Me neither, but that was the point. Those things correspond to the hyperactive type (the most visible type) while I am supposedly the inattentive type (“you could do better if only you tried/cared a bit more”). That test was specifically for that latter type and it does feel relevant. I’ll mention it at my next medical/mental checkup and we’ll see I guess.
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Why push yourself to read something you don’t like though? There’s nothing wrong with dropping things if you’re not enjoying them.
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Mostly because I bought it. I paid money for this book, so I’m going to read it. That’s basically the sunk cost fallacy, I guess.
I usually have a lot less trouble dropping books I just borrowed from the library.
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Haven’t made an update in a while…
Read two volumes of Youjitsu. I hear it gets better after three volumes, but I have trouble continuing. It was fine, but with stereotypical characters and typical highschooler life problems it’s a bit of a slog. The second volume was basically a watered down detective novel. Probably I’d been happier if I just read some more Higashino Keigo. I’m starting to fear light novels are not a great match for me; there’s not much meat given the length. Maybe it’s also the fact it still takes quite a while to read for me, but I’m not a slice of life person either, which is a theme most LN seem to encompass. Guessing takes me maybe at least 18 hours per book depending on the size? I read those two volumes in one month reading a little everyday.
Picked up Your Name again, since I never finished it in the book club. Started from the beginning though, since it’s been so long.
I want to clean up my manga backlog a bit, too. It doesn’t help I’m constantly buying more.
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I just finished 月の森に、カミよ眠れ ahead of my schedule!
It’s a story set in Kyūshū during the Heian period and describes how the Hayato people’s connection to the spirits and gods grew weaker as the imperial tax/tribute system forced them to cut down their forests to grow rice.
The structure is a bit unusual: The first 2/3 consist of a young woman and young man talking about their troubled pasts. Both of them have a special connection to the gods and are outsiders in their communities. What they talk about spans not only their own lives, but the lives of several generations of humans and human-gods in similar positions.
In the last third, they have to make an important decision that will decide their future: Adhere to their traditional lifestyle and die out, or kill/seal the gods of the forest and break the most sacred code of their people?
It’s a slow and gentle story for the most part. Melancholic undertones are constantly present throughout the story. I really liked the atmosphere overall and felt like the ethnic elements were well-integrated, although sometimes a bit clichéd – but Uehashi herself admits that she was still “unripe” when writing the book in the 2nd afterword. She also wrote that while she tried to adhere to actual history whenever possible, there are very few records of what the lifestyle of the Hayaoto people actually was like, so she wrote it as a fantasy book, not a work of history.
All in all I enjoyed reading 月の森に、カミよ眠れ. The story wasn’t particular engaging for the most part (and not boring either), but I liked very dense atmosphere and the folklore-ish style of the story.
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That awkward moment when your “last updated” date for one of your goals is January 1st 
I guess I forgot to update my “other” category when I beat Nier this summer, but I finally just added one more to the counter – I finished Planetarian last night, which is now my first ever visual novel completed in Japanese – a pretty cool milestone considering that my introduction to literally Japan in general came from an OELVN way back in…2012, jeez.
I had actually nearly completed it (in English) some years ago, which led to this very misleading gap that I find kind of funny (over four years to complete one chapter, mama mia)
Still pretty far behind on my goal of five game-like things this year but I think it should be manageable now. Planning to put in half an hour per day of monhun stories 2 and hopefully finish it by the end of the month 
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That sounds really interesting, and I love the title! Putting it on my wishlist.
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7 out of 8 volumes of ひとりぼっちの〇〇生活 are half off for the digital version on Amazon right now. I will not be getting them, because I already have the first 5 volumes physically and plan to complete the series with physical copies. But I recommend the series to anyone who wants a lighthearted and easy-to-read comedy series.
