I don’t know Ueno at all so I can’t help there. I remember being disappointed at Akihabara because it had a lot more games/movies than books. Which, is totally fair, lol.
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I’ll probably head over and check out the Ikebukuro store at some point during the day. I’ve stayed in Akihabara before; I just like the vibe of being able to wander out in the evening after dinner and spend a while browsing in a local book-off, even if it’s not a huge one.
PS: Google Maps has classified half of the Book-off stores as “charity shop” 
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If it’s not a destination trip then it’s totally fine. I usually stay in Kabukicho and go to the Shinjuku Book Off on the way back from the station even though it’s not the best one in the city. It’s still huge, and I have spent plenty there 
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FLESH & BLOOD 17 | L35 finally finished! 
I want to start the next one right away so as not to lose momentum, but I’m going to try to read ~50 pages of my next bingo book first, just to get momentum on that one.
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I’ve been in something of a reading slump lately, and while I’ve forced myself to catch up on the 理由 club I’ve basically written off the nonfiction club here as a lost cause, don’t really want to resume the WK club I’m in, and don’t have a ton of enthusiasm for any of my other started books.
So, new book! We love new books 
According to the receipt inside the cover, I bought 傷痕のメッセージ | L30?? on my birthday last year. It’s by an author I enjoy, and the sort of storyline that would catch my interest mild gross but no more spoiler than is written on the obi: A daughter autopsies her own dad after his will dictates that he have one (though not by her necessarily!) and finds a mysterious code written inside his body?!
I’m about 60 pages in and fairly intrigued, so I think I’ll have no problem finishing it. It does have quite a bit of medical terminology, more so than some other books by the same author, but aside from that is an easy read. It’s just short of 400 pages in bunko format so assuming I don’t get distracted by anything else (always a big If) I may well finish it this week
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Uggggh. I’ve been fighting this impulse for a few weeks now but I think I’m finally giving in and checking out what’s in my tbr…
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Does anyone here have any tips on reading physical books that you found out are way too hard for you? I was really hoping to take pictures of all the pages and convert it into text, and then convert that into an epub, that way I could at least use a pop up dictionary. So far google has done the best job at recognizing the text, but some lines start higher up than others and that’s causing it to put some of the text out of order.
I tried working my way through some pages today using the pictures I took and google ocr to look up words. It was…extremely painful. OTL
EDIT: Also this is the book if anyone was curious.
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I only have tips you probably don’t want to hear, like if I think a book is to hard, I‘ll put it back on the shelf for some time. One time I used the jpdb list of words, going through the list while reading, which accelerated lookups enough to make it more readable, but as I want to read books w/o this kind of help, I didn’t continue.
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Unfortunately, because it’s physical only, nothing like that exists. I was starting to make flashcards for it, but it’s clear there’s way too many words I don’t know.
The biggest problem for me is that I don’t think these are just words I’m going to encounter easily, even in other books. Some words use antiquated versions of kanji. There was even a word where I had to look up the English word it gave me, because I didn’t even know what that meant. 
Idk we’ll see. Maybe I’ll just keep perusing the pages and making myself a flash card collection. Then attempt it again at a later date.
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I pay for Takoboto premium which has a very generous (horrible handwriting and wrong stroke order OK!) handwritten kanji lookup. I used to do radical lookup but at this point handwriting is faster for me.
For books with lots of unknown words I will save them into a list named after the book so I can quickly look back at words I’ve already searched for (this is also a feature of the app, but a free one I think)
I also have a book stand than holds open physical books so I can easily do lookups without having to put the book down.
In my experience OCR is too fiddley and it’s better for me personally to just go slow and look things up as I need it, especially as often hard books get easier as you get further in.
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I also write kanji by hand instead of scanning them, but use this free resource, which also is good with bad handwriting and wrong stroke order: Handwritten kanji search at sljfaq.org
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I might look into this. I see they have a windows app, but in the Microsoft store it said it wasn’t available right now. I’m on an enterprise network though, which may be the problem.
What kind of book stand is it? I wanted one for this, but this book is itty bitty.
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I have this one with the cushion since I set it on my lap: Vigo Wood Adjustable Book Stand with Storage - Premium, Versatile & Portable
It’s best for larger books but I’ve successfully read relatively thin bunkobon size books on it as well
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I’m pretty much in the same boat as mic:
If it’s too hard, I put it down and come back to it later.
