As someone who enjoyed Aria, but generally doesn’t enjoy slower paced, “relaxing” anime and manga, do you think I’d enjoy ヨコハマ買い出し紀行?
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Unfortunately I haven’t read Aria yet and don’t know a lot about it, so I’m not sure I can answer that well!
ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 definitely isn’t fast-paced though! So I guess it just depends: what did you like about Aria and what are you looking for?
If a comic about a likable android (in a basically human sort of way) going about her day managing a very sleepy cafe and going on trips in a future world sounds appealing, then it’d at least be worth a shot! The airy art style and fantasy/sci-fi tinged world do look similar to Aria to my untrained eye.
One difference might be urban/ruralness? In the world of ヨコハマ買い出し紀行, urbanicity and population seem to have declined significantly, so there’s only a handful of people around and they all live fairly far from each other. So it might be even quieter than Aria, which looks like it takes place in a city?
I do notice this in Aria’s wikipedia page:
Each chapter is a slice of life episode of Akari’s exploration of the worlds of gondoliering, Neo-Venezia, and Aqua itself.[6] Amano frequently uses several pages of lush art to depict an environment, showing the wonder of both everyday activities as well as one-of-a-kind events. It has been described by reviewers as very similar in tone and effect to Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō.[6][8][9][10]
The amount of citations supporting that is very funny to me - I guess they must be similar! (and that second sentence does sound strikingly like ヨコハマ買い出し紀行)
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I liked the sci-fi and fantasy aspects (and the cats!). Plus the cast being mostly female helps. 
But I even found Aria to be slow when reading it and found it dragging in parts.
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the sci-fi/fantasy aspects and mostly female cast are definitely there! (although I don’t remember any cats…). But yeah, it’s a slow one. It might as well be “smell the roses: the manga.”
I dunno if I’d say it drags though. It reads pretty quickly since there aren’t that many words, and the arc is more about time passing and scenery changing than it is about plot, so it’s not like there’s big suspenseful things you want it to hurry up and get to around the corner… YMMV though!
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Nope! I only heard about the series recently (2018?) thanks to someone recommending it on the forum. I grabbed the first two books for free on booklive back in 2019, and have been waiting for the series to get picked by the intermediate book club… but odds are that it won’t happen, so I just went ahead and read the volumes I had.
Looking it up, it was a recommendation from @seanblue !
Speaking of which, I forgot to mention it, but it gave me strong ARIA vibes indeed! It’s less 摩訶不思議, but I didn’t miss it. The series has its own charm.
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十歳のきみへ―九十五歳のわたしから (日野原重明 / Shigeaki Hinohara)
This is a book written by the famous doctor Shigeaki Hinohara at the age of 95, addressed to 4th graders. In the book, he shares his most important lessions in life. For example how one of his worst experience in his life - suffering from tuberculosis and being bedridden for 9 months at the age of 20 - eventually helped him a lot in his carreer as a doctor because he was able to be much more empathetic.
In the book, Hinohara talks about what “live span” means - what matters is not how many years you live, but how you fill the empty vessel that is your life. He talks about his experiences in the war and the post-war period when everyone lived in poverty. He also talks about the nature of wars and apologizes that his generation was unable to create a peaceful world.
Since it’s addressed to 10 year-olds, the book is written in a simple style. Hinohara also addreses potential questions the children might have and doesn’t make it sound like a lecture or a sermon.
I personally found it quite engaging to read and in parts inspiring. Especially when Hinohara pressed the reader to question how much (or little) of their lives they spend on others, not on themselves, it made me think. Hinohara proposes that spending time for others, even in the most mundane ways, is the best thing you can do, although our society and busy daily lives make it easy to lose sight of what’s important. He also talks about the importance of empathy and forgiveness.
The last part of the book consists of letters children have written to Hinohara after he held lectures in their schools. I loved reading these and how receptive the children were to Hinohara’s teachings, reflecting on how selfish they had been in arguments/fights with their siblings, or how they realized they should visit their grandparents more often and other ways they can contribute to the happiness of others.
夜市 (恒川 光太郎 / Kōtarō Tsunekawa)
I wrote about it in detail here. tl;dr: I liked the setting and the general premise, but wasn’t fond of the way it was written or how the story was constructed. I didn’t read the second story in the book.
がばいばあちゃんの笑顔で生きんしゃい！ (島田洋七 / Yōshichi Shimada)
I’ve proclaimed my love for “佐賀のがばいばあちゃん” several times, a biographical story about the childhood years Shimada spent at his grandmother’s place in Saga in the 1950/60s. It still the most charming and touching Japanese book I’ve read to date.
