I think it’s working now! (in all aspects you mentioned)
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Yeah I think that’s a better behaviour.
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Coming in after the fact, I was very confused by the confusion about who-replied-to-who… since brandon already fixed the settings, and it seemed so clear, haha.
(Still confused as to why the original post and another by the same author was deleted though. Both seemed perfectly fine to me.)
Today I finished the first short story of 世にも奇妙な商品カタログ 1 インスタント死神・友だちクジ他 | L24, and on top of that also chapter 12 of 夜カフェ 1 | L24! Nearly done with that second book.
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I’m also read 夜カフェ 1 | L24 with my bookclub–what do you think of it so far?
I’m halfway through chapter 1 and I’m wondering if Yayako is actually a bad person and how long it takes for Hanabi to run away and live with her aunt lol
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It’s a nice story with some sweet moments! I would’ve been fine without the handicraft (very slight spoiler) sections, haha. And while I don’t think I’ll continue reading the series, I enjoyed reading it, and thought it was a great first light novel for me.
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I just finished the second volume of 聖女の魔力は万能です (series) | L29, and I’m loving it. It’s not the most consistent series in terms of quality, but it’s the most fun I had reading in quite a few months.
Moving on to volume 3.
There are 8 volumes available too! It’s pretty rare for me to find a light novel that I really enjoy with more than 2 published books.
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Today, I am reading 時をかける少女 | L25. I tried to read this a couple of months ago as one of my first books since it was so popular, but at that time I felt like it was too hard for me so I ended up getting too frustrated and dropped it. Now that I return to it, I find that it is fairly easy and I’m enjoying it too! The feeling of progress is most pleasing.
I guess months of pushing through LNs that I didn’t really even like finally paid off. 
Though, that’s not to say that it wasn’t an enjoyable experience, you can still have fun reading garbage from time to time.
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Today I’m reading 夜カフェ because it sounds cute and so I voted for it for a book club. I haven’t gotten very far, but it seems interesting so far!
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I am also reading 夜カフェ 1 | L24. I’m finishing up chapter 10 today (2 pages left) and then I’ll get started on chapter 11
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I’ve been meaning to read 純文学 again and decided on the critically acclaimed 流浪の月 | L27 (2020 本屋大賞 winner) since there’s a heavy discount for the kindle version thanks to the movie with the same title coming out two months ago.
So far it’s quite an easy read and the story is pretty slow, just what you can expect from this genre. Hopefully I can finish this rather quickly.
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so i am reading 夜カフェ 1 | L24, 三毛猫ホームズの推理 | L33 and ふらいんぐうぃっち 2 | L19 shuffling what i am in the mood for, and i have to say i like all of them.
though i am kind of surprised that there are 5 levels of difference between 夜カフェ and ふらいんぐうぃっち, because they seem pretty similar in difficulty, to me. The only difference i can see is that the manga has full furigana, and has less text overall due to its medium. the book has more text due to having both dialogue and narration, but those are the only differences i’ve seen.
tbh, ふらいんぐうぃっち seems to have a more difficult vocabulary from what i have seen, though to be fair i did finish 1 volume of it while i only finished 1 chapter of 夜カフェ 
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Today I’m reading 極主夫道 5 | L25 and maybe some ポケットモンスタースペシャル 1 | L22 or https://learnnatively.com/book/e64ff658e3/ depending on what I’m in the mood for later
I agree, they’re pretty similar in difficulty imo except for the amount of text (b/c of the medium). I just checked the gradings and it looks like nobody’s actually graded them against each other yet. When I grade them I’ll probably mark them as similar tbh
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I’ve also been finding that manga feel as difficult as novels rated 5 levels higher. It’s consistent too. Every manga I’ve read that was first graded by other people feels way harder to me than similarly graded novels, in nearly every single difficulty factor: vocab range, variety of grammar expressions, dialect, words misspelled so you can’t look them up and have to “just know it,” etc. I’ve racked my brain over and over again trying to understand why, and the best guess I can come up with is that everyone assumes it’s okay for manga to be much harder since there’s less text?
But it’s consistent, at least. The manga difficulty levels mostly make sense compared to other manga, even if I can’t relate it to novels/children’s books. To tell the truth I thought I was the only one who felt a big discrepancy between manga and novel gradings. So since I felt like an outlier, the way I’ve been dealing with it for gradings (especially if I’m the first reader) is to try to only grade things compared to other material of the same type.
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That’s not how I graded manga myself, but that makes a lot of sense to me, based on my experience. I could read ハヤテのごとく! 1 | L27 back when I was early N4 but I would never have been abled to manage a novel of the same level (let alone 5 level harder).
I had to look up a huge portion of what was written, but the context from images made it much easier, and the fact that there isn’t that much text compared to a novel means that I made progress in the story at a decent speed (and, psychologically, that’s how I could push through)
That does make it hard to compare novels and manga, indeed. I take the easy way out and just skip those comparisons 
Edit: in terms of the text alone, I agree it corresponds to books of higher level, though.
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I thought it was just me! I don’t read many manga at all but ミステリと言う勿れ 1 | L30 would probably be a ~34 if a novel, and I was gifted several volumes of 宝石の国 (series) | L30 which, admittedly I decided not to read because I couldn’t remain interested enough to finish the first volume, strikes me again as something in the low 30s, not the high 20s.
I think it really does just have to do with the perceived difficulty given the number of lookups needed per volume is likely fewer (less text, more context).
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It’s slow building, but it gets better!
(I say that, but I haven’t read past volume 4… not that I don’t want to, though, I would just need an infinite amount of time per day to read everything I want to read)
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This is a really interesting topic of conversation, which I’m finding hard to think about. It’s just so hard to compare manga and novels because of the difference in length. For example, on one hand I think うらら迷路帖 (series) | L32 being level 32 is fair. If it was truly a 37, it would be harder than any novel I’ve read, which isn’t the case. That said, occasionally the series has full-blown classical Japanese. Given the sparsity of text in the manga it’s not a big deal, but if it was happening for paragraphs at a time, 10-20 times in a novel that would be another matter entirely.
As a second example, とんがり帽子のアトリエ (series) | L28 being level 28 also highlights the short length issue. It’s a series that’s straightforward most of the time, but can have insane spikes in difficulty from time to time. When those spikes are a few pages, once or twice a volume it’s not a big deal. Scale that to novel length and without visual aids, and it could be a big deal.
I guess it’s good that I don’t often do difficulty comparisons between manga and novels. 
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Still on the topic of manga vs novel (maybe we should move that conversation to a different topic?), I wondered about the manga adaptation of light novels. It was pretty interesting to see.
For two light novels I know, it was indeed a 6 level difference .
However, for 薬屋のひとりごと, the difference is much larger: 10 levels with the shojo manga version and 7 levels with the seinen version… Maybe because of the presence/absence of furigana? But anyway, I guess the Chinese-inspired word usage was less pervasive in the manga version, so that’s another reason for the difficulty to go down.
That’s probably a biased sample, but I guess it does suggest that there is at least a ~5 level (perceived?) decrease in difficulty by replacing descriptions by images.
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A few days ago, I dropped コーヒーが冷めないうちに and started reading 義理生活 (sorry @cat !). I haven’t been active in Japanese since I was adjusting back to the school life. Will make it a point to post on the forum more often 
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Ha, nothing to apologize for. I drop books all the time and usually am reading 2-3 on rotation. I have no room to judge in the slightest
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