What was the English word, out of curiosity?
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It was “prolix”
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Interestingly 幻獣調査員 is the only one where I actually did this so far i.e. last summer after it started with 13.5 lookups/page in the first 10 pages . Other ones I did not even try to start in the first place.
But as @cat already said, books tend to get easier after some time. らせん e.g. for me started in the 12+ range and after 100 pages went down to 8+ lookups. Otoh it all depends on how many lookups you can tolerate.
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I am also in the, put it down if you don’t like the lookup experience camp, but when I do read physicals (usually around my level bc I hate physical lookups) I will OCR as I go, as in take a picture of the page in Google lens (although I’m sure iPhone has a similar feature) and do the lookups on that page that I need, then read, then OCR the next page. It probably ends up being the same amount of work, but it doesn’t feel as bad to OCR as I go 
@cat 's book stand would probably make this even easier.
It probably also helps that bc I’m only doing it with books at my level that I only have a few lookups per page, so it might not be as sustainable with a book way above your level.
fwiw, the 涼宮ハルヒ books have been on my shelf for over a decade now, so like, I might take put it down and come back to it more seriously than I should
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Well I was a bit more cautious, like I bought the rest of them books (they will arrive this week) only after I read the first one and liked it.
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Going to advise in the same vein as others: if the number of look ups are too much for you, put it back until you feel more ready.
On a different note though, I have powered through at least 3 books where I had multiple look ups and did not understand passages/ sections even if I understood the gist of others enough to get the story. If your current comfort level isn’t too far below it then you may be able to power through.
I read キノの旅 book 1 and Zoo book 1 about 2 years ago now (at the time I would have struggled to even read something Lv 18-19 on natively without many look ups, and both of these were marked as Lv30). The other books I powered through were Lv23 where I found even with the unknown stuff I knew more than I thought I did and found it a much easier book to power through even if it was still difficult at the time, and I did still miss plot points.
I managed it with a combination of perseverance, short reading sessions, being ok with ambiguity and accepting that if I didn’t fully understand it then it just meant I would need to re-read it further down the line. I used manually looking things up using a combination of google translate (for writing kanji I didn’t have furigana for or didn’t know) and DeepL for trying to figure out correct phrase and possible word translations.
For キノの旅, I watched the anime and tried to understand what I could since most, if not all of the chapters were related to anime episodes (except for one where there seemed to be a big change in the execution of it) so I knew sort of what was going on even though when I read it I couldn’t fully grasp it without the back ground knowledge. For Ico, if you know the premise of the game it’s based on and some of the lore, you may be able to power through it but would need to be ok with the number of look ups and ambiguity. I’m guessing there will be a lot of lore based info in it from what I know of the game and this and it’s second part.
When I read Zoo book 1, I did not know anything about the short stories within so had to rely on what I could glean from it and make do with that (it’s on my to re-read list for this year so I will figure out what I missed first time round). For Zoo, I understood most of 2 stories a little of 2 more but missed massive plot points and the last 2 I understood almost nothing. It was part of what contributed to my burn out since I forced myself to complete it, I didn’t want to DNF it and didn’t want to switch to something else even though parts were way too advanced.
In short:
If you think you can pace yourself without burning out, can put up with the number or look ups and the ambiguity and really like the premise of the story, try it and see how you get on. If you don’t think that sounds like fun, or makes you think you might burn out on it, I would suggest putting it aside for now and trying it once you feel more ready for it.
You may even find that doing short sections/ a few pages and then re-reading with your vocab list might help you get to a stage where you can read it less intensely yet still understand it. I always feel unknown grammar is more difficult to work around than unknown vocab though.
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おまわりさんと招き猫 あやかしの町のふしぎな日常 - first impression: with “just“ 7+ lookups/page in the first 15 pages it starts not that difficult, but reading is feels slow nonetheless, maybe as I am not that used to the grammar, maybe for other reasons I am not yet aware of, maybe I just need to get used to the author‘s style, got it: I had to handwrite too many unknown kanji, e.g. for fish types. L30 may be right. The book is indeed a light novel, I‘d say, but in an urban fantasy setting. And I will definitely continue to read the book.
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