This is a semi-continuation or rather a collection of episodes from the time period covered in 佐賀のがばいばあちゃん. Each chapter focuses on one particular aspect of the life philosophy of Shimada’s grandmother to find joy in a life in poverty. It lacks the catharsis of the main book that focuses more on Shimada’s personal development, but was nevertheless very heartwarming, funny and inspiring to read. Shimada has written several more of these and I’ll probably read those, too, at some point.
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I started reading 魔法少女育成計画 book 2, and so far it’s a bit rough. Not writing quality-wise. I think overall the writing quality (primarily referring to sentence structure) is fine. There are just so so so many words I don’t know. I read book 1 in late 2019 in paperback, which was a complete nightmare. Reading book 2 on kindle is super helpful, but it’s still harder than I’d like considering it’s been a year and a half since I read the first book. Hopefully it gets easier as I get through more of the book, though honestly I doubt it’ll get much easier. Also, I’ve only met two of the sixteen magical girls, and I’m a bit worried I’ll have trouble keeping track of all the characters. Guess I’ll see soon enough!
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I’ve got season tickets to my local women’s basketball team ( 
), and I need something to read on timeouts and at halftime, etc. I’ve been doing 伯爵と妖精 but it is comically ill-suited to the context. I am way too invested in everything going on in the story, and big things happen frequently, and then I have to stop reading in the middle of a kidnapping or marriage proposal or something and it is not working. (Or, it is working, because I’m reading without problems, but I want to change to something I can more easily dip in and out of, not one where there’s a big dramatic moment and I have to fight with myself to put the book down when the timeout’s over.) I don’t think either of my book club novels would be much better. Manga?? Maybe a 4コマ? Or … English? I’m afraid to break the English-reading dam but this might be a case for it. I could also do flashcards on my phone, I guess. Or I could lug along A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. 
Right now I’m leaning toward manga, I think. I’m open to ideas, if anyone has any!
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ゆるキャン△ Vol. 7? :3 We have one week left until we’ve finished the volume with the book club 
This is your chance to catch up 
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I mean, the most befitting manga to read would probably be ハイキュー but I guess you’ve read that one already?
You could also read a very very hard book, where at least I need to take frequent breaks to recover from my exhaustion. Then you only need to match those recovery phases with the game phases 
But maybe if the breaks are too short I personally would not be getting anywhere because if it was so difficult to keep in my brain, I would probably forget what I had been reading about… So maybe not a good solution either.
Or you could read a slice-of-life book that does not feature any kidnappings or marriage proposals or fights or the like… Hmmm.
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That’s volleyball, not Basketball.^^
Maybe one of the classics, like 黒子のバスケ or slam dunk could work?
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Oh dang really? 
Now you know how much I know about the manga…
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@Redglare … That’s a really good idea! It’s super low-key, I’m not invested in it (but do kind of want to catch up with the book club), and it’s easy to pause and pick back up.
@NicoleIsEnough @Belerith I think I would avoid sports stories in general! I don’t want to be having fictional sports emotions while in the midst of real-life sports emotions. 
A very very hard book, that’s an interesting thought. When I was more actively poking at 青桐 I did only read a page or two at once… but I think that one would weigh me down emotionally at a time I just want to be having fun. Slice of life seems like maybe the way!
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I’m also always forgetting that ハイキュー is volleyball, not basketball, but that’s because I was forced to play volleyball at the school PE/gym class for 12 years straight for the vast majority of lessons, and now I can’t wrap my head around the fact that someone may want more volleyball in their lives by reading a manga about it
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@valkow You know I’ve got some 4-koma manga recommendations! Of course I always recommend ご注文はうさぎですか and こみっくがーるず, which are both hilarious and super cute. However, more recently I’ve been reading ひとりぼっちの◯◯生活. It’s very cute, pretty funny, and relatively light on text. So it might be a good fit!
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I’m not very far through 天冥の標 2, but I kept telling some of my friends that if the author wants to have a time skip, it would be the perfect time, since pretty everyone who’s anyone is dead. And then the author did.
Backwards. 500 years.
So, err, why do I care about this, again?
Fun fact, though, the book is set in the year 201X (with X>5) and involves a pandemic caused by a virus. Sounds familiar? Now I know why one of the first google suggestions when looking up the name of the author was コロナ.
No seriously if I wanted a pandemic, I could just look outside the window. Where my spaceships at?
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That’s a lot of spoilers. 
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@Ditto20 I’ve been wondering which simile was the really weird one you were talking about in watanare, but for some reason I feel like it might be this one
「その、 チーズハンバーグカレーみたいな考え方、 やめなさい！」
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Aha, I should’ve known you’d have the answer for that one! Thank you for the ideas. 
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IDK where else to post this but i got a good haul at Kinokuniya today! I really wish i got more volumes of 見える子ちゃん. I’ve read a lot of it online and having the physical copy is just sooo nice. Im definitely not going to be able to read most of these for a bit but I couldnt help myself since japanese manga is just so cheap compared to translated manga.
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