[2024] 多読/extensive reading challenge

You think Amazon would do a price match if I asked? :joy:

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Wait, so you got coins back by paying with only coins? That sounds wild. Coinception? I surely thought that should not work. But they do say on this page that.

Even if you make a payment using coins, coins will be granted based on your membership rank.

So I guess I should use the coins while the campaign is still on to get MOAR coins. Doesn’t that become a geometric series? So if I buy stuff with 1000 yen I get back 500, then 250 etc. So basically from that purchase you get 1000+500+250+125+62.5… and with the rule for geometric series the sum converges to 2. So basically with a thousand yen purchase you get to buy stuff with double the amount! Is this the way to exploit Bookwalker? :grin:

My checklist is starting to go a bit out of hand with almost 150 items… Sometimes I feel the notifications are pretty random.

Edit: Just reread the sentence and it doesn’t say anything about the coins you get back from the campaign. Guess I spoke too soon.

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It worked for Kindle points, I remember when I was buying HameFura 1-9 and I was waiting anxiously for the points to register (it takes a few minutes sometimes) so I can buy next volumes :grin:
And it didn’t matter it was a 50% points back promo.

This is what was so surprising to me, since I thought the same as you. But yep - the +50% coin promotion, like other coin stuff applies equally to coin purchases and credit card transactions.

This was a… powerful thing to realize after already spending a whole lot of money that I thought was going to go significantly less far!
Heck, when I made the initial purchase I didn’t even know one coin = one yen, I assumed it was less since I ended up with so many, so it was a nice surprise all around.

I spent a lot of time the last couple weeks ogling books and making a checklist. The coin largesse somehow didn’t make a dent in the number of items on the checklist… but it did significantly lower the average level of “gotta get it”-ness to a safe “that would be pretty cool to have sometime”!

Watch out though! 2021/3/24 09:59 in Tokyo is… 4 and a half hours from now (did I get that right?). And the coins take a little while to trigger so the cascade will be significantly less powerful soon.

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Oh, wow! They are usually always until 23:59 of the date given, so I would definitely have missed that. Thanks! I guess it’s back to browsin and deciding what to buy :sweat_smile:.

I offer the information neutrally with neither exhortation nor judgment. :smile:
There’s definitely something devious about that sale in particular… I think seeing “the whole store is half off” would feel less like getting away with something than doing the coin from coins thing, even if the math works out the same. So the coins lure you in even more than a discount.
but I still bought some more stuff because we talked about it so much…

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Manga is even more devious, since it’s easy to buy stuff you can read pretty quickly. I have a few series I could buy the finishing volumes… Or branch out, but then I’ll just feel annoyed reading a lot of stuff partway…

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Yeah, I was doomed the moment amazon was out of stock on a manga series’ later volumes after I finally got around to reading the first few volumes I’d bought and wanted to read more.
Now I’m too anxious at leaving series partially acquired, and too lenient at letting myself alleviate that anxiety… The “put all in cart” button is a powerful one.

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These coins, man. In the end I think I doubled the amount I was going to spend (we are still talking quite small here). Those free mangas are such a trap, I had the three first volumes of a series and read a few. Bought the rest of the series because I can’t really leave it unfinished; I’m not even sure if it was that good, either :sweat_smile:.

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Also in ポーション頼み 5. I still can’t understand why that word isn’t on WK. Someone should tell the team to start covering common words.

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Just finished the third book in the 魔女の宅急便 series. :broom:

Stats 📊


Total time spent = 10 hours
Audiobook length (for comparison) = 6.8 hours
Speed vs audiobook = 0.68
Speed for last book read (魔女の宅急便(2)) = 0.53

I have changed the graph up a bit to reflect reading speed relative to audiobook length because it’s a bit more meaningful than seconds per loc was. From chapter 5 onwards, I stopped looking up every word I was even slightly unsure of and only looked up words that I wasn’t sure I knew the reading of or hindered my understanding of the sentence. I’m inching closer to a comfortable reading speed, which is exciting!

Review 📖 (no spoilers)

I wasn’t as big a fan of this one as the previous two. The narrative structure deviated, we no longer had a self-contained adventure per chapter. Instead, there was more of an overarching storyline and there was even an antagonist introduced too! I’m not sure I really liked that, I was left wondering what was going on and what the antagonist’s intentions were (which I think was intended, not just because of my poor Japanese). But it wasn’t like a fun mystery I wanted to unravel, just confusing. And it wasn’t as charming. I hope this is not a case of the series maturing as Kiki ages. :slightly_frowning_face:

I’m going to take a break for a couple weeks or so and start 魔女の宅急便 (4)- I just hope it’s more in the style of the first two than the last one.

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I was very curious what happens in the next volumes, but didn’t want to actually read them, so I’m very grateful for your reviews :bowing_woman:

Question

I know you said that antagonist intentions are confusing, but what actually this antagonist does? Yes, I want spoilers.

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I ended up reading volumes 4-6 of ポーション頼み in err close succession.

