I have a plan! The plan is to pause 怪人二十面相 for now and do my best to keep up with the 後鳥羽伝説殺人事件 club. The first week has the most pages (48) until week six (also 48), so if I can keep up with 7 pages a day for the first week then the next four weeks will be easier! So far I have managed it for the first 1.75 days. Whenever I get back to 怪人二十面相 maybe it will feel a little bit easier too!
怪人二十面相 tracking
day
time
pages
m/p
day total
notes
vocab
2/22
6
1
6
-
Just getting warmed up.
どてら == 厚くてあたたかい着物。。
2/22
9
2
4.5
-
My guess is that if you knew Kogorou-tantei from the other books then you would know that this behavior is really out of character for him.
こごしをかがめる (I just thought it was a neat phrase.)
2/22
8
1
8
4
Finished the chapter. Like watching a trainwreck.
ひけを取らない。。向こうに回して。。
2/26
7
1
7
-
Just a little warmup.
おびただしい == 非常に多い様子。。かけ軸 == 絵や文字が描かれた、壁にかけるもの。。紳士。。くっきょう (屈強) == 強くて頑丈なこと。。(pretty confident I’ve recorded that last one twice already.)
2/26
25
4
6.25
5
Wow, 4 pages in a row in 25 minutes! That is way better than my attention span has historically been with this novel. … Just checked, and yes actually, this is a record. I’ve only read as long as 24 minutes in a row twice before now. (Wait, why didn’t I also check if I’ve ever read 4 pages in a row before??) When I finish maybe I’ll make a final post of all of these tracking posts together. Then it’ll be interesting to look for patterns/developments.
Starting book club week 9 reading. Tried reading 5 pages in one go. I had to motivate myself to keep going after page four, but at the end of page 5 I kind of felt like maybe I could keep going. Except then I stopped.
Some mystery/thriller vocab: 高手小手。麻酔剤。
3/6
4
24
6
4
Starting in on this again reminded me that this particular chapter was kind of rough with the old man not being able to believe that he had been duped, and then being upset about it. But I also feel motivated to continue because 1) I sense that Boy Detective will rejoin us imminently 2) Someone in the book club thread linked the Diet Library scan of the 1939 edition and that’s really fun to look at/read.
身もだえ == つらい気持ちで、からだをうごかすこと。。血の巡りが悪い。。狐につままれる。。
3/7
4
30
7.5
-
Ohh, we get to meet Big Detective soon! For a second I thought the pleasant, plump man with the tortoiseshell glasses was Akechi and I was feeling pleasantly surprised that he was not a usual stereotype, but no … that was the public official. (Off to do a hike now!)
Hoo, I’m tired. My partner and I went on a ~2 hour ~3 mile snow hike this morning! Gorgeous. And quite tiring, so now we are sitting by a fire having flat whites and reading! ^^
昇降口 == 階段のある出入り口。。刻一刻 == 少しずつ時間がたっていく。。
3/7
2
12.5
6.25
7
-
さしつかえ == 困る理由や問題。。すじ == “source”。。上気 == 顔が赤くなる。。
3/8
2
18
9
-
Not a lot of opportunity/not ideal conditions to read this morning after all, so just a couple pages over less than twenty minutes. Was pretty surprised by the reveal, actually, on account of not having actually read the chapter title.
Shouldn’t I, at some point, start getting better at reading this book? I’ve documented 27 days of reading so far and there is no observable trend in any direction. It could have to do with the fact that the story isn’t totally my cup of tea and I’m reading it for The Culture. Whereas books that I’m super into I inherently push to read more and faster, this one I generally only stay motivated to read until I’ve reached the appropriate number of pages for a day.
Gah, I can’t take it anymore! Okay, I may need to switch to an easier read for today.
無駄骨折り == つらい努力をしたのに、役に立たなかった。。
No books finished or acquired since last update. Although I did start a Neokyo order for a Kiki full set. Trying to think if there’s anything else I should order with it … Maybe a recommendation from Mitrac.
Harta is going a little slower while I work on 後鳥羽伝説殺人事件, but that’s okay. Harta is flexible.
Oh yeah! A funny thing happened. There have been three sixth grade kanji left that I literally never once had cause to look up for months, maybe even a year after I finished all the other sixth grade kanji. I kept refusing to add them to my study routine until I came across them in the wild at least once. Finally a couple days ago I came across 株 in Bonbon!!! So I added that to my study routine and now the two remaining are 盟 and 蚕. We’ll see how much longer it takes for me to find them in the wild.
