitpick books on their plotholes - but these aren’t just things you can sail over.
Could you give me one or two small spoilers about that? What kind of stuff would I have to put with if I’d read this? Dash my hopes and help me remove it from my wish list!
I don’t think “small” spoilers are possible because these things are the solutions to major story arcs - though this first one is pretty well telegraphed:
So various other kingdoms etc. declare war on the starter town for <reasons, that IMO also don’t make much sense>. The people in the starter town are having lag issues due to the increase of adventurers, and work out that it’s the density of people that is the issue, and are able to replicate it by having ~50 people stand really close to each other. So they exploit this on the battlefield to win over an army of 2000 enemies. That’s cool and all, but I can’t see how you can get 2000 soldiers together from a much larger town without also having encountered the same lag issues previously - or constantly, while on the march/camping. Plus in the scenes from the enemy general’s point of view there’s no indication that they’ve had all the problems that the starter town has had in general - having people clip through terrain, and more importantly: Having the towns be smaller and have less people than they thought they should. Why are there even 2000 soldiers in this army (which is not the main army - there’s a much larger one) in the first place? It just doesn’t make sense from the point of view of this being a game world.
That’s where it started losing me on the setting’s integrity. Honestly, wasn’t reading that closely so maybe some of that stuff is dealt with, but it keeps adding more stuff that’s convenient to the story but doesn’t scan (stop reading here if you still want to read the book). Immediately after that they’re besieged, and the solution is that the starter town soldiers use the holes in the terrain to sneak into enemy cities and attack them - but the enemy must know the holes are there, because they’re already not following the simplistic NPC programming that they had by declaring war in the first place, so they would have found them the same way the starter town found them. Also, there are multiple other countries involved here and everything falling apart because a small force got behind enemy lines seems ridiculous to me. Then somehow the mayor of the starter town ends up emperor - it almost feels like the author thinks they’re writing a bit of a wacky story, but it takes itself way too seriously for that to work
And, near end-of-the-story spoilers:
Being able to hack the bots just-like-that to get access to the outside world is silly, but then using that access to create a video advertisement … when they shouldn’t even know what a video is, or just basic fundamental computing concepts (how the fuck are they even recording it?). This is kinda-not-really implicitly dealt with a bit later, but that explanation raises a whole bunch of other questions that would invalidate most of the story too because then they should have just understood their situation clearly from the get-go
Glad I could get that off my chest. I’ve definitely read worse books, and the reviews in Japanese seem very positive so maybe it’s just me - but eh. If you’re going to write a book about people solving problems, the internal logic of the story that leads to solving those problems needs to be a lot better than this, IMO.
Yeah, that doesn’t sound great, and with Japanese light novels at L28 being a multi-month effort for me, I don’t need less-than-ideal ones at even higher levels in my wish list. This sounds like something I might enjoy as an English manga where I can read it in hours instead of weeks…
Thanks!
I’m almost done with 鹿の王 5 (which is my next bingo book), and I’m expecting to finish it this month. I’m also reading along in the Mystery book club and the Children’s book club, but I dropped Genocidal Organ (WK Advanced Club) after a few pages as it didn’t vibe with me at all right now.
Going forward, I’m not sure what I should read next, maybe you have some suggestions? You can pick three if you like:
- 子熊のクーク (Bingo: random pick; try to read in one day)
- Erich Kästner’s 飛ぶ教室 - Das fliegende Klassenzimmer (Bingo: longest TBR)
- a book by 小川洋子 (not sure which one yet)
- 女坂 (it’s old and on paper and I am a bit afraid of it but want to read it)
- 献灯使 (Bingo: higher level than all books I read before)
- まほろ駅前多田便利軒 (want to know what the cigarettes mean)
- 後鳥羽伝説殺人事件 (first volume of a long private detective series, currently heavily discounted on BW)
- Just finish one of your started books already!
Also, would somebody be interested in reading one of those together? Will start next week.
Haha, I also read the first 20 pages and decided it wasn’t for me (and wondered why I’d wanted to read it in the first place…). I didn’t comment in the club but just quietly faded away 
I might be interested in 小川洋子 or まほろ駅前多田便利軒 . Let’s see what you decide.
I can definitely see why people might bounce off it - I voted for it partly because it had been in my TBR pile for a long time and I figured without a book club it might stay there forever. I’m hoping it settles down to something with some more SF elements to it soon.
I suspect knowing it had SF elements is why I bought it too, but there isn’t enough initially to keep me interested (and the writing style did nothing for me)
Finished モブサイコ100 1, AKA: My first furigana-less manga! Feeling proud of myself for knocking it back in an hour or so : )
I def recommend it as a warm-up for reading text without furigana for those who feel daunted by dipping their toes into furigana-less manga
Thanks to y’all who responded in my poll! Also thanks for being so strict to me and for reminding me of the pile of half-read books I have on my shelf 
I promise that going forward I will finish at least one of my started books for each new book I read. But although it only got to second place in the poll, I decided to start with 後鳥羽伝説殺人事件 first, simply because I want to find out whether I like the author’s style and the 浅見光彦 series, and if I like it, I will probably buy some more of his books (there is a huge discount until the end of the month at Bookwalker). But after that I’ll tend to my started books pile 
It looks like I miiiiight manage to finish 鹿の王 tonight (or tomorrow latest) and so I will start with 後鳥羽伝説殺人事件 from tomorrow.
I haven’t read that one but I have read a handful of the others in the 浅見光彦 series. They’re not great literature but they’re good detective crossed with travelogue stories. (Natively doesn’t categorise them as a series, I guess because Amazon doesn’t.)
A Japanese friend once recommended 赤い雲伝説殺人事件 to me, and when I learned that it’s part of a series, my completionist mind kicked in 
Although I don’t really expect character development in that series, I figured that maybe the general scene will be set in greatest detail in the first volume, that’s why I decided to start from there.
That perfectly matches my hopes, thanks for the reassurance! (It’s just that I’m a bit sensitive to uninspired writing styles, therefore my plan to test the waters with this one.)
I pointed this out to Natively but they said they cannot do anything without an importable Amazon series page, so 
but now that I was let in to the secret of the private comments, I can keep track of the volume numbers in there 
