[2024] 多読/extensive reading challenge

You didn’t misread. I am currently planing to buy one of the bigger kobo readers that are supposed to handle manga fairly well, and while you can’t side-load apps on it, you can side-load any file of the right format onto it, which is all the flexibility I need in an ebook reader. But I will admit I’d never even heard of the Boox Gulliver, so maybe I need to research ereaders more.

The question would then be, where do you get those files from? Because all Japanese ebook vendors I know of only let you use their specific apps, you cannot download the files as epub, say. Unless you crack that, which I think some people described elsewhere.
(But if you find such a source that lets you download epub without cracking, I’d be all ears to learn about it!)

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In this case, I was more talking about ebooks in English. I am a voracious reader, and I read probably around 100-150ish fiction books a year in English (with a few non-fiction thrown in). Although a lot of that volume is also rereading my favorites each year. (I don’t actually track my reading because it is so large, but I know I reread a 49 book long book series between April and August this year, which means I read about 50 books in the span of 5 months.) And for fiction ebooks in English, it is possible to find non-DRM books at most ebook stores (kobo, amazon, etc.), but you have to check them individually since each publisher on the platform decides whether they have DRM or not (and they can also choose per book).

So for Japanese books I don’t know. So far I’ve only gotten paper books and picked up a couple of free mangas on both Amazon.co.jp and Kobo. Sorry.

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Oh, I see. Yes, for English books this is probably a totally different story. I regularly buy English non-fiction ebooks, and there are lots of non-DRM options to choose from.

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And here I thought me reading all 14 books of Wheel of Time in five months was impressive.

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Well, those books are meaty! And I’d at least count more or less all of them as two. I wasn’t reading fantasy bricks, but (modern) normal sized mystery novels. (I say modern, because mystery novels from the 50’s for example was much shorter on average, so if I was reading Agatha Christie mysteries, they would have been shorter.)

I don’t read fast, I just read a lot. When I get in reading mode, I tend to read probably all evening (or late into the night if I got to my reading late) so around 2-4 hours every weekday and more than that on weekends. Then I will have times when I read less, but my high reading periods means I still average about 2 books a week.

Btw, I’ve read the first few books of the Wheel of Time and I own them all, is it worth it to read the whole series? (Sorry for the side-discussion of books not read in Japanese.)

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I think it’s worth it. It gets really slow in the middle (books 7-10 or so), but it starts and ends really strong. It’s been a while since I’ve read them, so I don’t remember specifics.

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Thanks! Maybe I’ll start into that series again and see how long it takes me to read it, hehe. :stuck_out_tongue:

Damn, book 10 is where I gave up. I should probably try to pick up that series again then…

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Yeah, I’d say so. Again, I don’t remember the details, but I do remember liking book 11 (last one by Robert Jordan before he died) and books 12-14 (written by Brandon Sanderson using Robert Jordan’s notes and getting advice from Robert Jordan’s editor/wife).

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Three reading sessions into the book, and I’m at page 50. Having a word list available through FloFlo makes life much, much easier, so I’m very glad I bought it.

It’s simultaneously going better and worse than expected. I’m very much reminded of my middling vocab knowledge, but when those vocab blanks are filled in, I do find it easier to follow along than I thought I would. Luckily the grammar used seems pretty simple so far, but I’m only at chapter two.

I do still struggle sometimes to follow along with the longer sentences. I’m sure they’re not that long by novel standards, but they’re still longer than I’m used to after reading through two VNs and a bunch of manga.

「あーッ、コカキぃー」

アンジェリカが嬉しそうな声を上げて、ふらふらと老人の側に寄っていき、猫がなついている主人に甘えるときのようにその身体にしなだれかかりながら彼の腿のあたりに顔を擦りつける。

For me, that’s a sentence that I can’t read in one pass. :sweat_smile: Especially with a few terms unknown to me in there, I can’t keep the whole sentence in mind as I read it. So then I have to reread it a few times.

I’m really hoping this will improve as I stick with the book. A quicker and more intuitive understanding of longer sentences, because that’s certainly not my forté.

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So far about 1/4 into “きらきらひかる”. I think is pretty similar in difficulty to コンビニ人間. So for anyone looking for a novel more or less with the same length to jump into novels I would add it to the list of recommendations.

The novel is about a sexless-cover up marriage between a gay doctor and an alcoholic woman; the routine they go through to fit into their roles in society and how much they put up to keep the status quo.

It feels a nice novel to read after コンビニ人間, sort of in the same line of characters searching a place to belong to and ways to fit in. I think I will change subjects with my next one, but for now the novel is giving me enough food for though.

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I’m planning to read a couple magazines this year, and I’m not quite sure what would be the correct category to put them in. I’m leaning towards ‘other’ but that category has been used mostly for games so far. There was one person recording their progress through ‘いろいろな新聞’ last year though…

I figured I’d put this out here and see if anyone else has maybe already thought about this. :slight_smile:

Noted. :+1: コンビニ was a very nice reading experience, so a novel of roughly the same difficulty sounds good. The subject matter sounds interesting too, and I assume you wouldn’t recommend it no matter the language difficulty if it was bad.

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That’s my motto for the year: “will only read stuff that I care for”. So the only gamble here is assuming my taste for novels ain’t utter garbage. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I’m now reading 西の魔女が死んだ, which I got as a gift from a friend who said it was her favorite book. That’s also why I’m extra motivated to finish it! Am now at page 154! The level of the book is really nice, I’d recommend it for the book club as well, or anyone at N3 N2 level! It’s originally a book for youth I guess, it’s very cute and feel good about a young girl who starts to live with her grandma who turns out to be a witch.

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いや〜変な話… this is technically off topic in this thread, but I still wanted to report on that anime.
I just finished watching it. It was pretty amazing! Thank you and @sigolino for the recommendation.
I feel I can’t really judge the originality or quality, though, since I lack experience with the medium, but all the character were really interesting. Even 太郎 got his moments toward the end. (Well, the 変な話 guy did not, but he got what was coming, so it’s all good).

In terms of learning, I feel I did well for the first half, watching the episode without subtitles first and then checking my understanding. I definitely improved over that time too, going from 60% understanding (that’s 2~3 words per sentence not catched) to something like 80% (1~2 word per sentence). A lot of the improvement comes from getting used to the story, the voices, etc. Still a long way to go.

Then I got caught off-guard by the fact that it went beyond 13 episodes (and the end of the first plotline) and went ahead a bit more aggressively, with subs only. It’s Japanese only, so I don’t feel too bad about it, but I relied way too much on the text, so I feel it wasn’t really that successful (from the study point of view). :thinking: Not sure what to do about that; maybe it’s still good enough? I guess I’ll try to focus more on podcasts for now.

I’m still on the fence about making a thread about 「多聞」(to contrast 多読, too bad that word has a loaded meaning :p). I don’t really know if there’s any point in making that, since I don’t really see how to keep track of the different media one can listen too (by length? audio only versus image + audio?) and there’s no bookmeter equivalent I guess. While this thread can also serves as a way to recommend books and discuss them, there’s already a bunch of other threads about anime and podcasts, so I feel it’s all inconvenient or redundant :woman_shrugging: At the same time, I like updating numbers…

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Wow, some people have some pretty scary goals this year.

I set 10 books and 24 manga for myself (trying to get to 24 books when including English/Spanish books) which seems like a lot considering I’ve only finished 4 books in Japanese (it feels like more somehow) up until now. But I have a few half-read (キッチン、魔法少女育成計画) so I hope it’s not too much.

By the way there seems to be some alphabetical chaos going on in the table but I didn’t dare fix it.

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I hadn’t noticed, but after you said it, I had to fix it. Done. :ok_hand:

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You’re so much more ambitious than I am. I don’t have a goal, but I guarantee you it’ll be less than that.

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Don’t they? :smile:

I definitely think my goal is a bit scary. I was originally going to go for one/month, but then 20/20 seemed appropriate for 2020 because of this:

Thanks. :stuck_out_tongue:

I figure if I read enough kids’ books and count magazines as well I should be able to make it? :sweat_smile:

And then you see people with goals of 40 books, haha.

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