THANK YOU! I did go skating and it definitely inspired me to want to go more frequently again! I have my own skates at home, so I will plan to visit some local rinks. I think we even have one that stays open during summer, which is exciting. :DDD
Also on the way back from our wintery mountain adventure we stopped at a hot spring facility that has the largest hot spring pool in the world! (According to them.) But it was HUGE! It was very cool, felt kind of like we were in Thermae Romae!
ooooohhh, yes, now that I know you are actually making a physical order I’ll be more forward about this.
Top tip if you’re looking for a gentle world that is easy to read is the monodama series I go on about. The first book is fine as a stand alone as well, so if you want to continue that’s great, but equally, if you just want to read one and not feel like you’re on the hook for more, it’s good for that. OR -
🦁
starting end of March is the 2nd to last survival adventure. We read these at a gentle pace. After the first 2 weeks with 12 pages, it comes out to about 1-3 pages per week of easy adventure reading. Starts in 2 weeks, though, which might be a bit tight. The next one in two weeks is Savannah, and in the summer we’ll start the last one Swamp - both links in this tour announcement. Amazon has them now and then but generally people buy them from used marketplaces through proxies, so… a bit harder to recommend.
Amazing suggestion, thank you! This had fallen off my radar, but I’ve always wanted to join but felt like I couldn’t justify it before. Now it feels reasonable (with regards to level and load), and I’m ordering from mercari through Neokyo so it’s easy to get them!! (I actually ordered both before even getting out of bed this morning after I saw your comment.)
This one is 100% definitely going to happen. Likely after I finish Bonbon and/or Kiki. Or maybe after I finally finish reading 霧のむこうのふしぎな町. Or just whenever I next have 10 tsundoku points? Anyway, the point is … I’m excited for it. ^^
Yeah, me too (so far)! Today’s 7 pages felt a lot easier than yesterday’s 7 pages and I like how quickly it’s summarizing the beginning of the case … Still a ways off from finishing the first chapter though, so trying not to jump to any conclusions yet.
Not doing official tracking for 後鳥羽伝説殺人事件 (yet), but I have Thoughts about the reading process!
Okay, so yesterday’s 7 pages felt easier, but today I only read three pages and it was brutal! There was a lot of office politics type stuff, and I probably should have stopped looking up every single word I didn’t know but it was just so hard not to because tons of them were a combination of two kanji that I already know individually but the meaning wasn’t clear to me without looking it up. And there were a couple completely new-to-me jouyou kanji in there as well. (Very hard to leave those be as a certified Kanji Collector.)
Okay, that was all. I think I’m actually very sleepy.
Bonbon was great, the end was really exciting. And Kiyo-san was lovely. I watched an episode of Alone the other night with family that had a very anxiety-inducing and gory event, and after that instead of starting Bonbon #3 I went back to Maikosanchi (which I had been in the middle of) and read three chapters in a row, and then I DIDN’T HAVE NIGHTMARES! Yay. Then I was only two chapters from the end, so I finished it the next day (last night).
Also, amazingly, I finished the reading for Mystery Series Club week 1! Maybe it’s got to do with my mostly manga reading background, but whenever dialogue heavy parts come around the pages start to fly a little faster. And seeing as the first week was the longest, I guess that means I can probably keep up. Assuming that the level of the book doesn’t go up from what it was in the first ~50 pages. There’s a LOT of proper nouns in this book, both characters and place names. … It would be great if there was a proper noun add-on for my dictionary (takoboto).
And then there’s Harta! I am one (1) yomikiri away from finishing issue 93! I just need a little bit of brainpower and a free-ish morning. Might not be til Monday (trying to do readathon on Sunday!), but we’ll see.
Wow, it feels like it’s been a while! I’ve been keeping up with 後鳥羽伝説殺人事件. Yesterday I was not feeling so good and only read one page. Today I went to the sauna in the morning, and I felt a lot better after that. I ended up reading 14 pages of 後鳥羽 today! That is definitely a record. Maybe I’m starting to get adjusted to the density of proper nouns.
Maybe it won’t be so hard to keep up going forward?
Real world stuff has been weird the last couple weeks. First my partner was having to spend a lot of time and emotional energy helping his mom who has dementia (and also multiple undiagnosed (because she refuses to see a doctor) mental illnesses). That was less this week than the week before, so that’s good. On the other hand, now I’m struggling with things related to my mom.
I’m thinking about making big buttons for mother’s day that say “DON’T ASK ME ABOUT MY MOTHER”.
