Probably NO. 6 〔ナンバーシックス〕#1 | L32 for me!
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now I’m kinda sad I throw away my obis because a lot of them had big number ones on them and I never read the detail 
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A couple more books I’ve read lately:
窓からの眺め | L27 - I think my favourite Akagawa so far! And great for whizzing through.
Diaries/snippets from 山下清 , along with lots of weird and wonderful pictures of his art.
I knew nothing about him coming into this, but he was gifted artist with relatively severe form of autism.
He became famous in Japan for his wanderings across the country, and a lot of the book is little snippets of different places/traditions around Japan.
The writing is quite unusual (lots of words have an odd mix of kanji, e.g. 飛行機 might be ひ行き）, and there’s a handful of dated and/or downright odd thoughts.
But really interesting to read about someone I’d never had a chance to otherwise.
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Along a similar line, I listened to a podcast recently where they did what they called ‘books in the box’.
Essentially anyone would pick a book they wanted to recommend, along with a short justification for why.
Maybe we should have a thread something like this to wrap up 2025?
(that said I don’t know what I’d recommend yet)
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I put all of mine in a bin. Tho I’ve also seen ppl put them in the front flap of the dust jacket - which works pretty well for some of them. Some of them can actually be cool, or like have character descriptions and stuff. And I figure if I ever wanna sell my books (unlikely) that might make someone more inclined to buy them
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Am I the only one who just keeps the obi on the books? I take it off to read and then put it back on when I finish the volume.
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I would, but I end up damaging them unintentionally - like if I’m reorganizing things or sometimes even just from taking them in/out normally
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I finished 京嵐寺平太郎 もののけ侍伝々 | L30?? which takes me up to 350 books read total. (I hit 300 in July last year, so that’s 50 in a bit less than a year and a half.)
The book itself is one of those where I’m not sure how to evaluate it. I enjoyed reading it and for me it was an easy and quick read, and yet I don’t think it very likely that I’ll read the next one in the series. The general setup is “samurai who’s friendly with various youkai gets roped into dealing with supernatural incidents, which he does with the aid of his youkai friends”. After an initial intro which suggested a bit more of an overarching plot, it settled down into a “monster of the chapter” structure, and my guess is that the five following books will be more of that. Technically not a light novel but felt rather light-novel-ish.
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I keep them too. I don’t even remove them to read.
This year wasn’t great for me. Lots of 4*, but nothing that sticks out as number 1.
Novels: I guess 舟を編む | L34 would be my favorite for this year.
Light Novels: 魔導具師ダリヤはうつむかない ~今日から自由な職人ライフ~ 1 | L29 (as a series) is my favorite this year
That being said, the 4th volume of 悪食令嬢と狂血公爵 ~その魔物、私が美味しくいただきます!~ | L32 came out today! Miracles do happen! I’ll probably read it this weekend, which may override my favorite of the year.
Book clubs? What book clubs?
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My reading time has been scarce lately, but:
22% through, and this is much more story driven so far (tho still with some kyudo info). Narration switched to 1st person, and that’s much more enjoyable to me
カードキャプターさくら 3 | L20 read the first two chapters. I’m up to the card that’s a Sakura doppelganger. Kero-chan’s Kansai-ben is the most interesting part… Tho seeing Syaoran be mad gay for Yukito, and Tomoyo repeatedly telling Sakura she likes her (but it goes over her head) is quite fun
I got through 3 more pages and then took a break. It reminds me of when I first started reading Bocchi or New Game, since it’s 6-koma. Tho one huge difference is there’s much more narration (at least at the beginning), and lots of out of box text
Finally, 明日もまた勇者のとなり 1 | L26 - with the book club. It’s cute, I’m behind.
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I finished 夢と闇の果て | L35 , finally. One of those books that even though I wasn’t really enjoying, led me along with the promise of a big payoff. Unfortunately the payoff was dumb and I feel like I wasted my time.
(also, is no one monitoring the feedback anymore? This really is not a children’s book)
Moving on to ストーム・ブリング・ワールド1 (MF文庫 ダ・ヴィンチ う 2-1) | L32?? - don’t know anything about it really, but feeling very High Fantasy from the first couple of pages.
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I don’t know if I’ve ever said it (or perhaps I have and it’s been long enough I’ve forgotten I have, in which case this is timely anyway), but I always look forward to reading your updates! You read such a fun variety of books that I don’t see elsewhere, and I always enjoy seeing their neat covers or hearing your thoughts about how generic some are.
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Sadly, that’s what I think too. There are feedbacks I sent months ago and still nothing.
Speaking of which, it seems that
was added as a single novel rather than a series. Good luck trying to add more volumes 
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I started reading 星空の下、君の声だけを抱きしめる | L25
It will probably be my last book of the year, giving me a short break from reading until next year.
Sidenote. Kindle just pushed an update which makes lookups less reliable. I figured out how to convert the kindle books to epubs. Does anyone know a good portable ereader? I know about ttsu but I mean something that I can take with me, look up words/translate sentences. I don’t mind buying another device if it’s better than my kindle because while it’s useful it just has a lot of small gripes that amazon doesn’t seem to care about. I hope that in a couple of years when I’m no longer dependent on lookups so much, I can just read physically.
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I own a Pixel tablet and use Firefox with the Yomitan extension on that.
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I had noticed recently that I’m getting less matches to things I’m looking up than I would expect.. now I can blame Kindle instead of me!
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It has difficulties recognizing some inflections now. It also now doesn’t look up part of the selected text when it can’t find an entry for the full text anymore, which also applies strongly to verbs.
it won’t recognize わかった anymore but does recognize わかっ.
Also had issues with verbs in the potential form and some compound words/verbs.
I use jmdict but I doubt it matters.
All in all amazon dropped the ball on this one 
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Yeah that’s exactly what I’ve been noticing! Also a few verbs with multiple kanji (I can’t think of an example off the top of my head, but imagine if 乗り越える was written のり越える) and it can’t recognize it as full word and only gives me 越える. I didn’t realize it was an “update” to the device. Well now I feel better (and a little annoyed that I haven’t found my only non Kindle e-reader yet since our move).
Thanks - finding the obscure books with neat covers is half the fun - more fun than reading a lot of them, lol.
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