Sounds like the ending / sudden change of tone wasn’t an issue for you then? I overall liked the book but I really found the tone switch jarring.
I can’t find the original post you made about the tone shift (somehow the search tool really isn’t working well for me… it finds additional results when you search in a given thread compared to a global search…), but if you mean the cannibalism, I just didn’t take it at face value (which is also what the main character ponders about in the epilogue) so it wasn’t particularly jarring, no.
I finally read your spoiler about the way キリオ‘s personality changes towards the end and I also found it annoying. As I mentioned in this thread, my original hope was that she would turn out to be a trans guy… I didn’t expect it to happen though
Oh, I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this one; it’s been on my list as well. From what I’ve heard it’s more bromance than BL, but if it’s a nice story/relationship then that’s all I need.
It was partially that but also just the general… Indelicacy? Of the investigation. The way the case was discussed in front of clearly distressed family, the unnecessary graphicness of the details really jarred me. I’ve read much worse, naturally, given this is my favorite genre, but it just felt so out of sync with what I expected from the writing up til that point.
That’s when you need to summon “death of the author”. No matter what is written there, it doesn’t mean they aren’t doing unspeakable things out of frame. Unspeakable things I will just keep talking writing about on Myspace (that’s where the smutty slash fic goes, right? Probably showing my age…). Imma put the 腐 back in Na腐thalene.
More seriously, only 50 pages in and they are already acting like a couple. What am I supposed to think.
I didn’t really notice, no? Mostly レオ was just being himself. The visit to the statue was much more jarring to me than the investigation, since he was risking not only his life, but that of others for no apparent reason.
ゲラルド was also callous, but he sold me on the necessity of that behavior.
Other than that, I felt the shocking nature of the crime scene was entirely justified as a way to prevent close investigation. The culprit would not want someone with expert forensic knowledge like キリオ to be able to look too closely at the body (nb: I didn’t think the culprit had necessarily planed for it at first, just that from a narrative point of view, it’s the only way to justify why she gave so little info despite the reader knowing about her expertise). Also, I don’t think that was part of the final explanation, but my guess was that the culprit removed all the blood from the body so that you could not determine if some of the injuries were pre- or post-mortem.
Oh, by the way, not related to what I am reading right now, but I noticed that both you and @basilsauce added to your respective reviews of 異世界でおまけの兄さん自立を目指す | L30 that it contains 18+ scenes, but there’s already a warning about it at the top (I asked @brandon to add it when I requested the book).
I was thinking that it was not very visible, though, and now I wonder if either of you added the comment because you felt the same?
I guess I thought it would be polite, just in case somebody hadn’t seen it. Aren’t the reviews normally sorted by “most recent”? (Except for one’s own reviews, which seem to be at the top for easy reference) I’m not sure how far down the page people read when looking up books.
Also, I found those long cooking scenes boring, and the reason I kept reading was because of the promise of 18+ scenes. So it seemed important to confirm their existence.
Ooh, is it how it works? I just saw my review at the top and assumed that it went older to newer. Edit: wait, I just checked and on that page they are in the order I expected, so I don’t know
True, but I got desensitized through stuff like 本好き
Speaking of which, I hope you will survive the cooking parts in there…
Edit: ah, also in 聖女の魔力は万能です (series) | L29. In fact, the plot is very similar to おまけ overall.
I think so? Whenever I leave a review it stays at the top of my pages no matter how many other reviews there are. But everyone else’s reviews usually seem to be sorted by “most recent.”
I didn’t survive the cooking scenes in volume 1. I tried to get through that first volume by skimming the cooking scenes as quickly as possible, only glancing at the page just enough to confirm that no plot was happening. It wasn’t enough. I rage-quit volume 1 because of the stew. A few months later I decided to give it another chance and started volume 2. I watched a few episodes of the anime to catch up with what I missed, and that was the right choice for me. Volume 2 has had a lot of boring parts too, but this time I’m doing it with an audiobook so when it gets boring I just let my mind wander for a while.