Anyhoozles.
Neokyo is taking subjectively forever to pack my parcel with the adventure books. I’m in no rush with Kiki books, but I want to have adventure books in time to depart with the group! That should be fun.
I’m kind of (sometimes theoretically) participating casually in a ton of easy manga clubs right now? 1. Nicora 2. Soup 3. Yawning/Umbrella cover. So, ABBC, BBC, and IMBC? Oh! And I joined the Akatsuki no Yona club, which is not exactly easy, but it’s also not terribly difficult … it’s just kind of a lot in terms of volume. I guess I’m feeling a bit scattered at the moment. It’s been six days and I’ve barely cracked open Harta 94!
Maybe I need a reading chart? Or a physical shelf containing any and all in-progress books (besides the ones that live next to my bed)? I used to have that, but then it turned into a shelf of books that were in progress but are no longer. But if I cleared it out, then maybe I could retire book club books to that spot when I’m done with them for the week? That might feel more intuitive and less overwhelming than a chart. Oh, except, wait, I’m reading a bunch of these digitally.
Now I’m not sure if this is your thing or if I’ve misunderstood this, but do you use Natively to track your books? I assumed you did, but I just checked and I can’t find your profile on Natively, but you have an account on the forums, right? And if you do have an account, I want to follow you! Here’s mine
Just in case you don't...
If you do use Natively, then you will laugh so hard at this, but in the back of my mind, I’m like, what if Mara doesn’t know about this
It actually helps me a lot to have all the books I’m reading marked as ‘Reading’ on there so I don’t forget about book clubs.
So here’s my dashboard and I can horizontal scroll to see what I’m reading on my dashboard
And you can also go into the book manager to give books ‘finish’ dates in the past (if you really wanted to, that came up somewhere else on WK), selectively hide status updates, etc. And just like a real bookshelf, every once in a while I remove things from the reading list and kick them back to ‘owned’.
btw I totally get the ‘don’t ask me about my mother’ badge. I can relate, and know a few other people ´who feel the same. hugs
OMG! All three of ours have passed now (including a second marriage by a parent), but it was a heckuva energy-sucking roller coaster ride, so I make a gift of donating my energy to you, which I had previously devoted to that…
今日も頑張ってください
I actually never really wandered around Natively, because I haven’t had my reading/crazy stage, yet. I keep trying to get there, though! So thank you for the explanation, mitracさん
Totally valid. I technically did know about this, but this is the second time in a row that you’ve reminded me of something really good that I had temporarily forgotten existed!
I added all my book club books to reading and put the url of the book club home page in the notes section! That’s actually been one of my organizational issues, that I have to scroll through my forum notifications to try to find the book club page again!
Aww, thank you, that’s so sweet!
Thanks for the commiseration, friends.
P.S. Omg, I just figured out how following works! Now I know things about your timeline Mitrac! Like, did you just finish 怪人二十面相 a few days ago?! Congratulations! How did it feel? Does it ever get easier? Really, though, that is huge, well done.
Which book club / url? Librarians are working through those now so I can add that publicly, too. At some point I’ll make an announcement somewhere useful to announce that if people report those we’ll add them (basically click the ‘report an issue with this book’ and then give us the url to the book club!) and hopefully we get back to book club leaders being in the habit of asking us to set those up when they start the club homepage.
I actually hadn’t thought about using the Natively links… yes, that is a hassle to scroll through or search for them.
on finishing 怪人二十面相
Thanks!! Ooops, you just reminded me I didn’t post my weekly update… This might surprise you - I have to admit I lost a bit of the will from about the 75% mark and skimmed from about Ch 27 or so to the end. Between you and me, (and the rest of the internet reading your log), I think if the book had ended around Ch 26 or 27 I would have had peak happiness with the book. To me it didn’t feel like it got easier, and I don’t know what happened, I just suddenly felt like I was done reading it. I think I should have done what you did (move on to something else for a while!). But instead I skimmed the rest of it. I thought that was a good solution, but looking back it wasn’t as fun. I’m not sure how much this was my own internal weather affecting things. But to be fair, the end of the book has a different character/style than what comes before. That probably sounds pretty negative, though. All in all, I’m glad I read it and it was great to finish it! I’m taking a mini break from hard reading and then I’ll ease into something else and hope my new books including BonBon arrive soon!
on stalking people on Natively
It’s so fun, omg ever since hotdog introduced me to the joys of stalking people’s reading I have a daily look at my dashboard to look at my follow list and scroll through who read what. And since then, whereas before I would just update when I started/finished a book, now for most books I also update what pages I read every day to enable 2-way stalking although I’m going to allow some to be a bit more freeflow / nonlinear. And I don’t track time, for some reason that makes me feel competitive with myself in a negative way.
