I actually liked the anime of The Garden of Words even more than those two, at least conceptually. It’s short but of course there’s also a novel - 言の葉の庭 - which Amazon says it’s 320 pages long so probably it expands more on the topic. No glowing reviews on Natively but 4.5/5 on Amazon JP out of 1000+ ratings, so…
(and all three also have associated mangas, of course )
As for myself, I’m now 90% leaning towards changing books tomorrow when my own “readathon” begins. Just for the 24h, mind you, then I’d get back to the current book I’m reading. We shall see…
Happy reading to all those who’ve already started!
I decided to update my home post to have some more concrete goals based on what I’ve been pondering in my head for a bit. Here’re my thoughts for tomorrow’s reading:
Readthon Options Mandatory
Read + listen to one hour of 穏やか貴族の休暇のすすめ。 | L32 (this is a must; been trying to get in one hour of audio every day).
LN Options
Read a whole bunch of FLESH & BLOOD 18 | L35. I’ve been trying to get better about reading a little each day, but only been partially successful, and I’d like having a chunk of it done.
Dinner and social break. During the last session I kept falling asleep and I also took voluntary and involuntary breaks to deal with kitty.
This is definitely the slowest I’ve read in years. Although it wasn’t like normal reading. Maybe in April, I’ll try a full day of reading SO or SBR to see how much progress I can make without doing club admin and full vocab sheeting. I can do about 60p in an hour when I get into it
I’ll do a final update tomorrow or so and see how much of SBR I read in between tooth brushing and sleep. Tapping out for now though since I have work tomorrow
Aaahhhhh it’s getting hard now.
Screaming babies and the fact that I’m past sleeping time and have been in this airport for more than 5 hours is getting to me
I’ve spiced it up a bit. I finished ホリミヤ 13, and read a bit of Spy X Family 1 (the vocab is as hard as I remember… Helped in bits by the stuff I remember from the anime). I’ve also got through more chunks of both novels. So far I’m not liking chapter 3 of 秒速5 as much as the other two, but it’s still early days. Ill try to finish this novel in around sleeping and other stuff, as my main priority.
Total stats so far:
Time reading: 5hrs 52mins
Novel pages: 132(!!! Approaching record breaking numbers very quickly! There’s quite a few blank pages in-between chapters in that, but any excuse to bump the numbers up)
Manga pages: 208
Pokemon: not yet
I’ll probably update one more time before my next flight, and then will be dark for a long time before posting my roundup when I land. Hope you’re all enjoying this as much as I am (read: was prior to screaming baby)!
Update time! 2 hours total so far, which is not much but it means I’ve already surpassed my goal of 1 hour for Japanese today. Apparently my reading endurance for Japanese is higher than I thought, which is great. I was planning on also reading in Korean today, but since Japanese is going so well, I think I’ll move Korean to tomorrow or Saturday, just to see how far I can go today with Japanese.
I read another one of the Sakura Japanese graded readers. Considering this one is actually split into three parts, I’m hoping I’ll be able to read the two other parts today? It’ll be a nice challenge.
Got up this morning and read manga for about an hour and a half - 22 pages in カードキャプターさくら V3 for this week’s offshoot book club reading, and the first 3 chapters (61 pages) in Major V8. Technically I have another half an hour before my Readathon hours are over, but the first game of the March Madness basketball tournament has started, and I’m going to be too distracted to read.
Totals for this Readathon:
小学館ジュニア文庫 名探偵コナン 黒鉄の魚影 (Light Novel) - 15 pages + 4 pages of movie images with captions (I’m counting the latter as manga pages ) in 2h 45min
Naruto V1 - 60 pages in 1h 10min
カードキャプターさくら V3 - 22 pages in 30min
Major V8 - 61 pages in 55min Total: 162 pages in 5h 20min
Nowhere near as much time or pages as I did in the winter, but I was expecting that. And I achieved my goal of starting my first LN!
I hope so! I’m proud of myself, for being able to read a novel in Japanese at all, of course. But I’m a speed reader in English (I’ve been known to get through a 300page novel in 3hrs or less), so it feels very weird to be reading this slowly!
In any case - to everyone reading now, and everyone reading over the next few days, enjoy and good luck!
So much fun to see so many updates already, can’t wait to join!
I will be starting tomorrow (Friday for me) until Saturday, now that it’s close enough I know what I will be reading so this will be my home post.
I have one Light Novel I started and one manga series I want to finish, I will be working on those, expect when Saturday starts, then I will read my Book Club reads (if time allows, I’ll also go back to the other reads afterwards)
Quick update from me: So far I’ve read 33 pages of 献灯使 | L39 which took me 3:35 h; I finished the second short story and started the third one, and I think now it’s time to switch to another book.
I’m actually quite pleased with a reading speed of ~10 pages per hour for a L39 book (although it doesn’t feel that difficult tbh but sometimes it just uses a lot of words that I am not familiar with).
I’m at work right now, but I used my lunch break to start reading!!
I’m reading the current advanced book club book, 風立ちぬ. I read for about 25 minutes, and I’ll look at exact page numbers later but I think I read like three? Mann some sentences I was stuck on for a while, but I think I got them figured out haha. I found some vocab to add to Anki later as well!
Now I’m just looking forward to finishing work, going home, eating, and then I’ll be reading until it’s bedtime!!
Started reading first thing upon waking up, and read 2.8k characters from 逝く夏と還る秋. My goal was 3k but I’m calling this close enough because I finished a chapter and I don’t want to start a whole new chapter just to stop after one page. Now I’m off to the gym to regain some energy.
Update 4:
Using up all my 10 mins of free plane wifi to complain about the fact that I got seated directly behind the same crying baby from the airport lounge. This is going to be fun.
In more fun news, I hit 150 pages from novels! Things are going to slow down a lot because I’m hitting extreme brain fog and need to sleep. Also I did 45 mins of Pokemon. See you on the other side!
I’ll be starting soon, since I’m about to go to the airport. I planned to read my Korean book, but I finished it a couple of days ago (I got really into it and binge-read to the end… oops).
For my next read, I started volume 32 of 本好きの下剋上 (LN) and read about 42% yesterday. I hope to finish the volume today as part of the readathon.
I switched to 風立ちぬ・美しい村 | L30?? and read 15 pages in 1:10h. I reached a point where it feels like it will become very sad very quickly, and I did not want to read that right now, so I switched to 1Q84 BOOK1〈4月‐6月〉後編 | L34 and read 6 pages in 30 minutes. And with that I’m calling it a day
Technically I can read until tomorrow morning 8 am, so let’s see whether I can manage any
Third update of the day! I just finished the second part of a three part Sakura graded reader. My reading speed was faster this time, which I’m definitely happy about.
I’d planned for today to focus on 玉藻の恋, and yet somehow I’ve done absolutely none of that so far. Talk about plans being derailed. I did start my day today at 12pm however, so technically I could read more tonight, and tomorrow morning as well. For now, I’ll focus on finishing that last part of the graded reader, and hopefully tomorrow morning I’ll be able to fit in a little of 玉藻の恋.
I will post properly later. Did my reading yesterday, went ok but not quite as much as I’d hoped. Thought I’d fit some reading in this morning but nope!
back to the drawing board
not sure it was really smart to commit to reading the new ABC starting in one week 
(although it doesn’t feel that difficult tbh but sometimes it just uses a lot of words that I am not familiar with).
