Today I am reading volume 1 of 束の間の一花, which I’ve just requested to be added here. It’s manga about two people with terminal illnesses fall in love. There’s an ongoing TV series right now which I’m watching as well.
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I finished
Enjoyed a lot the main story twist and makes me pumped to see what will happen next.
Also some of the twists on the short stories were very interesting and kinda dark.
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Still plugging along with 魔道祖師. I’ve passed the halfway mark. It’s definitely getting easier as I’m learning the common words, but it’s still really tiring. Even though I enjoy the book I’m trying to take it more slowly because it tires me out.
During my first reading in English I didn’t know what was going on so I took Wei Wuxian’s snarky thoughts at face value, but his perspective is so unreliable. It’s really interesting reading it again because he sees everything and understands so little. And I just came across a scene that I didn’t remember at all. It was probably in the English version too, but I guess I was so confused by the long cast of characters and flashbacks that it didn’t register.
My handwritten paper jargon list has about 80 words which are either made up, don’t really seem to be used in Japanese, or are used or pronounced in an unusual way. There are also lots of names and titles, and place names, and some of the famous swords or other magical weapons have names too, which are not included in that number. Also, there’s normal new vocabulary, which gets bookmarked in my dictionary app instead of the jargon list. I’ve read books with made up jargon before, but never one where the list exploded to this degree.
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during my trip to Japan I read 1リットルの涙難病と闘い続ける少女亜也の日記 | L26 which is a lot different from the movie but was a quick (albeit heart-breaking) read and ラストで君は「まさか! 」と言う 真夜中の動物園 3分間ノンストップショートストーリー | L26 which I enjoyed quite a bit despite being aimed at children.
I also bought about 45 books… so I am set for a while… 
(BookOff and Tsutaya Book Garage are dangerous for me 
)
currently making my way through the 魔女の宅急便 (series) | L26 books. Not really enjoying them. They are not bad or anything, just… boring? I probably would have loved them as a 6 year old, though. They are quick reads, though, so I’ll still finish them. Also, I kinda want to know how the series ends, since Kiki is growing up throughout the books.
I also caught up with the bookclub pick: 体育館の殺人 | L30 
much easier than the last bookclub pick, imo.
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So I tried giving 本好きの下剋上 a go, and I’m despairing so much that I might jump to the Junior version.
I’ll give it a few more chances but my progress is so slow that I can’t even input it on learnnatively 
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I finished reading とかげ by 吉本ばなな today. I really liked her writing when I read Kitchen and ‘Dreaming of Kimchi’ (short story) in English. Unfortunately my level of Japanese isn’t quite there for getting the most out of her work; it’s quite subtle and reflective and when I read キムチの夢in the collection, I went back and checked the English version and found I had definitely missed a key point! A little frustrating but on the flipside the book club book is going fairly smoothly for me, so I still feel I have progressed a lot over the past year. After all, I tackled my first book in Japanese just over a year ago and every page was so slow and difficult! Good luck to everyone, even on frustrating days I am sure we are all progressing more than we realise 
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I’m still reading 忘れえぬ魔女の物語 1 | L34. I’m about 70% done, but it’s gotten kind of weird in the final chapter, so my motivation has been going down… I’ll still finish it, but it hasn’t been meeting my expectations.
I also started NEW GAME! 1 | L22, which has been good so far. That’s a bit of a relief since I’ve been having trouble finding a new Manga Time Kirara series to get into.
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Continuing with 本好きの下剋上~司書になるためには手段を選んでいられません~第一部「兵士の娘1」 | L31, took me 40min to go through 8 pages.
Thankfully, I didn’t suffer as much as the previous two days.
I was wondering if anyone that has read those series knows the existence of a vocabulary anki deck? I don’t want to depend on doing vocabulary on JPDB or kohii if possible.
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I don’t know about pre-made anki decks, but you can export stuff from the tools you listed (or is that what you mean by “rely on them”?)
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I haven’t found a way to export the decks from jpdb or kohii, maybe I’m missing something.
There are some work to get them arounds but they have their flaws.
And by rely on them, I mean having another website to visit for SRS, while I can just integrate everything in Anki and even have offline support.
