I finished all 3 volumes. It’s great, very refreshing read in the yuri genre, with some not so black and white storylines. I particularly enjoyed the role that the vampire hunter(s) played, not to mention how death is Incorporated. Also it was nice to read some fantasy that wasn’t modeled after European aristocracy for a change. Overall definitely recommend.
Starting きみが死ぬまで恋をしたい 1 | L22 soon
Also realized I should pick these back up: 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 1 | L30 and 東方酔蝶華 ~ロータスイーター達の酔醒 1 | L28??
Finished a bunch of been-supposedly-in-progress-for-a-year manga volumes as light side reading alongside 天冥の標 & 星界の紋章.
I’m reading the novels in 2% increments it seems. I need to keep in mind that I don’t need to save every 表外漢字 I come across in these… just the really useful ones like 頷く、呟く、睨む、掴まる、覗き、歪む、舐める、痺れる、嫉妬、躊躇、揉む、餌… see the problem?
I just need more uninterrupted time to get into a flow state and stop mining everything.
Say, something like a vacation. Heading towards a short stay in rainy Málaga. More time to read then, when I’m not in a pool or sampling patatas bravas… Any good bookstores with a Japanese section?
I don’t travel with a laptop, just an iPad. ttsu + 10ten is an otherwise ok travel combo, but it keeps losing my progress (finishing the book) if I happen to turn the device to landscape. Irritating. Rotation lock engaged for now, but I’m a pretty heavy user of both rotations and multitasking normally.
I noticed Immersion Reader was made by a forum member here, which seems like a native app with embedded ttsu and Yomitan. Giving that a shot.
Yes, the kanji of the words you listed appear definitely not just in those two books.
Shouldn’t that be 覗く to match the pattern?
But otherwise, I agree with @mic, you will need those words anyway, they are really common. It may feel slow now, but it’s an investment in the future!
Edit: Speaking of non standard kanji, there’s one that had to be added as a picture in 星界の紋章 3. Trying to select it makes it disappear.
It does exist though 跑足
Wow, that’s really neat how they added it as a picture in the middle of text. 
I’ve just finished the main 本好き2 book! I just have the two(?) short stories at the end, then the book proper will be done! Overall thoughts: it felt pretty on par with book one; we get a few realizations of growth on マイン’s part, but it’s still pretty firmly in SOL land. I enjoyed it, but honestly don’t have many thoughts to share due to the SOL not making a big impact for me.
Not 100% sure what I’ll do after finishing; I may take a little bit of time to watch some anime to clear my pallet, or may start reading + listening to 本好き3 or 穏やか貴族の休暇のすすめ。 | L32. 
I like 本好き better overall as a series, but I like 穏やか貴族の休暇のすすめ 1 better than 本好き 3
Haha, the horse-riding scene. This caused a bit of uproar during the recent-ish rewatch party. I’ve always thought it was cool.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the banter as well. Strong point of the series.
I’m not familiar enough with reddit to navigate to related comments, but I did have questions when reading it. In particular, why would you give the horse the ability to go 50+ km/h, with basically no safeguards (it doesn’t matter if the horse says it’s a bad idea if you can just override it by saying “nah it’s okay trust me bro”). I feel like kids would do something dumb and die all the time.
Got scared the novels and anime may present scenes in a different order. 
if you want my interpretation, to be honest the confusion is sort of the point
is it an alternate universe? is it just her imagining a different world? was it real and the comic travelled between both worlds, or was it just a coincidence and it let her imagine it? i think this is one of those stories where the space to imagine what you think happened is important to the question of storytelling. why do we make things? for ourselves to have made something? for others to enjoy? because it’s a job? for the process alone? because we share the process with others?
fujino and kyomoto are ‘fuji-moto’, almost assuredly two parts of the author, and the story is about making things, and about tragedy (especially in the wake of the kyoto animation arson attack one year earlier), and about fujimoto meditating on perhaps why we make things when in some ways not making them could be easier, or at least less stressful. and the ending is ambiguous because, i think, putting down a definitive answer to something each and every artist would have to find themselves would be destroying the point of looking for it.
At least that’s what I got from it. The movie is pretty one to one, so I don’t know if it would add too much more.
Well, I finished the book, so that’s not an issue 
ETA: also it’s funny that the author wrote in the あとがき that those three books are all he intended and he isn’t planning to write any more. According to wikipedia, the first volume of the next part came out 6 months later…
This is one of the problems Aozora has. It looks like 跑 is a 第3水準 kanji, which is pretty rare, but not so much so that it doesn’t have a unicode or copyable text from sites like 漢字「跑」の部首・画数・読み方・意味など. I guess it’s better than not having the kanji at all though!
