After 8 months I’m finally continuing 五等分の花嫁 | L23, and man, I didn’t realize how much I missed it. And I completely forgot how good it is. It’s just such a perfect balance between decently easy to read and really entertaining. And the digital version is flawless and in full color.
If any of you aren’t averse to harems and haven’t read this yet… highly recommended!
Oh, I just started this volume myself! Which means I can’t read those spoilers yet, but it makes sense this will be a slower volume. The events of the last book have so many repercussions that need to be addressed.
Yeah, I also complained about that cover when that book came out. It really feels like they expect everyone to already know the plot 
For what it’s worth, I’m highly averse to harems and even I enjoyed 五等分の花嫁.
Yes indeed! I also noticed that you finished the previous volume the day after I did. It’s cool having someone else right around where you are. How quickly I read the remaining volumes depends on a lot of factors though.
With that self-description I have no idea what got you to read it, but I’m glad you did and liked it 
Well, I read the manga after watching the first season of the anime, but I have no idea what possessed me to watch the anime in the first place.
Well, that explains why you read the manga… I guess! 
Strangely enough looking at my anime list it seems I dropped the anime really early on (no idea why, it’s been what, five years?) and now I’m enjoying the heck out of the manga. Maybe I should try to watch it again after I’m done reading.
I read the manga instead of watching the whole anime when it was clear the anime wouldn’t adapt the whole manga. So I only watched the first season.
The anime adaptation is mostly excellent!! Tho season 2 cuts a good amount unfortunately. I watched it before the manga, and got really into it! (I’m in the middle of playing the 2nd VN rn)
I’m also not usually into harems, but really love it - in part b/c the story is as much about the sisters’ family dynamic & relationships with each other, and how they they come to terms with the ways they’re changing, as it is about the romance. Also has some of my favorite voice actors, including Matsuoka-sensei as the lead (which is I think why I checked it out in the first place)
I’ve started 四つ子ぐらし 1 ひみつの姉妹生活、スタート! | L23 which I’m quite enjoying but I’m wondering if anybody had any children’s/low-level novel recs that are a bit lower on the ‘replacing perfectly good kanji with kana and thus confusing me’ scale. So far また夢 of all things has probably been the least prone to this, though 不思議駄菓子屋 was doing okay (weirdly it sort of varied by story). I think 夜カフェ was also okay with it from memory.
I suppose it’s training some parts of my brain but boy does it mess with flow
/edit will probably give Kiki’s another go after this as well, not sure whether with the club or just at my own pace
I haven’t read it myself yet, but bookmarked 泣き虫スマッシュ! がけっぷちのバドミントンペア、はじまる!? | L22 because one review specifically mentions: “Most words I expected to see in kanji are indeed written as such, plus furigana, in this book.”
Here are some children’s books and stories I read and can recommend that I think are lower on the kanji-to-kana confusion scale:
Yeah, it’s been cool to watch your progress go by in the activity log too. I’m not sure how long it’ll take me to read the rest either. As I mentioned, I only have one more volume on hand after this one, and I might not be able to get the next ones for another month or so.
IDOL×IDOL STORY! | L24 (3/4). Well done, but at the same time I really had to adjust my expectations. From vol 2 onwards, it’s more focused on the huge ensemble case than the main couple. Hoping that changes in vol 4
ツバサ -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- 26 | L26 (of 28) - ready to be done w/ it at this point I finally finished it was a long journey, but finishes up well enough. Some of it’s gotten easier for me, but the abstract stuff is still hard. I’m vaguely interested to read some of their less abstract series like CCS or ちょびっツ 1 | L25 or https://learnnatively.com/series/a9d115c95b/. Otoh, I’m definitely not going near ×××HOLiC | L26 anytime soon (tho it’s much less convoluted plot-wise than Tsubasa, I need a break from Yuuko).
声優ラジオのウラオモテ 1 | L28 has been okay. Almost halfway, and so far there’s nothing that wasn’t in the anime. So it’s not that exciting for me, but good vocab acquisition. The audiobook is good, though I don’t recommend purchasing it b/c dwango’s business model and UX design are terrible.
I remember seeing this pop up in my recommendations, when I was first getting around to reading, and the story seems maybe interesting in the long term. Not sure if I’m into it yet, but I’ll at least give the whole volume a try.
Ecchi OL yuri that seems decent/maybe tasteful, and like it won’t be so hard to read
Next up 真月譚 月姫 3 | L27 (when I finish Tsubasa)
I feel like ふしぎ古書店1 福の神はじめました | L23 was pretty good about having kanji, but it’s been a while since I was reading it last.
