[2024] 多読/extensive reading challenge

Pretty much not at all which is one of my big issues, but thats kinda just how I am when it comes to what I want to read. Like I’ve always been of the mindset that if something is in a cool fantasy world or has action id rather see it than read it. Like I read the sancuary arc of the re zero web novel and it was neat, but like I just enjoyed watching it play out in the anime a lot more (even though they cut hellas out). I figured there are a lot of fantasy words that I could learn, but none have really caught my eye. Like to me, if I’m reading then its because I care about the characters and their interactions since I feel like you get a much closer look at that in a book as opposed to a show. So I guess as a whole there reallllly hasn’t been like any story driven stuff I care about and I read a lot of slice of life and romcom. ofc not to say story driven stuff cant have deep characters and interactions between those characters.

I kinda thought about it this way at first, but realistically I think you still get plenty of reinforcement from the challenging stack.

I have only tried one mystery, hyouka, which was so boring that I dropped it and honestly it hardly counts as a mystery in the first place. I will definitely give the genre another try though, so do you have any suggestions? If possible, something with a lot of the story contained within the main characters would probably be best. Like opposed to some detective trying to find some master art thief, some shit where the culprit is like one member of the family and whatnot.

Right now I’m just planning on trying a few different things because I know theres a lot out there and theres a good chance some other harder stuff would interest me just as much. I’m almost done with 推し、燃ゆ and its been…pretty disappointing so far in terms of difficulty of the language, but thats a sample size of 1 lol so its not like I’ll just stop there.

One worry I did have though that seems to be true is difficulty in understanding the writing vs difficulty in understanding the meaning. Like sometimes sentences are very hard to understand and thats what I’m going for. But on the other hand, sometimes sentences or paragraphs are easy to understand from a language standpoint, but very hard to understand kinda what the author is getting at and and seeing the deeper meaning. Like kinda going literary analysis mode and understanding symbolism and reading between the lines. See…I don’t think I want that. I want to improve my language skills, not my literary analysis skills. So it feels like needing to sit and think about that stuff is almost counterproductive to my goal. And on top of that I don’t really give a shit about that deep stuff in the first place hahaha. In that sense, light novels are pretty much pure sentence comprehension since they really don’t try to get fancy with that stuff ime.

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I get what you mean by rather reading something more difficult and enjoying learning more ^^

Maybe Durarara!! or Baccano!! is something you can enjoy? Both have light fantasy elements and have an amazing cast of people that are all interesting in their own ways. Durarara is still a bit slice of life in the beginning but gets more interesting over time :blush: (the slice of life is also good tho)

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I actually have already seen both of those and they were fantastic, but I don’t know if I could get myself to read through it since I know what happens lol. Shinsekai yori is on the harder side too and I love it, but I’ve seen it 3 times already haha.

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Baccano only animated like one novel of the many right? You could look up which part of the story they animated and read the rest of it :wink:

Shinsekai Yori is one I enjoyed a lot as well! I read the manga and my bf saw the anime. Between those two the differences are significant so I don’t know how true they were to the novel. Probably a lot of the same with some different outcomes, not enough if you have don’t want to read what you already saw

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Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the other books are completely useless, I guess is what I mean.
Come to think of it, this reminds me of the word efficiency conversation we had the other day :slight_smile:
There might be a theoretical “best”, most efficient sequence of books to read that’s so far lined up just fine with what you were reading anyway), but I don’t think books outside of that order aren’t valuable too.

Sadly, I haven’t read enough yet to really have any good suggestions! Someday…
The one I’m reading right now, 本陣殺人事件 might not be un-boring enough for example, since it’s mostly just details described in an interesting way, but I like it a lot, and there’s a grisly murder, a gaggle of suspects in a rich family, a mysterious three-fingered man, and a lot of specific architecture and history concepts grounding the story in a time and place.

江戸川 乱歩 might be an option too - like you were saying about “hard to understand sentences, not hard to understand literature,” his stories are usually (from what I’ve read) fairly straightforward, but told stylistically enough to be very engaging (think along the lines of his namesake, Poe), particularly if you’re up for the eerie and ghastly.

(but I’m basically drawing from a very shallow well of stuff I’ve read though, so I can’t tailor recs any better than that!)