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Yeah, to be fair I hear the first couple are bad and everything past that actually gets really good, but I can see how that would be draining if thats like 35+ hours of preliminary uninteresting content lol. But yeah, light novels are kinda weird. I have only read a few non light novels but the common complaint I hear from japanese people is that they are like pointlessly descriptive in comparison and can feel fluffy. From my perspective, having a buncha unneeded descriptive text is nice from a language learning perspective, but it might be contibuting to feeling like theres not a lot of meat. My personal opinion on light novels is that a lot of them are pretty garbage literature, but great entertainment for the right people. For my monkey brain, the “good literature” isn’t as entertaining (both in english and japanese) so the choice is clear.
Also has anyone here ever tried to read with really thick brain fog? Freaking impossible. Im quarantining right now and kinda coincidentally cut out a ton of sugar and caffeine outta my diet (from a frick ton to near 0) and the brain fog made it to where I got stuck on words like 明日 lol. Its slowly getting better and I can read again but man, that was wack.
Well thats just crazy, Tofugu must’ve not heard that wanikani is just a kanji learning website and the vocab is only there to reinforce the readings. There’s clearly no reason to intentionally use words that are more common!
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The other day I saw 出口 and was like しゅっこう? What’s that? 
That’s one of the reasons I like 本好き. The writing is to the point without a lot of flowery language, but is still what I would consider high quality writing. I’ve read other light novels that were garbage quality writing and I’ve also read very flowery regular novels (in both Japanese and in English). Overly descriptive writing doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it bothers some people, but it can get tedious after a while.
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Lol when I read this I was like you forgot the し for くちだし.
Then I realised you didn’t type 口出
Clearly I’m at my limit for today already lol. Yeesh. Getting better though.
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京都寺町三条のホームズ vol. 4 is done and with that I’m finally all caught up with the anime 
Just two more novels this year to meet my goal now!
Obligatory burndown graph:
I think I’ll be pausing this series for a little while to do some light reading instead. Most of the difficulty here comes from the fact that it’s just chock full of temples and historical figures so it’s not the kind of thing that can be made easier by “I’ll do some grinding and then come back to it”, but regardless I think I’d like to aim for something I can read a bit more smoothly for now.
…only as I type this out does it occur to me that I should probably NOT have already picked 蒲団 as my next book. It’s pretty short (65 pages on my ereader) but even just a few pages in I can already see I’m going to be hitting speedbumps. Why am I this way…
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I started reading 探偵ガリレオ by 東野 圭吾, the author of 容疑者Xの献身. It’s the first part of novel collections in the Galileo series involving the same pair of detective and scientist.
Hard to put the book down, I’m already halfway through! I realized this is a great way to trick myself into reading, since once I start, I just have to know whodunnit .
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I remember the live action series. It’s a quite a fun dynamic duo.
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I’ve just finished チーズスイートホーム (1) which is my second complete manga volume, and I’m about 2/3 through 大海原と大海原 (1) so well on track to meet my late start target of 3 manga volumes.
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Going into this weekend some kind of mood struck me and although I’d been back-burnering Ranma 1/2 for a long time I suddenly felt the need to churn through the rest of it and put the series to bed, even though I had enough left (5-7 of those big thick volumes) that I really had no business doing that.
But I did! Neglecting everything else I had to read in the process…
I don’t have all that much to say about the series that I haven’t already, but I’m glad to have closure on it finally.
Ranma stuff
Reading this much of it in one chunk made me realize it reminds me a lot of a long-running comic strip - It’s fun to watch Takahashi experiment with different comic foils and pick which angles of which characters to use for the next story arc in a way that reminds me a lot of like, big Calvin and Hobbes treasuries or what have you (with these volumes including short interviews where she talks about how, for example, yep the way Akane’s crush on the doctor in the first volume is completely dropped is because she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with Akane yet until the haircut), and it ends in pretty much the same way Calvin and Hobbes does - very little change in the status quo as our main duo runs off into the sunset, leaving you with the comforting promise that they’re still out there doing the exact same stuff they have been this whole time. On the one hand, I’m a little disappointed there wasn’t more closure, especially with Takahashi having her cake and eating it too a bit in having Ranma and Akane sort of have a wedding but also not really going through with it, but I suppose it’s probably the way it had to go - they’re characters built for endless hijinks after all.