Aozora is a whole different level, though. When a kanji is added as an image on Aozora, it feels like the author just had a stroke and wrote something random. Good luck finding it anywhere else. As you said, this one is just a rare kanji. They probably had an encoding issue or something. Probably ran out of space putting in all those 厰 and 纓 (two kanji that appear somewhat frequently in 星界の紋章, although I just typed them from memory and there’s no search function in the ebook, so I may have gotten them wrong; the meanings are correct though)
Edit: I found a word reference for the series online. I was correct!
Haha it does certainly feel like this sometimes. But for example in 高野聖 there are two such “picturized” kanji: 蘸 and 𢪸. While 𢪸 is 第4水準 and I don’t think I’ve seen it again, 蘸 is in the same category as 跑 and I’ve actually seen it one more time as さん. Naturally, I had added both to my Anki deck so I felt so much vindication when I saw it again!
P.S. I’ve seen 厰 before in 黒い雨 | L48 but never 纓. Edit: oop it looks like 纓 was in the 弟子 part of 李陵・山月記 弟子・名人伝 アニメカバー版 「文豪ストレイドッグス」×角川文庫コラボアニメカバー | L46. Somehow it escaped my Anki deck so thanks for giving that example!
While reading this in my mind I pictured the prince from Katamari Damacy rolling a giant ball of all the kanji he can find 
To my great relief, unlike ソードアート・オンライン28 ユナイタル・リングVII | L33 this has been an incredibly smooth and enjoyable read, in terms of story. In theory we’re on Floor 8 of Aincrad now, but we’ve taken a detour to Floor 4 now while trying to solve the recent Kirito’s a vampire development. 80% through and I’m surprised how easy it feels for me now. Curious to compare it to ソードアート・オンライン6 ファントム・バレット | L33 or even https://learnnatively.com/book/7ca632e88c/ when I get there
Read another chapter with my friend - ironically I find this harder to understand than SAO. The chapters are very formulaic, but it’s the thematic content that make it interesting. Lots of great vocab to pick up from this
With the book club. I’m pretty iffy on this so far, but it might win me over enough to continue to vol 2, maybe. Update: I like vol 2 much more, and am excited now
Next novel/short story reads:
Next Manga:
Considering https://learnnatively.com/book/5c7afeac02/ more and more, and trying to talk myself out of buying the physicals set
Otherwise https://learnnatively.com/book/6d90966eb1/ is high on my list rn. Plus w/e else I’ve mentioned
Done! It took me two weeks to read the first 70-ish pages, and then two days for the remaining 250.
Basically, going through the flashbacks was slow, but things got my attention once we got to the present time.
That’s also when I started liking the main character better (although, I still can’t really stand his personality; he should stand for himself more). While I did sympathize with the situation of 里伽子, she still annoyed me for most of the book, it’s only the very end that me warm up to her a bit. I honestly would have just thrown away her contact info (or not even take them) when I-already-forgot-her-name (津村?) gave it over. Also, I can’t stand her either, but I guess the main character is into manipulative girls…
I did like the writing and found the end satisfying, though, so it’s kinda 3.5* for me. I rounded down this time
Reddit divided between people thinking the series jumped the shark and people who could suspend their disbelief and enjoy the horse ride. 
My only small twitch was when I realized ラフィール is kicking ass planet-side after a life lived in 0.5 g — but it was established earlier that she can withstand effects of gravity better than ジント, a former lander.
Automated amusement park sounds like a recipe for frequently occurring accidents. I’d love to explore something like that (from a safe distance) with a Flipper in hand, seeing which devices one could take over remotely.
Our current LLM “safety mechanisms” and jailbreaks show how easy it is to break the veneer-thin restriction layers via very simple means. I sincerely hope self-driving cars integrated with voice assistants won’t pass our safety regulations any time soon…
Wait, what? 
This is like Tolkien saying he only intended to write The Hobbit. I guess the story took a life of its own, given how quickly he changed his mind.
I happened to notice that 戦旗 lists ラフィール before ジント in the character list… dare I hope for her PoV?
Maybe he got an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Now I’m picturing the folks behind ハヤカワ文庫JA as mafia. Perhaps so, they seem to be the only publisher really interested in sci-fi?
But more seriously, he had already invented a language for this work… I think it might have been a labor of love.
