📚📚 Read every day challenge - Fall 2022 🍁🍂

:books: :maple_leaf: softlyraining’s spooky book stack :jack_o_lantern: :open_book:

October 25th:
:yellow_square: 名探偵コナン (69% → 74%)

Short read today. Conan got carried away again and voiced (very important and useful) questions out loud, to the chagrin of Ran’s father. I’m waiting to see if he’ll put his new gadget to use at some point during this case.

In other news, I succumbed to the call: the call of the Bookwalker coin back sale. A couple of my purchases were discounted, too, and a part of my brain couldn’t help but snag a sweet deal. Also, since there’s pretty much zero shelf space left in my home, going digital just makes more sense right now (not that lack of shelving’s ever stopped me before, but I digress).

Ah, the guilt of spending more money on books when you still have plenty that are unread. Such is the torment of a bookworm’s life. :weary:

List of purchases, for those curious

ふじと南極なかまたち(上 and 下)
medium 霊媒探偵城塚翡翠
カルト宗教信じてました。 and the sequel volume カルト宗教やめました。
おばちゃんたちのいるところ Where The Wild Ladies Are
カレーライスと日本人 (both because I haven’t read any non-fiction books in Japanese yet and I love curry rice)

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25 October 2022

:house: Home Post


  • Intro Reading for Quartet I

Textbook reading!

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:exploding_head: Clearly your priorities are different from mine :rofl:
I’m so hooked on vertical writing, I even installed an app that let me read Aozora pages vertically :woman_shrugging:

But for me the biggest question is, where do you get Japanese ePub from? I only know about vendors that lock you into their own app, so there is no (straightforward/easy/legal?) way of getting an ePub from them. (This is different from some German / international vendors where I can buy German or English books as ePub even without DRM.)

Those are sooo hard to withstand, aren’t they :rofl:
I’m happy to report that I got out of it with only 7 books in my cart :grin: so I pretty much came away unscathed :wink:

5 are from my ongoing F&B series, one that I want to propose to IBC and one from the Mystery book club that was (a) discounted on top of the sale and (b) mentions 黒い森 in its title so I need to find out whether it’s just talking about a black forest or about THE Blackforest (which is, like, 10 km from where I live :exploding_head:). Looking at the cover picture it might as well be the latter, so I’m keen to find out more!

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I bought a few too - but 2 were for upcoming book clubs and I think the rest were more volumes of various series I’m reading. And one which I want to propose for BBC once I figure out how to do that!

Reading has not been extensive today - I’ve read 2 (edit:3) pages of 夜カフェ. But I’m not expecting much of the next few days - I’m only at home until Sunday morning (having got home Monday morning) and need to prepare my house for house sitters. I’ll be away for 4 weeks for work, back for 6 days then go overseas for another 7 weeks plus :anguished: Also I’m working an 11 hour shift from home tomorrow then another 2 hours…

I need to finish Tugumi but I’m taking it with me - actually taking it home :rofl: The library will finally get their book back.

I think things would be chaotic enough without having sort of adopted a stray cat who has now been persuaded she’s an indoor cat. She’s so sweet, but every now and then she freaks out suddenly and lashes out. The day I got back she scratched me in the face - again. But hasn’t done it since. I’m just worried for my house sitters. Hopefully she’ll behave. In 6 months she’s gone from not approaching humans to sleeping on my bed.

Sleeping kitty photo added:

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Had a major headache, so I took in some ibuprofen and rested. Ended up falling in sleep and then waking up at 3 am from a nightmare. Decided to read then (it still counts for the streak!) and surprised myself by reading two sections/chapters of 時をかける少女. Had to stop myself from reading more, as there doesn’t seem like any good stopping points going forward. That said didn’t get in any reviews/lessons in yesterday with jpdb, so today we picking up more cards.

