Haven’t posted here in ages 
so it’s probably about time…
After having finished Flesh&Blood, I finally decided to give 穴 a try. I figured I might be able to quickly read the first story before the next ABC book starts, but I was clearly wrong…
My main intention was to scout the book’s difficulty (as we had a bit of a discussion about it in the Natively & IBC threads). When I started, I found the very first passage to be a bit difficult because there was lots of speech and recounting of speech so that was not really clear to me; also of course settling into a writing style always takes a bit of time. But after this first scene it was pretty okay difficulty-wise. Nonetheless, I only managed to read about 5 pages per day before being pretty much exhausted 
I was actually wondering why this happened and what this means for the book’s difficulty, but I’m still a bit confused. I guess it’s a mixture of the book being off to a pretty slow start (so there was nothing that would naturally drag me along), the author using a narrative full of tiny details (making me wonder constantly how all of these details are supposed to fit together), and me being a bit sleep-deprived and short on time during the past week (so I only managed to read late in the evening when I was very tired).
Luckily the story picked up a bit of steam today, but I still don’t know what to think about its difficulty 
(But probably it’s not as difficult as the Natively L38 is supposed to make us believe.)
For the rest of this month, I will continue 穴, I will hopefully manage to catch up with がばいばあちゃん at some point, and I will start the new ABC pick on Friday.