最弱テイマーはゴミ拾いの旅を始めました。 | L23 is a light novel, so has the kanji you would expect and it has a furigana version so you don’t have the opposite problem. Full disclosure I dnf that within the first few chapters, but I think I may have enjoyed it more if I read it when it was closer to my reading level…
Probably reading 俺を好きなのはお前だけかよ | L28?? next month. I remember the anime being pretty funny (And I need something hilarious after finishing oreimo 
)
It’s been a hot minute since I posted an update, but I finished two books yesterday:
献灯使 | L39 and スレイヤーズ 1 | L36
献灯使 took a while for me to get into the story. I have no idea why it was in my wishlist either. But my spouse just brought the book home saying they were curious about the 解読 since it was from ロバート キャンベル. I have to admit, I didn’t recognize the name and even looking him up I was only thinking “oh, that guy from TV”. Still, since the book was here AND on my TBR, I just went for it.
On the one hand, I really enjoyed the writing. On the other hand, both the main story and the other short stories (except for the “play” at the end) end brutally as soon as something happens. Like… what? What happens next?
I’m not even sure I fully understood the end of the titular story. (Spoiling the end; read at your own risks) 無名 and I-forgot-her-name-already are lying down on the sand next to each other, things are going smoothly, then he suddenly changes sex (a phenomenon previously established in the story; due to “contamination” which is radioactivity based on context, the human species has changed a lot and people will change sex once or twice during their lifetime), thinks “fuuuuuuuuuu… please tell me she changed sex as well please please please”, looks at her (and is unable to determine if that’s the case), she misinterprets his action and leans in (for a kiss?), then he passes out. The end. What about… everything that was supposed to happen after (major spoiler) being chosen as a 献灯使? What happens to them? Also, (major spoiler)why did he even pass out? Is it serious? He has health issues; did he die?? I was hoping the 解読 at the end would give me some answers, but it did not and focused instead on the background of the story (and I really don’t care).
Still, I’m going to say that this story (and the next one; especially the next one in fact) are both better SF AND better Yuri than アステリズムに花束を 百合SFアンソロジー | L30??.
Speaking of that, I really enjoyed the second story, but, again, it ends right in the middle of everything. The setup was really interesting, I also liked that the spicy lesbian scenes were described through wordplays involving kanji characters and messing up their stroke orders. Then drama starts! What will happen next? Well, The End is going to happen next, that’s what.
Technically, that was also the case with the third and fourth stories, but I didn’t care about what would happen next, so whatever. I also didn’t get the point of the “play” (put in quotation marks, because I don’t think you could actually get actors to do it) at the end.
I also read スレイヤーズ 1 | L36 on the side over the past week or so, mostly because I’ve seen the series mentioned here and I randomly saw it on the shelf at my local library. It was meh, I guess. I remember someone mentioning that it felt like it felt like it was aimed to be a one-shot, and I also got that impression. It alternates between info dumps and plot “twists”/treasons/aha I was the bad guy all along types of moments, which was kinda weird. If you unpile everything, the real bad guy could have just reached his goal from the very beginning, before the main characters even got involved… so… then why did anything happen? Also, there were like 300 deus ex machina to move the plot along and a lot of inline onomatopoeia. Also, there’s a lot of katakana English in the story, despite the setup feeling like feudal Japan? Maybe “English” is the actual in-world language, but if so I missed when it was established.
I still gave the book 3* because it’s really easy to read, short, and still fun enough (even though I rolled my eyes a few times). I want to reserve 2* for books that made me at least partially angry or bored to death. Looking at my books in here, I feel like I’ve been pretty consistent about it so far.
Also been a while since I posted!
But I finished 三人屋 - it was a bit harder that I expected, half because there were a lot of characters in the first half, and I don’t think I paid quite enough attention to who was who.
I enjoyed the second half though, once I knew who everyone was 
I also read 気になってる人が男じゃなかった 1 - which was very fun, I will get the second one next time I order some books.
I don’t really read manga, so it was a bit of a new experience for me, I have to say, I don’t feel like I learnt so much language wise. I think books definitely work better for me in that respect.
I’m also halfway through 木曜日にはココアを , which I’ve read before a long time ago. It’s been a much easier read this time, so I am quite pleased that I’ve noticeable improved since last time I read it.
Finally, I’ll be starting アーモンド this weekend as part of the Korean in Translation book club.
Is this gonna be the new “better love story than twilight” 
What a disappointment. That’s been on my tbr/watch list for ages, but way above my level still. I suppose at least I know not to get too excited for it…
