(First of all @AislinI’d be very sad if you stopped being active - I always value your opinions and your deep thoughts about the books and stories we read. And I can very much understand that it’s very hard to see others not valueing or even downplaying what is so dear to you. )
I finished 地球星人 yesterday, and I wrote up a very long post about it, with lots of questions. But when I was ready to press the “Reply” button, I thought it might be better to post this in the book’s home thread so that the discussion somewhat stays more together, if that makes sense? At the same time I realize it’s awkward because the book club is by far not finished
What do y’all think @Aislin@Mithrillion@brrricane ? Should we continue discussing here or move over to the home thread, with appropriate spoilers?
Well, at least, there are some series I know in there! As much as I have been living under a rock in terms of manga reading, not coming across anything I knew in the first part made me feel like I really know nothing
Sorry for spamming this thread, but we will probably read the next book in MORI Hiroshi’s Saikawa & Moe series soon! It’s about two amateur detectives who solve cases that involve maths, tech and engineering so there is some talking about these topics in the stories. It’s the third book in the series but I expect it to be readable without prior exposure to the series. We set up a poll for the start date so if you are interested, just raise your voice in there.
Yep, I think so too. Things that are fun and easy get done more often and keep you more engaged, and both of those things are super key.
Furigana gang! I have practically zero trouble reading kanji nowadays (all of the novels I read only had furigana on a few scattered words, and none of the games did at all), but even so, sometimes there’s a word that is totally made up of kanji I know…and yet I still can’t easily search it up because I have to type in a bunch of other words and erase everything that I don’t need. I saw a tweet a while ago that I like to pull out every now and then; it’s anecdotal of course, but it’s from a student who felt that it was silly to mandate non-furigana books during morning reading because they were able to learn the kanji and readings for a number of difficult words by spending time reading manga and such with furigana. I always encourage people to not stress out about it.
Aha, well to be fair some of those are pretty unknown. 戦隊大失格 is a new series from the author of 五等分の花嫁 and おとなりに銀河 is by the author of 甘々と稲妻, but neither one is nearly as well known as their respective prior work. カラーレス, 大きくなったら結婚する, and 僕の心のヤバイやつ are all pretty smalltime. The rest have either gotten or are about to get the anime treatment so they’re a bit more well known, but I think it’s pretty safe to say: it’s not you it’s me
Just curious, but why don’t you just guess the reading and try to input it directly? Unless you’re dealing with a kanji with multiple on’yomi readings, it’s usually faster that way. (Though there are always those pesky kun’yomi readings when dealings with verbs and adjectives…)
Personally I don’t like a lot of furigana because it becomes information overload. Sometimes the extra information just distracts me when I’d be able to read fine without the furigana anyway. (And it’s just ugly having that much extra text on the page.)
Yeah, I felt like this year reading manga took off for me well. And that is now helping me as I picked up skyward sword again and it is getting easier each play session.
The furigana also helped me a lot still. Today I was like I probably could turn them off, but there’s still the occasional words that have to look up a bit even knowing the kanji and reading.
丸腰 showed up and from context I had a good guess what it could be, but looked it up cause it wasn’t a familiar word to me. Now I probably won’t forget about it.
I’m currently going through the highlights for 本好き book 12, which I want to finish before I start reading book 13. (It acts as a nice refresher of what was happening as well.) Then I’m going to go through the second half of かがみの孤城. Part of me doesn’t want to go through 魔法少女育成計画 book 3 since many of the sentences will be too hard to use as reliable example sentences. But there are still many good words I could study from that book… Not sure if I’ll bother with the words from 殺人出産 either.
As for what to read once I finish 殺人出産 (currently 44% done the whole book), I’m not sure yet. I definitely don’t have enough time to finish another book after 殺人出産 this year, but I might as well start something. I’m debating between starting 本好き book 13 or reading one other book first (so I can just start 本好き fresh in the new year). The prior recommendations were for キッチン and 博士の愛した数式, but I’m not really feeling the former right now and I’m still waiting on a certain someone for the latter (plus I should study the math words that I made a Kitsun deck for first).
Maybe I’ll try 三日間の幸福, which is also on the shorter side. Or I could always read a book in English! Though I’m not really sure what I’d read in English anyway.
I agree with @brrricane that it would be early to post there. Maybe we can save the links to these posts and just link them in the home thread together in the so the discussion doesn’t get lost?
I’m also not finished yet, this week is very tiring at work… I might put a dent in it during the holidays (ie the weekend ).
Thanks to the freebie thread, I remembered I read BLAME! all the way back in 2009 when I was still a beginner. Boy that was a rough ride at the time, but it felt okay because there are many parts without any text, so you still get the satisfaction of turning pages at a good pace.
Still, text itself was super hard, as I had to look up basically every kanji, in a small kanji dictionary that had everything sorted by radical and stroke number. That was pain
The story itself didn’t help either. I remember spending like an hour on the speech bubble saying the elevator the characters were on will take like 60 years to reach its destination and the main character commenting he will just sleep then.
Reading the first volume, I noticed that, obviously, things are much easier right now. And I also noticed that the story is confusing even if you understand everything that is being said I guess I would still not be able to make any sense from the ending today.
Sadly, the elevator thing was not in the first volume, so I couldn’t check my former understanding. Based on the preview from volume 3, I think it happens at the end of volume 2, if anyone wants to check for me.
Interestingly, after finishing that series, back in the days, I tried to move on to バイオメガ, by the same author. It has a similar aesthetic, but was more text heavy from the start, and I just noped out at the time.
It’s kinda fun to remember the “good old days” (12 years ago!!). It gives me a better feeling for how far I have come.
I just finished the last volume of ひとりぼっちの〇〇生活. Such a great series, and I will really miss it. It’d be amazing if the mangaka made a sequel series, but I doubt that’ll happen.
I realize I never took the time to comment on 裏世界ピクニック 7 in this thread. But there is no time, I might be able to get to 100 books. I liked it, though.
I also finished 伯爵と妖精 7, and it was pretty nice too. The stakes are getting higher. Also, エドガー, my dude, sensually murmuring in a girl’s ear the wrong name?
Yes, congratulations, you did it.
You might still be able to push through it quickly–the short stories volumes tend to have fewer pages. If I remember correctly, the last story was particularly good in that one.
So you don’t get caught off-guard again, the short story volumes are: 8, 12, 15, 21, 27, and 32.
This will definitely be the last book of tonari tenshi I read. I don’t quite understand why the series is so popular. As it goes on, the main character just gets more and more annoying and pathetic it feels like lol.
Also, theres like freaking typos every book lol. Its crazy. Book 5 had some sussy nihongo earlier but I just let it go, then this sentence pops up lol
Like is it really that hard to not mess up your words? I feel like this is the only series that has this problem and I’ve mentioned it before on this thread, but its the FIFTH BOOK and its still happening. From a learners perspective, even though its realistically completely insignificant and I still understood it anyways, its just such a turn off.
)
Furigana gang! I have practically zero trouble reading kanji nowadays (all of the novels I read only had furigana on a few scattered words, and none of the games did at all), but even so, sometimes there’s a word that is totally made up of kanji I know…and yet I still can’t easily search it up because I have to type in a bunch of other words and erase everything that I don’t need. I saw 
read a book in English! Though I’m not really sure what I’d read in English anyway.
I guess I would still not be able to make any sense from the ending today.