The author had a falling out with the old publisher (due to the anime), so they republished the existing work while she continued the series with a different name with the new publisher.
The stories continue in Today’s Special. There was no confusion in the republished version (they added bis. for those), all the volumes are numbered as well as the chapters.
I’ve read through all of the works under the new publisher and posted about them in the autumn challenge thread before, if you’re interested.
I’ve decided that for 2022 reading goals, I’m going to go the opposite direction of 2021. 2021 was reading whatever whenever according to my whim. I still want to do a lot of that, but I also want to motivate myself to read a wider spread of things.
I’m thinking I’ll set my overall novel goal at 24, with 12 being free choice and 12 having to come from a list I make beforehand. I’m going with 16 options so that if I’m really not enjoying something I can drop it.
I listed up everything that I’ve been wanting to read for a while, plus books I have in progress, plus series I want to continue, plus authors I want to read more of. That post is here. Then I started listing up ideas for the 16 goal books.
Here is what I’ve got so far, in no order:
薬屋のひとりごと
ミニスカ宇宙海賊
青桐
冷たい密室と博士たち
機動強襲型令嬢アリシア物語
君の名は
小川未明童話集
Something by 宮部みゆき
獣の奏者 (4)
予知夢 (探偵ガリレオ)
とらドラ (6)
死神の浮力
ミステリークロック (防犯探偵・榎本)
?
?
?
I’m thinking I want to grab at least one thing from the ‘authors to read more of’ section, but I don’t know what other books by those authors are particularly good. After that I’ll have two more spots to fill.
For free reading, I’m sure I’ll finish 伯爵と妖精, and after that my plan is to get back into 本好きの下克上.
I find making and working toward goals like this to be fun. I’m hoping I can read a whole bunch of interesting things next year.
I finished volume 3 yesterday. It was nice to see more involved 妖精 plot and エドガー finally embracing fully their existence.
Considering that they got to the 妖精 world only a few pages from the end, I thought that it might continue on into the next volume… but no, that was one quick resolution.
I’m glad “ケイン”くん is sticking around. I just love seeing エドガー teasing him. I wonder if we’ll see some more of マリゴールド et al., possibly urging the “couple” to get started on the heir making.
I’ve now exactly halfway through 魔女の宅急便, my fourth ‘book’ and first novel!
I originally wanted to finish it before the year ended, but I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to do that anymore… if I manage to read enough, I could get close though.
However… I started off only being able to read 1 page at most, in half an hour, using the vocabulary spreadsheet from the old book club and looking up unknown grammar. I still need that spreadsheet but my pace and stamina has definitely improved — I think I can read about 4 pages in half an hour now. Still slow, but better than when I started back in April!
Just finished 告白…and holy moly this might be my new #1.
This book was just meant to be a quick 4fun read while I catch up on my anki cards from hikikomari but it ended up exceeding all expectations. I read some online reviews and people were saying there wasn’t any point to the book.
And they’re absolutely right. There is no point to this book. No moral. Nothing it teaches you.
This book is just a book about hatred. Its literally just a story of revenge. After reading the last part, its incredibly clear the revenge isn’t even to serve justice or get closure. Its just out of the sheer desire to torment those who have done you wrong that you just hate.
What makes this book so good is just watching the torment unfold from multiple perspectives. And with each new perspective, a new piece is added to the story which adds another layer of torment. The way your perspective of the characters and story changes with each new perspective was great and everyone added something I felt like. I guess if there was a point, it would be just how much you never know what people are going through or what they’re thinking, and your perspective is very biased. I kept thinking the book would be a fantastic piece if it just ended as is part way through, but I gotta say I loved the ending. It was beyond brutal. The main girl is just absolutely relentless.
The book ends on
これが本当の復讐であり、あなたの更生の第一歩だとは思いませんか？
And I don’t think there’s anyone who would say no to that.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the person getting revenge is a middle school teacher and the people she gets revenge on are her students. Makes it all the crazier.
Your description intrigued me. I went and read the synopsis and it strongly reminds me of a movie I saw many years back. Has it been made into a movie? I remember it was brutal fun.
I don’t remember it very well, it was more than ten years ago when I watched it, I just remember that it was twisted and enjoyable. I’m seriously thinking of trying the book at some point now.
Yeah, would highly recommend if you like a messed up story. The actual difficulty of the book isn’t that bad btw.
I added like 5 new words from the whole book. The writing is just walls of text like I said, but the difficulty of any individual sentence is pretty low.