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:fallen_leaf: Day 26, 26th of October :maple_leaf:

:open_book: Back to my Home Post

Using my precious break time to do my reading earlier in the day, because I don’t have time later. Managed to read two DrDru stories today. First was one about negations, and how vegetarians don’t eat meat. Seeing those long Katakana words was rather spooky, I had to put them into a translator to figure out they were names…

The second one was about making a trip to Tokyo Tower! Don’t forget to look (ひだり)(がわ)(みぎ)(がわ) !

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Oct 24, Mon

  • かがみの孤城 (上) 29% => 30% (Ch.2 June)

Oct 25, Tue

Probably didn’t read anything major.

Oct 26, Wed of Week 5 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

  • SHADOWS HOUSE Vol.3 Ch.26-27 (club week is on 25-26)

6 vocabularies per chapter. Somewhat moderate.

I now skimmed up to Ch.33, and see more reasons not to hurry.

I have to admit that more reading is a good way for me to collect vocabularies, however I don’t make reading a higher priority for now. They may be some reading to accompany listening, and reading aloud, though.

I have upcoming assignment and discussion, and felt a little stress out… that would be my excuse. In any case, it became that I don’t want to do a thing too seriously in Japanese.

Also, my body is quite bad this week. In particular, coughing a lot that it becomes distraction for everything else (not just vocalizing). Hopefully, it is going to resolve, but also knowing that “cough” part can take some time.

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:maple_leaf: :jack_o_lantern: :snowflake: :christmas_tree: October 26 :christmas_tree: :snowflake: :jack_o_lantern: :maple_leaf:
Home Post

夜カフェ :cake:

I keep being a bit choppy in my reading, this past week has me reading every other day more or less. While I am fairly sure I had okay reasons for not reading most of those days, it isn’t what I’m aiming to do.

Today I reminded myself again that I don’t need to read a whole chapter. Part of a chapter is fine. And I picked up 夜カフェ again and read about half a chapter. So not I’m half a chapter behind plus this week’s chapter, but as long as I keep reading I’ll be on point just as the new book club week’s start. But then I’ve already finished 耳をすませば so only Orange and 夜カフェ is left.

At this point I don’t think I’ll catch up with Loopers, but it will be the next read I tackle outside book clubs for sure.

The most enlightening point is figuring out why I haven’t been enjoying 夜カフェ much recently. I think it is because of reading it with a club, aka reading only one chapter a week with then a week to wait for the next chapter. With several situations taking multiple chapters to resolve and often the middle chapters for that situation is just that situation being in stasis.

That means that I have all the time in the world to be reminded of the bad stuff happening to the characters, but the good things tends to be fleeting (since they don’t typically span multiple chapters in that way).

So while I’ll finish off this volume with the club, for the next volume, which I also own, I think I’ll just read it at my own pace, aka every day (except when I’m reading book clubs!). I’ll see if that makes a difference in my overall enjoyment of the work. If it does, I might continue with the series. If it doesn’t, I definitely won’t. ^^

Turns out I don’t enjoy books that are all about people figuring out how to deal with bullies when it is real life stuff and not like fantasy where you just have a training montage and then you beat the crap out of the bully. Less finesse and rather unreal, but more satisfying.

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:tiger2: :books: The Tanuki Autumn Onsen :hotsprings: :raccoon:

20221026 - 吾輩は狸である progress: 62.51% :baseball:

Wagahai-cat mistakes a game of baseball for an artillery siege.

:fallen_leaf: Japanese found under the leaves :fallen_leaf:

Meowords

当人「とうにん」ー The person in question; said person
蒙昧「もうまい」ー Uncivilised; ignorance; unenlightened
縦隊「じゅうたい」ー Military column (formation)
「どじょう」ー Loach (also: 泥鰌)

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:books: :video_game: :maple_leaf: :fallen_leaf: October 25

Trying to speed up reading 狼と香辛料 so I can finish with the bookclub (75% → 79%).

