The difference is that there are no illustrations inside.
Ah, yes, that first scene where she is at risk of drowning in 20cm of water can be hard to understand, since there are parts that are unexpected or seem non-sensical. That’s the kind of text that makes you realize how much we rely on context to understand text.
I picked up the whole とらドラ! (1) | L32 series off ebay on a whim after seeing it in a used lot for criminally cheap, and have been working through the first volume this past week and a bit. Having seen the show so many times over, I’m really loving being able to pick out how specific scenes and dialogue have been changed and cut. It’s all quite minor, but it really is quite impressive how clean the adaption was in terms of writing. Managing to fit the whole first volume into two or so episodes and still hitting nearly ever beat is quite a feat.
Spoilers for around 50% through volume one, and the crux of ep. 2 of the anime:
One of the more interesting changes to me is the scene where Taiga breaks down after failing to give her cookies to Kitamura, in particular just how emotionally heavy it is in the LN. The book makes it a lot more clear just how low her self-image is and how broken she feels, where as the show stops short of tears and jumps ahead in the dialogue a bit. This line especially hit home:
いつもの攻撃色はなりをひそめ、代わりにその目に溢れているのは──おそらくは自己嫌悪の奔流、なのだろう。
I also finished reading くまクマ熊ベア―2 a few days ago but besides it being incredibly easy to read, I enjoyed very little of it. There’s just so much of nothing going on, and the way the one really big beat around halfway through concludes made me hate the MC. Isekai as a genre really cannot help itself to a little bit of child labour, can it
I only know of one other example (本好き), but both cases left a sour taste in my mouth.
It is quite weird that nearly the exact same scenario has played out more than once, baring only the product that is being made. Thankfully everything else about 本好き is really good, so I can manage to look past it myself; kuma bear, not so much. Especially when yuna basically decides on behalf of the orphanage to refuse the funding they should have been getting? 
But there are - just not in the first few pages
Should I expect to run into that sorta thing a lot in this volume?
My perpetual frustration with Japanese
What kills me is that she is insanely rich on her own (and just keep getting richer, because of things like that). She could single-handedly turn that place into a school or something. That sounds like a better type of education to give to those kids (and coming from the modern world, she should know it, even if she didn’t like school herself). But no, it’s just bullsh*t capitalist grindset.
Wait, what?? I don’t remember any illustration in this series.
Could you give me a page number/percentage?
Not a lot, but it happens at least twice more in this volume, as far as I can remember. Once toward the end of chapter 2 and once partway through chapter 3. Chapter 4 is fairly straightforward as far as I am concerned.
And you made me realize a crazy typo in my previous message, but whatever.
I don’t know how y’all even made it past 
x3 volume 1. It’s my first Japanese DNF 
Exactly. The whole section read like some wild bootstraps level justification for why the kids yearn for the coops. Saying “spend this money you would have spent on literal orphans on something more important like someone to check for fraud” is just wild. And here I thought LNs adapted from syosetsu were supposed to get editors…
I bought volumes 1-10 when they were heavily discounted. Plus, it’s so easy that I can just blast through one volume in a single day or less, so I just shrugged and powered through it. There were some plot stuff that were mildly interesting too. Years later, I bought volume 11, I think, because it was also discounted and 10 has a cliffhanger. Then, even later, I bought 12 (skipping 11.5) for the exact same reason. Volume 12 made the mistake of not having a cliffhanger, so that’s how I finally got rid of the curse.
Considering some of the books that I saw published in Japan, I feel like some editors just agree with that message 
Yeah that is another angle I wasn’t really thinking about. After all, isekai tropes do really just be like that across the board.
I know they’re easy, but wow is that fast. I managed to do about 20-25k characters per day without feeling like I was going overboard; if I were to read a whole volume of kuma bear it’d probably take 8-10 hours
I remember timing myself on one of those, and it took me 5 hours (and 5 to 7 hours in general). At the time, reading was my only hobby. Between commutes and free time, I would spend ~6h a day reading during the week, and close to 10h during the week-end.
EDIT: that reminds me that one of my challenges at the time was to read two in a single day… but I failed.
I’m spending a lot more time on the internet these days, so I don’t think I could achieve that speed anymore 
I’m closer to 2h read time per day at best.
Sigh, even though I’m in the middle of so many other books, I recently started 無敵の犬の夜 | L30?? on the bookwalker app on my phone. I feel like it’s ok because the other books I’m reading are all physical, audiobooks, or kindle books, but this is the only phone book! 
Does anyone else do this? Please justify my logic.
Anyways, 無敵の犬の夜 is fascinating! It’s about some trashy delinquent teenage boys in Kita-Kyushu, specifically about a middle school boy who adores this high school tough guy he meets who… ends up beefing with a rapper in Tokyo and high stakes 不良 drama ensues? (Yes, that is seriously the plot). If I had to describe it, it’s like the author imagined what the lives the characters from Tokyo Revengers would have if any of it was real (hint: poverty and a lot of lame posturing). The characters even mention Tokyo Revengers at some point, so my theory is plausible! 
It is actually a 純文学 book, so behind all of that there is a compelling portrait of growing up in a “small” world due to living in the 田舎 and in poverty, and the kind of social hierarchy that forms. It’s pretty easy to read except for all the dialect, too.
I’m not sure who I’d recommend it too, though. If you enjoy other content with 不良 or just want to understand why Kita-Kyushu is so “infamous” in Japan, it could be fun for you. 
Here is my current pile of reading material. Included are 2 Kindles and a tablet, although I think right now I’m only reading one thing off of each 
so they actually are representative in size of what I’m reading from them.
Based on that I’m not sure if you want my validation, but I’d accept your justification
Huh, you’re right. I actually remember the third one now.
I just checked and volume 2 has two illustrations as well.
I don’t remember from which volume, but they eventually stop.
I finished 青のフラッグ 8 | L24 and I’m kind of torn on the ending. The final chapter was done in some bizarre first person perspective and the whole thing was just weird. I think it was done that way so you didn’t fully see what was happening until the end, but I don’t think it worked unfortunately.
That’s fascinating. I learned recently Japan had something like a 40% literacy rate in like the Edo period even before the advent of the national education system - isn’t that crazy?
Anyway, I’m reading 世にも奇妙な商品カタログ 1 インスタント死神・友だちクジ他 | L23 as my… fourth book ever? I have to say despite having more or less the same premise as 不思議駄菓子屋 I think I prefer this one a bit more. That might just be because I can read it at my own pace though.
This is one of those interesting borderline cases - the publishing imprint is ハヤカワ文庫JA, and is basically a Japanese author science fiction/fantasy label. Sometimes they have the light-novel style covers and sometimes they don’t. They publish stuff like 星界の紋章〈1〉帝国の王女 | L38?? - which is widely considered a light novel (even says so on the wikipedia page) but also stuff with covers like this or this (for some random examples). They generally get their own section in bookshops that is not lumped in with the “light novel” labels.
So, yeah, “light novel” doesn’t actually have a definition and it’s all made up anyway.
Today I started 蛇にピアス. I’m not quite half way through and really enjoying it so far! I bought it 2 years ago when it was nominated for a book club (I think that’s how it was at least) and then completely failing to join the ABC on Wanikani when they read it, it’s about time. 
I’m sold!