Are most pages like that? I find it very difficult to read something when there aren’t many breaks. And having a ton of multi-page paragraphs would just make that worse…
Thats from the naomom diary part which I would say is one of the easier parts, but if you can read that fine youll be chillin for the rest of the book I’d say. Theres no spoilers, so you can read it if you want.
I just finished 伯爵と妖精 4 and that was quite a fun read. I did enjoy the murder mystery in a closed setting with the extra mechanic of リディア being possessed at night. I kinda wish that the author had gone a bit further with it… but anyway it took 2/3 of the book as it is.
Once again, the resolution felt unbelievably fast, in like 5% of the whole book, but I got used to anyway.
I’m a bit torn about reading the next volume just now. On the one hand, I am having fun reading this series. On the other had, I’m somehow slow reading this series. I finally got to 90 books for the year, so if I rush, I can make it to 100 (or just 97 and lower my standards to add 3 more books I read this year that were half manga half text). But I can’t really rush reading those somehow.
I started quite late on this reading challenge (July 23rd) having just started reading manga this year with the ABBC, I set myself a goal of 3 manga this year as that seemed doable.
I think I just passed 1 year of studying Japanese this time (multiple failed attempts, never got remotely this far, always terrified of Kanji) - my goal by this point was to maybe have started a manga.
Now on an average day I can generally fit in a few pages of manga before bed (still leaning very heavily on a dictionary), on a good day I can read 15 to 20 and very rarely ~30 pages (although I’m seriously helped by fight scenes!).
Reading has gone from a distant goal to the core part of my Japanese study, most days lately I won’t do much study except reading and I can still really feel myself growing.
I just finished かがみの孤城 as well! I read part 2 in about a week which is also faster than I’ve read any book. I really liked the book overall! I didn’t know much about it and despite the fantasy backdrop it was surprisingly mundane for about 3/4th of it (presumably why Vanilla thought it was “pretty shit”?) It’s basically slice of life but it’s well done in my opinion, even though it can be a bit slow. The author is quite fond of 「その時だった」(that’s when it happened) and you’re like “what??”… but then most of the time it’s something pretty trivial.
Speaking of slow (SPOILERS)
I’m usually really bad at guessing what will happen next in a story but this seemed pretty obvious to me? At least it was my first thought when they learn they’re all from the same middle school, but remember things differently (e.g. number of classes per year). And as こころ later realizes, there were lots of other little hints.
「もっと早く気づくべきだったのかもしれない。」You don’t say!!
But yeah the whole end part was great. I didn’t foresee the part about 狼と七匹の子やぎ (or any other of the plot twists) but I’d never heard of this story. I regretted not looking it up when it was mentioned a couple of times! I wonder if its more famous in Japan than in my country (France)?
I also had that theory at that point, but I was like “please don’t be that!”. I thought if it was that it should have been so apparent to the characters (particularly differences in clothing and speaking style) that it would have ruined the book. But in the end, the explanations for why they didn’t notice or ask revealing questions to each other (mostly due to their various social skill issues and wanting to avoid conflict) was reasonable enough that I was fine with it. It was also a much simpler explanation than the whole parallel world theory, so I think it’s good that the simpler explanation was the right one.
I didn’t guess the twist related to the fairy tale, but I also wasn’t familiar with it. I did guess the twist about who Aki was, but I didn’t guess any of the other major twists. I’m also usually pretty bad at guessing where a story will go. Personally though, I don’t mind if a story is predictable (referring to the different years part) if it’s well executed.
Yeah I thought it was a bit weird that it never came up, especially given that they spent a New Year together. But the book makes the point that at that age, kids don’t really care what year it is, to the point where ウレシノ doesn’t even know his? In any case, I think オオカミさま didn’t particularly intend for it to be a secret that they were from different years, that’s just how it happened. So it’s ok if it was dumb luck. I also liked how everything was explained, up to the details of the gaming consoles names and the fact that the TV was an old cathode-ray tube one.
Something that still bugs me though it that they should’ve found out earlier about the shifted days of the week. Even if they don’t go to school, こころ doesn’t go to the castle on weekends for example. They could’ve noticed the pattern.
Nice job guessing Aki’s plot twist, I absolutely did not see it coming!
After reading Edogawa’s Murder Case of D Hill for a long while I switched gears a bit and am now reading SpyxFamily and re-reading Naruto in Japanese. Have to admit, reading Kishimoto’s author note at the beginning of Naruto vol 1. made me shed a tear
I just saw Verasia has a version of 人間失格 with photos of Dazai and an amazing cover:
