Interesting! I will keep it on my list for a time I’m in the mood for SF.
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Oh, I hadn’t expected that! What is your definition of “decent”, though? 
Mori Hiroshi has at least one SF series (the “W” series); and then there is the SF Taisho Award - or maybe you read all of them already? A few titles do sound familiar…
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Not at all! I heard of that award, but kinda forgot about it.
My interaction with Japanese SF has been to pick whatever the book store next to my former place was recommending, then after moving doing the same thing at book off. The result hasn’t been great.
At the same time, I keep scrolling through the rankings of light novels and whatnot and it’s isekai as far as the eyes can see (I’m exaggerating a smidge).
I guess I should look into it more carefully The W series looks interesting too.
Thank you 
I needed help increasing my pile of unread books
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Glad to be of service 
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I found this thread to be a very informative read. While this doesn’t touch on the absolute beginner book club much, I get the impression that the Doggy Detective books aren’t necessarily easier than the beginner book clubs like Aria but just different. Is that the correct impression?
I’d say they are easier, with some caveats.
They suffer (a lot) from lack of kanji. You get lots of long strings of hiragana which can be difficult to pick apart, but the fact that they have very comprehensively filled-in vocab spreadsheets should mitigate that quite a lot.
Although they are very much picture books, you don’t get the same 1-to-1 text-image relationship you get with manga, so the pictures provide less context for what’s going on. Sometimes the image shows something that only happens at the end of the page, that kind of thing.
They are prose! In many ways I find that much easier to read than the dialogue of manga, but it undoubtedly means tackling a lot of full-length sentences where in a manga you get far more short phrases.
If you follow the club reading schedules it’s undoubtedly less to read per week (though some Beginner Club schedules were pretty light and probably comparable, such as Shimeji Simulation). The language and concepts are nice and simple, and as I mentioned I actually find prose quite a bit easier to tackle as a beginner in many ways. Overall I’d definitely count them as easier, but prepare for some downsides.
(The text is also really nice and big and spaced out. Manga can require a magnifying glass! Aria’s Masterpiece Edition is nice and big though.)
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