I tended to like the arcs that were zanier and driven by the characters we care about a lot more than the big adventure arcs (so I was disappointed the entire last volume is a big climactic adventure arc about bird people I don’t care about – frankly the small moments of kindness between Ranma and Akane speckled throughout were all a lot more compelling to me than the much more conventional stuff that happens between them in the big action climax), and I especially liked the semi-frequent angle for extremely silly side stories where, as the resident local martial artists, the main characters are tasked with putting a ghost or yokai to rest, invariably ones with inane last wishes, like a ghost of an especially uncool swimsuit that just wants an earnest compliment. My favorite longer arc in the backend might have been the one involving Yamata no Orochi, because multi-headed dragons are ALWAYS cool.
Gender-wise, it’s definitely never like, affirmatively transgressive or anything like that, and one of the running gags is about the reasonable fear that if Ranma’s mom thinks he’s a cross-dresser she will force him to commit suicide which is a lot less funny if you apply any real world logic to it at all, but since it’s off in its own zany world and comedy logic, it’s easy to fall for a fantasy setting where gender is like, a magic curse that causes zany hijinks, rather than whatever it is in the real world. And I get the impression there’s a lot of folks out there who grew up wishing for a cursed spring of their own to fall into. It’s probably unfair, but on a lot of days I’ll take something that’s basically neutral but fun and surprisingly good fodder for more positive readings, over something that tries to tackle heavy stuff in a well-intentioned way but doesn’t stick the landing, and Ranma’s definitely the former.
I’m glad at least, that it doesn’t end with Ranma curing the curse - even if he never really makes peace with it it’s definitely more on that side than “oh this would only ever be put right if Ranma were truly a man in all senses” or anything like that, which would have been worse I think.
With that out of the way, I’ll try to catch up on the stuff I let slip, namely the second story in the book club book, finishing 獄門島 before I gotta lead a book club about a different eerie island, trying to catch up on ハルタ and series from it, and pro wrestling magazines to try to meet my last goal for the year.
I’ll probably try to clean up loose ends like that before jumping into another long manga series.
I still have mixed feelings about whether it’s better to read a series like this volume by volume mixed with other things or in a big batch like this, so I guess I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and play it by ear.
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Just finished imouto sae 13 which is the final book before the time skip where are they now volume and…ok. nice.
Actually a fantastic job wrapping everything up and putting a close to things. Completely exceeded any and all expectations I had. The book has a pretty large cast of characters and it kinda threw two small unimportant ones by the wayside, but the rest of them ended in such a good spot. The author does a great job of having things happen that actually matter down the road, too.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a series come full circle so beautifully. Truly a work of art, well done Hirasaka Yomi. Looking back, so many characters were sent through hell and back, struggling in their own way. All of it the result of one dead author who wanted nothing but to make people happy and her books (namely 妹さえいればいい). Years later, on the anniverseray of her death they are finally able to find happiness in their own ways. Looking back, a character who died before the series even started was the true center and half the series is just the ripples her life and death caused in the world. Its no wonder the series was named after her most popular work.
The time skip is pretty nice too because 〆切前に百合が捗る 2 is about to come out and one of the characters in that is an imouto sae character after the time skip. So its almost like an epilogue.
s
EDIT: One of the main characters is even mentioned in the last volume. Cool!
Hikari being this girl
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This last volume is the most cursed shit I have ever read wtf
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I just reached 200 (non-manga) books on Bookmeter!
Sadly that book was Re:Zero 13, but at least I only have one more that I own, and then I’m done.
The book was mostly fine until Subaru decided to do something very problematic for absolutely zero reason.
It also contains a 4th wall annihilation that also works as basic Subaru banter.
「あ、ごめん。その展開は没になったんだ。読者が望んでないって編集会議で」
I went ahead and checked the web novel, and indeed, something else was going to happen here. (I’m saying it’s banter because the author could have just removed what the other character said, and it would have been seamless, so obviously it’s on purpose)
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