I wish there was an abridged version of Honzuki with a tighter focus on the plot.
I’ve been reading 崩れる脳を抱きしめて | L34 and I can just feel the tears hanging over me ready to drop at any time. The doctor in this book really doesn’t understand professional boundaries though lmao
These boring scenes were some of my favorite parts of 本好き… But I guess I’m not at all a fan of fantasy epics/adventure series or anything so the only ones I really enjoy are the SoL fantasy series
Hahaha, thanks for the chuckle this morning. I hear you, and I heartily approve of any and all smutty slash fic. As far as I can tell, if they’re already acting like a couple, then that’s free reign to make it canon right there.
Yes! That was exactly my thinking! My eyes just glazed right over it the first couple of times, and I almost posted in the Natively discussion thread about having some sort of site-specific warning before I noticed it. It should probably be a nice bright red, if nothing else.
Glad your expectations could be met. I read @Naphthalene’s review initially, and by the halfway point of the book was wondering how things were possibly going to go down given how things had taken a turn for the super mundane, so I was glad I pushed on as well, haha.
So out of curiosity, is anyone currently reading something that they can’t track on Natively, but is substantial enough page-wise that they would like to keep track? I’ll likely begin reading bonus stories in the Flesh&Blood franchise, but they were all published in magazines/booklets/doujinshi/etc., which I can’t really add to Natively; I was wondering if anyone had any particular means they were using to keep track on Natively itself. I could just set up a separate spreadsheet or something, but it would be nice to keep all my JP page counts here, in one place.
I was thinking there was a proposal for something similar already in the Product Requests category, but I can’t find it. I was thinking someone had suggested a “blank book” of sorts that could be customized and added to your library, but maybe I dreamed it? Does any of that ring a bell @Megumin?
I was so annoyed with him. Also it’s kind of a theme in that authors books, or at least the one’s I’ve read / started reading.
Concerning as he’s a real life doctor…
A dummy/blank book was mentioned/discussed some time ago but it didn’t get far (thus no request).
I’m all for it, for having private dummy books for us to track random stuff, but not sure how @brandon feels about it.
why not? you can add individual aozora stories which often are only a couple of pages long, so why not SS of series? SS is such a big part of Japanese literature, methinks.
I guess the issue comes down to I would need to be able to add magazines, privately published doujinshi, publisher-specifc not-for-sale booklets, and the like to Natively. I mean, if @brandon’s fine with it I can send a flood his way, but I’m pretty sure he’d like to avoid that. I have added regularly published short story collections here myself; it’s just all the other stuff that’s the outlier.
For me definitely VNs. Last month I read something like 6000 or 7000 pages of book text worth of them, so my Natively reading really doesn’t capture the full scope of reading when I’m on those. Something like a blank book for that might be interesting
Yeah I’ve also read the first volume of 推理カルテ and it’s definitely true there as well though that one is a Sherlock based medical mystery series like House, and since Sherlock is like that it makes sense in the setup of the mystery series
We have added some magazines in the past but you’re right it does get a bit messy. TBH there’s a whole host of content that people are reading that are somewhat hard to fit into the website (news, visual novels, social media, magazines, digital app serial publications… etc).
Magazines, if they have amazon links, are one of the easier ones to include, but it’s not like I can easily pull all the magazine publications into one series, so they’ll always look incomplete and a bit of a mess. It’s a bit unfortunate, not sure the best policy for them.
I’m not opposed to doing a dummy book implementation, but it’s not totally straightforward. I’d also love to see if any other tracking sites allow you to do such a dummy tracking item. Simply for inspiration
Bookmeter allows you to do it.
Here’s the page to add a custom book: https://bookmeter.com/books/new
Basically, it just asks you for a bunch of info about the book (including image cover) and that’s it.
(There’s also a functionality to check if the book really isn’t available already, which I think is great)
(Also, you may need to be logged in to access the page, I haven’t tried while logged out)
Edit: it seems to be accessible even while logged out.
Yeah, I would love to see how quickly i can chip away at 逆転裁判 for instance…