Loving the meta 
(陰キャギャルでもイキがりたい is a monthly comic in Yurihime magazine)
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Been plucking away at 博多豚骨ラーメンズ | L33 for the past few days in he evening after a tough hike at 30+ degrees C. Today is a rest day so I have plenty of time and energy to make some progress!
Read up to and including 6回表. Spoilers for up to there.
The more I read, the more I love the ridiculousness! Thanks for recommending this, @nikoru! 
I’m starting to see how this is unfolding now. Clueless 斉藤 getting all the laurels without doing anything, all the while getting entangled in a bigger plot… I’m loving the 表裏 parts still! It’s great that the front is the major’s hidden dealings, haha. Which reminds me, I need to look up what front and back mean in a baseball context.
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You weren’t kidding here, haha. I’m about halfway through 穏やか貴族の休暇のすすめ。2 | L32, the now that the author’s gotten the all-okay that this won’t be marketed as straight BL, they apparently feel comfortable enough to just take off the gloves entirely. Or at least the illustrator has. 
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I finished 博多豚骨ラーメンズ | L33!
Hitman comedy with lots of ridiculous happenings and some twists. Recommended for some light fun.
I took some notes at about the 80% mark; after finishing 10回表.
Spoilers up to there
Oh man! I did not see this coming at all! Thinking back to earlier scenes, it’s great how much shines in a new light. Of course 馬場 wasn’t worried about going out alone while being targeted. That conversation with the 屋台 ramen chef warning him that he’d be setting にわか侍 on him… 
I’m also surprised to see so many important characters get dealt with so offhandedly. Guess they were just the antagonists of the week and we’ll be getting new ones next book! I am planning to continue, this is great fun so far. I do hope that after volume 1, with the series getting a foothold later volumes are getting longer arcs and overarching story plots as well.
Looking forward to find out who’s left standing at the end!
and for the rest of the book
What a great ending! I love that 斉藤 was also a target of the revenge-ist at the end. And after he went to the trouble of getting his face altered! Does this mean the team will be looking for a new pitcher or is 斉藤 still there? I guess it’s possible it was all a ruse from the beginning and there’s someone else on the team who’s the usual pitcher.
Anyway! I loved the energy here! A great brain off book for some simple fun. Still planning to continue. :smile
:
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Riiight? 
I watched the anime twice or so, which definitely helps. But I also remembered some details from the book (which is ofc much more detailed).
These are just the counters for the innings (or “rounds” as you might call them): Inning - Wikipedia
One inning consists of two halves, which are referred to as 表 and 裏 (which seem to be the official Japanese terms, according to one of my language partners). In English, they seem to be called “top” and “bottom” as that’s how the score is written down on the board.
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Kaori Ekuni and Yoshimoto Banana are both pretty great writers who have a handful of under level 30 books, so are worth a mention.
Not a novel, but 旅ドロップ (小学館文庫 え 4-6) | L27 was very enjoyable.
For Yoshimoto Banana キッチン | L30 is the classic one (but maybe leaning slightly on the more difficult)
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FLESH & BLOOD 19 | L35 finished! This was a great tie-up of several different plot threads the author’s had running for a while, as well as a good continuation of others she’s been setting up for a bit. I wish it was more popular for LNs to be longer; I really feel like the author could make good use of the extra space. Not that the current books feel rushed, but there’s just so much more she could delve into and examine.
Anyway, while I won’t be starting it immediately, as I want to do my manga plan for August, probably my next F&B book will be 王と夜啼鳥 instead of volume 20, as it was published in between vols. 19 and 20. I’ve always been really curious what exactly it contains, as it has some of my favorite cover art of the series.
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I’ve been a bit missing from the forums lately, but I have been reading! (Admittedly somewhat slowly 
)
Since last time I read 工場 | L32 - which was excellent, very reminiscent of Kafka, three workers struggle with purpose as they work in incomprehensible jobs in a ever present factory.
Next, was 黒い森の記憶 | L30 - which was great fun. I read through the comments in the book club for it later, and realised lots of other people were much better at hypothesizing/picking up on clues.
I was very much sat along for the ride, I had no idea where the turns along the way were.
And finally, I just finished 不倫と南米 | L28 which was a cool to see a new country through Yoshimoto, but none of the stories felt super memorable.
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Thanks!! I added 旅ドロップ (and realized that it was already on my wishlist, lol, I should grab a copy bc it’s pretty perfectly at my level right now). I left キッチン off since I still maintain that L30 seems to be the magic level where most LN and adult fiction really opens up.