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Oh! Okay then. I know it’s definitely possible, since I did it for koohi (and I heard someone did it for JPDB). I, however, do not remember how to do it.
Edit: I think koohi only lets you export the words you added overall, so not what you are looking for.
I found the one I heard about for jpdb GitHub - hopto-dot/JPDB-Deck-Scraper-GUI: Deck scraper for jpdb.io. Abandoned but still working. but it’s abandoned. (Also, visual basic, yikes)
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You mean good ol’ visual basic.
In any case, I was looking for something more integral than that (something that automatically generates the deck with all the fields), but I guess I can work with the txt of the words and make a deck with another tool.
Thanks!
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Thanks to a recommendation from @cat in “what should I read next” thread, I read 夢探偵フロイト: -マッド・モラン連続死事件- | L33.
In particular, I did something new for me: I listened to the audiobook while reading the text, and I really enjoyed the experience.
Random thoughts
One of the thing that slows me down when I read is that I love subvocalizing, but I never noticed how much concentration and effort I need to do that. I don’t remember if I mentioned it here, but I even do voices for all the characters in my head 
Well, the audiobook did all the heavy lifting for me, so that reading was just effortless.
Meanwhile, one thing that is frustrating for me when listening to audiobooks is that I have nothing to do with my eyes, so I will usually only listen while walking or doing chores. When I really want to listen without having anything else to do, I will even just look at the progression bar from audible filling up
Well, having the book gives me something to look at, plus it gives extra cues from the kanjis, so that I could even bump up the speed.
Now, doing a quick test, my usual reading speed was about 1.6x the normal reading speed of the audiobook (by the way, I love that we can chose the speed in increments of 0.1). HOWEVER, I usually have to pause at times when I miss something, so I feel like my average speed is lower than that. If I put the audiobook at 1.6x, whenever I have to think about a word or check a kanji more carefully, the audiobook will just not wait for me, which was a bit frustrating. So I went instead for 1.5x, which was much more relaxing overall. Slightly slower than my max BUT much easier to keep going for longer stretches (or while tired).
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This is also why I love reading along with audiobooks! I usually only go up to 1.3ish because faster than that gives me whiplash right now but it fully occupies my eyes and ears and I find I don’t get bored or distracted easily doing it.
I also credit it for getting me comfortable with kanji readings back when I started - no need to look anything up when they’re reading it aloud and the meaning is clear from context!
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I have so much to read (both currently reading and waiting on the virtual shelf to be opened), yet I can’t help myself. I was looking for some kind of little mysteries to do as a sort of unconventional advent calendar 
. I see there are 6 stories in this book, so I’m thinking I might give 4 days to each story and read all 6 over 24 days. Do you think the book is well suited for something like that? Are the stories of about equal length, and is there a place where you naturally stop and try to work out what’s going on before reading the solution?
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You could certainly give it a go! I don’t have the book with me right now - I think some mysteries are a bit longer than others so you may be busier on some days than other. They all have a similar ‘detective reveals the answer’ formula so you could certainly pause when the detective starts to reveal. One thing to note (without spoilers) is you should definitely read the afterword as well as the six stories!
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Thanks for the answer! I can’t find a table of contents with page numbers online either (Amazon preview only has the ebook version). The book is supposed to be 336 pages, so each story can’t be more than 56 pages (and that’s without removing initial pages, any empty pages and あとがき)。This comes up to 14 pages per day (extreme maximum), which sounds perfectly doable, although less so if I also want to keep up with the rest of my reading…
So I guess the real question is, do I really have time to add even more reading to my schedule? 
I’ll have to think on that.
Would anyone be interested in joining such an advent book club?
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Normally I’d be all over it, but the holidays are usually so packed for me that it’s difficult to find time on top of whatever I’ve already got going on. 
Maybe if the book was super duper easy/super turn off your brain kind of thing but it doesn’t sound like it. 
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Same, but in my case I have ~900 pages to read before EOY not including the short story advent I’ll be doing on the WK forums
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I’d be happy with such a choice to be honest, as long as it provides some sort of mystery challenge. Any suggestions welcome!
900 pages? That’s not a nice, round number! Why not make it 1000?
By the way, I searched for Christmas and Mystery on Bookwalker, and the first result was an 赤川次郎 mystery. 
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