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Home post :bookmark: Oct 26 :maple_leaf:

・狼と香辛料 (72% → 75%)

Things are getting stressful with exams coming up and a ton of stuff that needs to be done :skull:

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:jack_o_lantern: October 26th :jack_o_lantern: (Home Post Link)

Finally set up a bookmeter account today! Slowly continuing to transition from sites made for language learners to actual japanese sites. Natively still has value to me as a way to track approximate book difficulty, but I feel i’m not all that far off (within maybe 6 months to a year timescale) from being able to pick up pretty much anything at a YA level, and bookmeter will be more useful for finding cool things then, I think.

Also set up a bookwalker account to start accumulating stuff now that I have my kindle set up, eventually this will come in handy I’m sure. Plus being able to preview series is actually pretty nice now that I can read enough to sorta gauge level just by looking. The yen is so weak rn I might just pick up some stuff I already know I’m going to want… :thinking:

Anyways. Did get some good reading done too!

Tried reading the first few pages in the くまクマ熊ベアー 1 preview, since I knew that was supposed to be an easier light novel. I like manga, but eventually being able to read stuff w/o pictures is the goal.
Read よつばと!chapters 83, 84, 85.

Good Words

炭酸「たんさん」ー carbonated water/drink
模様替え「もうようがえ」ー rearranging, remodeling
着替え「きがえ」ー changing clothes
幅跳び「はばとび」ー long jump
痒い「かゆい」ー itchy
捗る「はかどる」ー to make good progress

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Today I read four pages of the first Konosuba book. I’m reading it right now because the book is pretty easy unlike most of the other books I have. Also some lines of the Monobeno visual novel.

You could get the kindle version of books and turn them into epub format using calibre.

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Main Post

On October the 26th I:

  • Read today’s NHK Easy News.

Yes, I haven’t been reading (or listening to) anything but NHK Easy News lately, but at least I keep doing the reading and listening. These two threads are really stimulating.

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I looked up the translation of that word into my native language. The translation turned out to be another word I’ve never seen. Had to look up the definition. Apparently, it’s a kind of fish :sweat_smile:

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Reply to Nicole, slight off topic

I would love to read it vertically, but taking notes serves me two purposes:

  1. Can export sentences to study which I find particularly tricky, and I can do this later at my own convenience due to no limit on notes
  2. I can make notes for name readings and reference them quickly without needing to go to another app / having a split screen.

So far no app has given me everything I want so I settle for those.

As for how…it’s both straight forward and complicated. I get them from the Japanese Rakuten books website. I then login to the English (not sure if it’s explicitly American or not?) Rakuten books site where I can also see my library and am given the option to download it as an ePub (this option isn’t on the Japanese site, or if it is I couldn’t find it). I can’t really say more on this forum as to what I do from there, but DRM is a problem that I handle :upside_down_face:

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October 26th!

Chapter 10 of Yoru Cafe Volume 2 today. As always it took me AGES to read - I usually do it on a weekend to make sure I have enough time and I’m not already tired from a day of working, so doing it today after work was a bit of a challenge!
I did it though :slight_smile:

(Home Post)

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26 October 2022

:house: Home Post


  • Chainsaw Man (Chapters 42-44)

man.

CHAINSAWMAN SPOILERS!!! FOR ALL THE WAY THROUGH!

The shit that Denji goes through really stings to read through again, and it’ll only hurt more watching it animated. Poor guy gets betrayed by every character he interacts with in the most crushing ways. Power wasn’t too bad cause they just met, but being shown love that wasn’t laced with dog-related messaging by Reze only to get dismembered at a festival seconds later, ouch. Homie really doesn’t catch a break.

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:fallen_leaf::maple_leaf: October 26 :maple_leaf::fallen_leaf: home post link🏡

I read today’s NHK easy news article, which was about a v-tuber teaching how to use an AED.

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Home post

Day 25:

Priority: :houses: 青桐. Constant 出血 and a persistent smell of 腐汁. :grimacing:

Free choice: :mag: 硝子の塔の殺人.

Extra: :notebook: デスノート 1.

Read-aloud: :curly_loop: ミステリと言う勿れ 1 with Bri.

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