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Ah yeah I don’t disagree at all, you may have misread but the problem isn’t that I wouldnt be improving my reading, just not doing it as fast as I have been. I’ve got no doubt that if I just read what I want right now, I can learn anything I would learn otherwise realistically, it would just take more time. I think I’ve decided that I’ll continue to read what I want, but at the same time I’m just putting in more effort looking for harder things that seem interesting to me so that I could possibly kill two birds with one stone.

Sounds interesting, I’ll check it out!

Ohh, I was not aware of that. In that case I’ll look into that, thanks!

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I just looked it up. Roughly the first 3 of the 22 novels available are covered in the anime :grin:

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Wait what the hell…I thought that the story came to a pretty nice close. Interestingg…

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I’ve only seen the anime, but understanding is that the anime is a fairly close adaption of the original novel, while the manga is not at all a close adaption. Just looking at the manga cover makes me cringe since it’s not at all in the same tone as the anime.

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I thought the manga was better story-wise. There were some questions regarding the middle section of the anime that were answered really well in the manga xD Maybe I should read the novel then to make a good comparison between the three

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I’m back to plug another Sayaka Murata book! We’re planning to start on August 14th and we’re currently deliberating about the schedule, so if you think you might want to read this novel, this would be the time to get involved :grin:

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Since I know there was a book club for it on here, if anyone liked コンビニ人間 and wants something similar, I found 推し、燃ゆ to feel very similar and better done. Not saying you’ll feel the same, but at the very least I think you’ll definitely like it. Wasn’t exactly the type of literature I like necessarily, but I know a lot of people on here probably would find it to be their cup of tea.

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Today I finished 伯爵と妖精 14! This puts me only one book away from my yearly goal, so I am thinking thoughts.

I make my goal bigger, or I could add a different kind (read certain books or types of books, read in certain ways, etc), or I could just pat myself on the back (when I hit 30) and then keep going without changing anything. Making my goal bigger isn’t appealing to me, as I’m happy at the pace I’m reading now, so I don’t need to increase it, but it’d be okay if I didn’t read quite as much in the latter half of the year, so increasing it might make me unnecessarily anxious to keep up. I don’t want to make my goal to read certain books, as it’s 2021 and I read what I want, but I’m thinking about making a new goal post-book-30 where I change something about how I read. Specifically, maybe I’ll try not looking up words? At all? A lot of the words I look up now, I don’t need to look up. I’m confirming things I know, or adding nuance, or just wanting to make sure I have such an interesting word in my anki. There are times I look up things because I genuinely need to, but they’re in the minority. Looking up a lot of words (a lot comparative to what I really need to look up) has become a habit. And, really, I like the habit in general. I like getting new words to add to my deck even if I won’t learn them for a while, and I like being sure of what is being said, etc. But it might be worthwhile to take 5-6 months to break that habit, and then turn the tap back on more gently, being more picky about when I pause in my reading to look things up. Also, I’m kind of curious whether the little pauses every page or two are like mini-breaks for my brain, and whether my reading stamina might actually go down if I take them out. :sweat_smile:

I’m still thinking about whether I’ll do this or not. My anki system is feeling particularly fine-tuned right now, so there’s not a need for change, but it might be interesting and a good challenge.

Ah, I forgot the most important thing! Which is of course this picture of ニコ, my favorite cat-shaped 妖精:

伯爵と妖精 picture, no spoilers

(THE FISH. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:)

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I might actually read that soon, mostly because of all the literary works out there, it’s on the shorter side and of course because it sounds interesting. Reading a 900-page Murakami book always feels like a commitment. Since I know 推し、燃ゆ is only about 150 pages, my motivation to pick it up has skyrocketed.

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Has anyone successfully added 私の押しは悪役令嬢, the light novel, on bookmeter? The search only brings up the manga and a bunch of other books with similar keywords.

I grabbed the ASIN from Amazon and searched with that. Got the correct result right away.

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Indeed it is on the shorter side, but in case you didn’t see my other post, its a lot of text so it would probably take a bit longer to read than another book of the same length.

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Thanks! I didn’t know I could just search by those. :sweat_smile:

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Me neither actually! I usually search by ISBN, but I guess ebooks don’t have those. I was actually a bit surprised it worked!

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Problem is those kindle versions are never hard to find, but the normal ones are :sweat_smile:. I can’t fathom how the search can’t find the books with the exact correct string. It seems to lack some database which can’t be accessed through the search?

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