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I decided to go through and add some thoughts I had on the book as a review since it’s been a while since I’ve done so here on Natively, but the entire thing is one gigantic spoiler, which I always feel uncomfortable doing as the tags are broken on Firefox. >.< I know you’ve probably got a lot on your plate, @brandon, but this is one issue I’d be extremely happy to see solved. (The broken tags also merge all my carefully-divided paragraphs into one disgusting blob; I promise I don’t write like that, anonymous reader. )
I did add a ton of line breaks to try to hide the spoilers and a warning up front, at least, so if anyone spoils themselves I take no responsibility.
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The line breaks definitely achieved it. Tho if you’re gonna do that, you may as well just remove the spoiler tags, and retain your paragraph spacing
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My to read list grows ever longer…
Apt description I really enjoyed that book. It started kind of spooky but I remember I was laughing a lot by the end
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Same 
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Ooh, I was thinking of maybe giving that a watch someone. Is you watching it twice indicative that it’s good?
My lookup for the baseball terms stopped at the bare minimum, so thanks for elaborating!
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I really loved it! I am not really an anime (or movie fwiw) person so that makes my recommendation even more weighty, I guess.
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Turns out the broken paragraph spacing was just due to me not using the spoiler tags correctly, regardless of them working on the browser or not. 
I did go back and fix that, at least…
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After a few days down a really deep jpdb rabbit hole, I finally got back to reading, and finished:
Left a review, but tldr: it was an enjoyable fantasy yuri read, and it’s one of my two recs for L20s fantasy. My other one being 勇者になりたい少女と、勇者になるべき彼女 | L28
Considering continuing on to vol 2, or going for 夏の少女は還る | L27 or ウは宇宙ヤバイのウ! | L29 (which seemingly didn’t really have yuri in the first printing, but then added it in during a revised reprint?!)
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Phew, last book finished! https://learnnatively.com/book/ed7a3d021e/ was more of the same as the first book, but a bit better, I thought. You come for the male harem, it fulfills the male harem. 
Which means that I’m now officially ready to read me some manga! 
It’s been a while since I’ve devoted any significant chunk of time to it, so I’m hoping to get a good pile of books read. First up has to be トーマの心臓 | L30; it’s spent far too long on my Now Reading without any significant progress. orz
Here was my shortlist of stuff to pick from for future me’s reference:
Shortlist
- 獣の王国 | L25 - Only volumes 6 & 7 remaining. Cute series good for when you need something fluffy to read.
- トーマの心臓 | L30 - <.<;
- D.Gray-man | L24 - On volume 13
- 氷の魔物の物語 | L25 - On volume 7
- 魔入りました!入間くん | L28 - On volume 5. For some reason I keep bouncing off this manga even though I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve read; not sure what the blocker is.
- 幻惑の鼓動 | L29 - On volume 2, but I only have three volumes at present, so two more to go before I order my next batch.
- よつばと! 16 | L17
I had a small personal goal to read four novels over the June-July period, and I’m pretty shocked to see, at the end of it all, I’ve finished nine.
Looking back at my stats, five of them were accompanied by an audiobook (and in one case was only an audiobook), so the final number ends up making more sense: of those nine novels, there were only four that were finished through straight reading and no other accompaniment. I’m still definitely counting the audiobook ones in my overall stats for the months, but I feel like I’m slowly getting to another turning point in my “read more novels” goal for the year (with the goal of reading more quickly with more reading stamina): as I become more comfortable with listening, it’s becoming easier to lean on that aspect of the experience, and I’m not 100% sure how much of a crutch that ends up being. My listening stamina is certainly improving, but is my reading speed/stamina?
On the other hand, my listening is definitely not good enough to listen without a text, at least at the level of audiobooks I currently have available to me, and it doesn’t make sense to cut them out of my routine when they open up so many more doors in terms of reading through books in a quicker manner.
So, the long and short of it it…I’m glad I got those four novels read, I think. I was prepared to include the “listen along” books in my victory total, but I don’t actually need to, I’m happy to see. I don’t think I’m going to change much about my routine, at least for this year, but it’s an interesting change to see. If I can remember I’d like to look at my trends over the entire year once we finish our 2025; this has definitely been a year of growth for me, I think.
I don’t have any other mini-goals in mind at the moment; I’ve considered setting one up for my manga reading in August, but I don’t want to pressure myself too much with the process. Maybe I’ll take a look at where I’m at halfway through the month and adjust from there…
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Does anyone know how many volumes 本好きの下剋上 ハンネローレの貴族院五年生 | L30 is likely to be based on the web novel? Or did the web novel cut short and it’s completely unknown?
I ask because both volumes have extra points back right now on Amazon (even the unreleased volume, which is unusual), but I’m reluctant to read a series like this as it releases since I’ll forget characters and plot threads.
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You could just buy them now, and then you’ll have for later either way
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