The onsen part in volume 4, which made me stop reading the series in the first place, was extremely short and had no real fan service. Somehow, the men in the group still followed the usual trope and tried to peep, but that really makes no sense in context, which makes it extra weird.
Anyway, volumes 4 and 5 generally follow the plot loop I mentioned in a previous post. Volume 6 was more adventurous and introduced a 70 years time slip. When the main character comes back, the previous cast is really old (and partly dead) and the book basically focuses on “what happened during that time”. Then the main character start traveling again, without them obviously. So it was a good way to make a soft reset.
Overall, still a fun read. Honestly the only thing I found annoying was that the main character kept complaining about being flat chested. It felt a bit much (and irrelevant), especially since she could just use her powers to change her appearance if she wanted to. Anyway, that’s easy to ignore.

There’s one more volume published. If I read it today and finish 鹿の王2 tomorrow, I will have reached 100 活字 books read in a year (aka the @Kumirei challenge). On the other hand, I don’t like that series so much that I have to read the next volume right now — it’s just that it would make it possible to read a volume in a single day. Otherwise, I can still complete the challenge by reading 3 books in the next 8 days or 4 books in the next 16 days, which sounds much more reasonable. :thinking:
Then I am free from this curse and I can start reading manga again :upside_down_face:

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Looking at my bookshelf for inspiration, I realized that a bunch of non-light novel series I like (かくりよの宿飯, わたしの幸せな結婚, 紅霞後宮物語) are all published by 富士見L文庫. Innnnnteresting :thinking:

Edit: those 3 are the top, 3rd and 4th best seller of that label. I guess I should try the one in second place. :upside_down_face:

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Finished 伯爵と妖精 4! I thought I’d read something else after 3, but 4 sucked me right in.

My hold came in on 青桐 (inspired by the Akutagawa Prize reading challenge), so I started it last night. It’s possible it won’t suit my ‘it’s 2021 and I read what I want’ mentality, but if so I’ll put it back on hold set to activate in 2022. :grin:

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Aha I’m glad there’s someone who can live vicariously through me!

Spoilers

So, in the third book Kiki is 16 years old. There’s a new witch in town, Keke, who’s 12. Except, is she a witch? That’s one of the mysteries. She forces herself to live with Kiki and Osono and claims she is a witch but is not very forthcoming with what magical powers she has. In fact, whenever someone asks her a question, her usual response is it deflect it and ask a question back. It makes it quite frustrating to read, especially as I’m already lacking in confidence with the language so I like to have solid answers to confirm I’m understanding the text correctly.

The reason I describe her as an antagonist is because of the effect she has on Kiki. Keke kind of waltzes into town with a haughty demeanor and wins the hearts of everyone else, including people Kiki cares about (Tombo in particular). It also seems like Keke is pulling some strings in the background to undermine Kiki, like making sure she can’t hang out with Tombo. But nothing is for certain and Kiki doubts herself as well as whether she should even envy Keke as she’s only a child. Honestly, I found it pretty annoying that neither Keke nor Kiki were very open about their true feelings. Only until right at the end. But that might be a cultural difference.

Anyway, Keke leaves town and moves back home at the end of the book. So hopefully we’ve seen the last of her and the disruption she caused.

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Hit the halfway point for my yearly goal. After 14 light novels, I finally added in something else by finishing my reread of 容疑者Xの献身. :+1:

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I’ve ended up in the middle of a lot of things:

  • I noticed that if I hurried up a but with 週刊プロレス I could be 1/4 of the way to all of my listed numeric goals 1/4 of the way through the year, so I’ve been churning through those faster than usual. I think I might be able to get to where I’m actually caught up and reading them each week right after I pick them up, which would feel cool!

  • I’m right in the middle of 放浪息子, roughly where the english editions stop. I’m enjoying it, and I think I can get with the flow of the story a lot better now in Japanese than in English X years ago. But at some point I realized a low-key passage through the years probably wasn’t best read in one giant binge so I slowed down.

  • I got over the hump with デジタル・デビル物語 女神転生 and have been enjoying it quite a bit as a totally solid dungeon crawl with some interesting systems and a good vibe. I want to keep playing it but that kind of intense dungeon crawl is a very specific experience I’m not in the mood for all the time, so unusually for me these days, I’m gonna try to keep plugging away at it but not focus on it exclusively.

  • I’ve read a chapter or two of 世界から猫が消えたなら, enough to learn the premise and… it’s a surprising one! At first I thought it was going to be a straightforward story about cancer but then the devil shows up. Looking forward to reading more.

  • Hungry for a more language-focused game than Digital Devil Story to balance it out, I started ダンガンロンパ 希望の学園と絶望の高校生 on Steam. I’ve been curious about this for a long time but avoided learning pretty much anything concrete about it, so it’ll be interesting to learn what it actually is. I’ve only just barely started it, but the presentation seems fun. I’ll try not to let it overtake Digital Devil Story too much.

  • One of the things I got on bookwalker is some issues of ハルタ, the magazine that publishes Dungeon Meshi! I’m curious to try the manga in a magazine experience, and if nothing else, reading new Dungeon Meshi sooner is worth the price of admission to me. So far I’ve enjoyed quite a bit getting a taste of the different series reading through the magazine.

I’m planning on posting more about each of those when I finish them, but I have no idea what order they’ll get finished in at this point! So that’s my status for now. My focus is… a bit scattered! And that’s not counting the things in English…

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Curious to know how far along you are now? I’m guessing further than I am LOL :joy:. I’m still working on book 3 which was my new year’s resolution. About 2/3s of the way there… :slight_smile:

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はたらく細胞 (Cells at Work) Volume 1 is currently free on Amazon. By far the best anime from last year (at least in my humble opinion).

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