So I finished two books recently, 消滅 VANISHING POINT | L31 and 三面記事から見る 戦前のエロ事件 | L34. The former is a sci-fi-ish suspense by 恩田陸 which I enjoyed quite a bit and makes me want to move up another book by her in my TBR up in the ranks of ‘what to read next’, whereas the latter is a pop nonfiction book about sex-related crimes (occasionally but not necessarily always ‘sex crimes’). I read it over the course of many months as each chapter is an unrelated incident, with incidents ranging from “lol whoops they accidentally put an allusion to a famous adult shop in children’s textbooks” to “ugh she/he did what?”
I have four more books I hope to wrap up before this month is over, but we’ll see. I’m reasonably certain I’ll finish three of them, less sure on the last one.
Well, I will not be finishing 本好き this year as originally planned. Since volumes 31 and 32 were kinda boring (not ideal for the 3rd and 2nd last volumes of the series) I read them quite slowly. And now it’s taking longer than expected to read Stormlight Archive book 5 (to be fair, it is over 1300 pages long), so I’m still not ready to start volume 33. Instead I’ll probably make it the first thing I read in 2025 and start off the year with a win.
Presumably I’ll still have a few days left in the year, but I’ll just read some manga. I’ve read 129 volumes this year (excluding rereads since Natively still can’t track that), so there’s not really a nice number nearby to aim for. So I guess I’ll just read whatever I feel like.
Well, a bit more than a week later and I finished all 7 published books. Not exactly a cliffhanger but we are in the middle of something… At the same time, I don’t want to spoil myself with the web novel version (famous last words; I didn’t last 3 days last time I said that)
The writing kept getting better overall, but the siscon/brocon scenes became really repetitive, with the brother saying something that flies reeeeally close to sun (we are talking pixel perfect TAS Kerbal space program here) and the main character just going お兄様ったら before thinking that she needs to up her game to and say something outlandish herself. I could do without those, but honestly the rest of the plot has been really good so far. I guess it’s a mild spoiler, but I love the fact that the stuff that made no sense to the main character (and the reader; this one at least) when she played the game are actually justified in universe, instead of just saying “it’s how it is” like many other similar series.
I have a feeling I’m gonna wind up going ahead of the jpdb deck this time around, cuz I’m really hooked. So I’m considering switching it to “Frequency within deck”.
Everything else is basically on hold rn, until whenever my new obsession chills out I’ll probably at least do book clubs in January tho
I have to say the マリみて 4 deck is showing up with all sorts of words I wasn’t expecting - stuff about crabs, putting stuff on the black market (横流し), etc… Also colorful expressions like 馬の耳に念仏, 猫に小判 and 座布団一枚. It’s making me quite curious
One month later and still reading 黒死館殺人事件 | L42??, which I’ll dub the turducken of books. There’s so much information in here that it could’ve easily been 1000 pages. Just yesterday I learned of the condition called Tabes Dorsalis, and upon running to the wikipedia page I found that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his dissertation on it. So now I’m left wondering if that specific condition was used as a subtle homage to Doyle or if it’s just a crazy coincidence.
Also as a small update to my previous post, I found how to type the mysterious kanji 𥥔 (it’s used several more times), but there’s still very very little info to be found about it.
And I indeed did not last long. I was checking the publication pace, noticed that the latest volume just came out and that there is 1 to 2 years between books. Also, the web novel has less than one volume worth of content ahead (and the author is only putting up one short section per month ~ish; probably due to working on rewriting sections for publication and having a day job). So I thought screw it and went ahead reading and am almost done. Plot is getting really promising, but I don’t think there’s enough time until I reach the last available chapter for it to conclude.
Interestingly, it renders the same as your screenshot on my computer, but if I copy it and paste it in the url bar, it renders properly. I’m guessing the font used by Discourse just doesn’t have it.
I read the novel version first because I can easily find the meaning of new words using my Kobo ereader’s Japanese-English dictionary. And then, I read the colored manga version on my iPad to confirm that I have understood and imagined the scenes similarly. This is because I can’t easily find the definition of new words from the mangas without doing a screenshot first and then using a translator app since the words in the manga cannot be selected on the Kobo iPad app. I also prefer reading on my Kobo ereader as the font size can be enlarged to read the furigana easily.
I still have another 4 novels and 4 colored manga versions of the Detective Conan series now but I want to buy more because I’m planning to read all the novels in the series. I like investigative stories and Detective Conan seems to be the only series that has furigana for all Kanji in the books.
So because I have 2 book clubs and 2 extra books I should in theory be trying to finish before the new year, I started a new book 心霊探偵八雲 2 魂をつなぐもの | L30
To be fair, I started it two days ago and am half way done so it’s not the biggest time commitment. I’m kind of surprised to see it at L30, it feels like high 20s tops, but I could be biased with my existing ghost vocab
Update - I’m on my computer and it renders. I thought maybe it was browser (Phone I use Chrome, laptop Brave) but I just checked Chrome on my laptop and it renders fine there too. Android and/or mobile issue? How curious. I just tried searching it but all my hits were Chinese and I couldn’t pull anything relevant in Japanese
Edit: Oh wait @Naphthalene said it didn’t render on their computer. Hmm
I started スキップ・ビート! (1) | L25 a few days ago since I saw the newest volume on the bookwalker landing page, which made me realize that manga is still ongoing! This was one of the first manga I read (inside a German manga magazine), so I couldn’t believe it’s still going. Even more, the first 15 volumes are currently free to read on bookwalker so I am trying to read as much as I can. (Unless the series becomes too annoying, which happens often with shoujo lol)
It’s pretty tough with all the hand written sections, but thankfully there’s an old book club on the wanikani forum I can refer to.
Currently the nostalgia is carrying me through it I’m on volume 2 now.
Yay, try it! It’s not a leisurely read (at least for me) because the amount of handwritten text is kind of brutal and I am completely overwhelmed when I have to parse so much handwritten text Also some chapters are really text dense, which was a bit surprising to me. I read somewhere on the wanikani forums that this gets better in the later volumes, so I hope it’ll become more chill by then Otherwise I would really recommend it, I really like the main character and that she is very stubborn and bold
I do wonder if the story can stay interesting for 50+ volumes though…
I believe I paused reading the English volumes somewhere in the early 40s (to let some more volumes build up so I could read them all at once), and I was loving every minute of it, personally.
On the list of unexpected expressions/sentences in マリみて 4:
まるで、ちょっと勢いつけて引っ張ったトイレットペーパーなのに、加速がついて止まらなくなったみたいな感じ。ぐるぐるぐるぐる。いったい、いつになったら終わるのだろう。やっぱり、ペーパーの黄土色の芯が見えるまでかな。(In reference to library catalogue search results for バラ/薔薇, and the simile continues for a while )
Were they using a computer? I believe those books were released in the 90s and I’ve seen libraries still using index cards at the time (not in Japan, of course). Though maybe that was just an additional legacy method for the old folk used to it.
Yeah they are from the 90s/early 2000s (this vol was Dec 1999), and it was a computer - she was lucky to use one of 3 in the library, and it seemed like it was basically her first time or something. Definitely reminded me of back then.
I worked (and basically “lived in”) a library in the 2000s. While electronic catalogue was the default, some people still used index cards too
At the same time, I don’t want to spoil myself with the web novel version (famous last words; I didn’t last 3 days last time I said that)
I’ll probably at least do book clubs in January tho
Also some chapters are really text dense, which was a bit surprising to me. I read somewhere on the wanikani forums that this gets better in the later volumes, so I hope it’ll become more chill by then 