Natively are making some changes on the front end, so some things are buggy. There are a couple of ways of adding status updates, but for now I think it’s best to use the ‘update’ button on your dashboard. Unless something got fixed (and I don’t they are planning to fix the current dashboard, they’re completely revamping it), updating from the book page doesn’t go to your feed. I’m just telling you all this because I’m hoping to stalk your updates, now, too but don’t do anything that’s not fun!
I didn’t spot a “report an issue” button, but I did see a feedback button, so I tried submitting the url through that. Let me know if that works well and I’ll do it for the others as well!
Ahh, that makes sense. My brain does this “fun” thing, which is a huge disadvantage in some cases, but I guess kind of an advantage in leisure, where when it’s done with something it just fully stops. If I try to force it it melts like a sleepy cat that doesn’t want to be picked up. I’m sorry you ended up not enjoying the end of it, but still major props for finishing it.
This makes me even more interested in the modernizations, cause I feel like when a work like that (a classic that was hugely influential, but not necessarily completely perfect) gets reinterpreted that’s a huge chance for some of the flaws in the original work to be ironed out. Now I really don’t think I can resist the temptation of ordering a cute derivative work hehe.
Oh yeah, I think I’m going to be the same. I’m already a little obsessed with it.
I’m feeling pretty useless as a librarian as I started a lot later than most of the rest of you, so one of the things I’ve been doing to feel like I’m making a difference is adding all the (active) book clubs that I’ve noticed don’t have a badge. I totally forgot about the WK badge too! I’ll get busy with that today
I actually just recently had my first round of the issues I reported back in the summer be addressed by the librarian. And I have a suspicion that that librarian was @mitrac ^^
But yeah, the page count on that one is reliable on Bookwalker, unfortunately, this will not be enough for the Amazon sync, ehhh
I did all of the active standalone books (and the ones where they are currently reading the first of a series). We’re talking about how we want to handle series (does each individual book get a tag? Does the whole series?) so I held off on doing manga/series for now, but I’ll start doing the backlog once we come to a decision.
yes, I may have done some for you I’m sure others, did, too - that screenshot reply is from someone else. Just give me the Natively link and I’ll add it to my list of series to chip away at!
more details on page numbers
page counts is a thing that the response might vary between librarians. If a user reports a book and includes the page count it is so quick to add and can be done right away. If they don’t add the page number to the request, then it’s a bit more hassle, but I suspect most librarians would look it up for one book. If it’s a long series, I would look them up and add them in, but I needed to have a bit more time for that and have enough concentration not to screw it up. I can see why someone might not want to set up the expectation that we’ll go through ultralong series and add page numbers. Just give me a shout if you need that. Or report them one by one as you read them with the page number and it will definitely get added.
There’s a request in to sync some series with Bookwalker, but I’m not sure if it will get prioritised or happen. Brandon got burned by trying that with yes24 for Korean and they’re still sorting out some issues it caused.
I’ve caught up on what I can do, so I’ll go back to the outstanding ones for you and @MaraVos that you requested on my log that I got part way through and didn’t have the tools at the time, but I think I have the tools now to do them so I’ll have a go and report back.
Whenever I get back to 怪人二十面相 maybe it will feel a little bit easier too!
… Just checked, and yes actually, this is a record. I’ve only read as long as 24 minutes in a row twice before now. (Wait, why didn’t I also check if I’ve ever read 4 pages in a row before??) When I finish maybe I’ll make a final post of all of these tracking posts together. Then it’ll be interesting to look for patterns/developments.
I did go skating and it definitely inspired me to want to go more frequently again! I have my own skates at home, so I will plan to visit some local rinks. I think we even have one that stays open during summer, which is exciting. :DDD
That said I do think the story picks up pretty fast which I greatly appreciate.
Amazing suggestion, thank you! This had fallen off my radar, but I’ve always wanted to join but felt like I couldn’t justify it before. Now it feels reasonable (with regards to level and load), and I’m ordering from mercari through Neokyo so it’s easy to get them!! (I actually ordered both before even getting out of bed this morning after I saw your comment.)
Or maybe after I finally finish reading 霧のむこうのふしぎな町. 
I’m sure others, did, too - that screenshot reply is from someone else. Just give me the Natively link and I’ll add it to my list of series to chip away at!