📚📚 Read every day challenge - Spring 2022 🌸 🌱

Summary post :bookmark:

June 14th :seedling:

・SAO Progressive 1 (19% → 30%)

Reading in the morning proved to be effective! Probably spent 3 hours. After that I got absorbed in trying to figure out a formatting technique for a couple hours (ft. the poll thread) and then got too tired to read again. Will try reading in the morning again tomorrow.


For those interested, here’s the results of said formatting technique. A list table!

List of books I've read
Year Books
2020 [1]
2021 [2]
2022 [3]
Sum 28 books

  1. 2020
    Jan
    Feb
    Mar
    Apr 氷菓
    May SAO 1
    Jun SAO 2
    Jul SAO 3
    Aug SAO 4
    Sep
    Oct 本好き 1
    Nov 魔女の宅急便・SAO 5
    Dec SAO 6・本好き 2
    Sum 10 books
    ↩︎
  2. 2021
    Jan
    Feb 博士の愛した数式
    Mar 本好き 3
    Apr コンビニ人間
    May
    Jun 本好き4・SAO 7・すべてがFになる
    Jul SAO 8
    Aug 冷たい密室と博士たち
    Sep 本好き 5
    Oct 本好き 6
    Nov
    Dec 本好き 7
    Sum 11 books
    ↩︎
  3. 2022
    Jan かがみの孤城 上
    Feb 本好き 8・笑わない数学者
    Mar
    Apr 本好き 9
    May 薬屋のひとりごと 1・薬屋のひとりごと 2
    Jun かがみの孤城 下
    Jul
    Aug
    Sep
    Oct
    Nov
    Dec
    Sum 7 books (pr. June)
    ↩︎
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june 14 :cherry_blossom: home post

Got a lot of reading done today!
神々のトライフォース: 19 pages (started Act.2)
夜カフェ: 2 whole chapters!

Yes I know I said I dropped 夜カフェ but I suddenly had the urge to try reading it again

With 神々のトライフォース, I think I liked Act.1 better than I’m liking Act.2, at least so far. It’s mainly because I’m not really a fan of ガンティ. It’s not b/c she’s original to the manga, b/c I don’t really care about that. I’ve liked a lot of the changes made! And I like the idea of Link having a traveling companion! But so far I don’t really like ガンティ’s personality very much. She seems a bit out of place too, like she belongs in another manga? Who knows, though, maybe I’ll grow to like her!

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It has been a while since I’ve looked at any NHK Easy articles, but I was wondering if this was related to Hana Kimura’s death, and sure enough…

I think this is the first time I’ve read one of these articles knowing far more context about the situation than was covered in the article.

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June 14th!

I’m posting after midnight, but I actually did my reading hours ago!
I started Volume 11 of Yotsuba, and read chapter 70.

Yotsuba wandered into a restaurant and learned how udon is made, it was a sweet chapter.

(Home Post)

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I heard this on NHK last night on the news. The lawyers are wondering how they will prove and handle the problem in general. Bullying can sometimes be hard to define. Yes, you have the penalties correct.

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June 14 :cherry_blossom: Home Post

Today was kind of a hot mess :joy: the inherent chaos of finishing my main project and having to figure out what I’m doing haha. I immediately got humbled by a rough section in 海辺(うみべ)のカフカ and so I ended up giving Nightshade a go again (because I thought that would have less weird vocabulary and stuff I guess? lmao what) and honestly it’s doable, under normal circumstances I would’ve probably been fine with the amount I was looking up but I was not in the mindset :joy:

Sooo I finally picked up バディミッションBOND and that worked out better for sure. I messed with the demo a while back when I was deciding whether to buy it and I remember it being a little rough vocabulary-wise, especially with like crime/police vocabulary, but AI prepped me well :+1: I’m still looking up more stuff than I generally was with AI but I think that’s mostly starting-new-thing-syndrome, it’s really not bad thus far.

And game-wise I’m really enjoying it so far! Which is probably the least shocking thing considering it’s like… another detective-y visual novel-type thing :joy: But it has some cool mechanics, and I really like the comic book kind of aesthetic it has going, and a lot of it is voiced which is nice. I’m intrigued by the characters too :eyes: They’re probably gonna hurt me but what else is new! It’s also cool playing something that I just completely wouldn’t be able to experience in English, nice little bonus :grin:

Anyway I also fought through that part in 海辺(うみべ)のカフカ and ended up finishing the whole rest of the reading for the week so that’s almost 30 pages total today? So yeah today started out with my brain being like “no. no read >:(” but it ended up really successful so :man_shrugging: whatever the process must be!

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Home

It’s been really hot lately, and apparently that means just lying around playing video games all day when I don’t have anything else I need to be doing. Unless that’s just the hyperfixation. But I looked at my books and my brain said, “No. Dragon Quest.”

…I’ve reached the Masked Martial Arts Tournament and Erik/Camus still hasn’t called me 相棒… I’d thought for sure he did outside of Itemized Kill, but it seems not… I’m sad. His title on the つよさ page does call him エリオルの相棒, but it’s not the same.

Anyway, I apparently played about 13 hrs, which, yeah, seems about right. I finished Daharune, went all over the place trying to complete some quests, and made it through to Grotta where I completed the tournament. I completely forgot that there was a spider boss. Ugh. At least he’s not terribly realistic, but still. Well, next is onward to the ruins of Dundrasil/Yugunoa!

Rab/Rou says 相棒 when he says that someone of dubious origins (El) isn’t going to be the princess’ partner, though I didn’t hear it lol (not last time, and not this time either), his speech is kind of hard for me to understand at times. Now that I’ve got JP text, I can tell that 相棒 gets used a little more than I thought (the innkeeper asks if El is Hanfree’s 相棒さん, the competitors will sometimes call their own partner 相棒), but パートナー is still used the majority of the time. Knowing it’s not just Hanfree doesn’t exactly make me feel any better, though.

I saw おす/おっす in kanji today (押忍), in a bookshelf in Grotta. I hadn’t even known it had kanji. But, well, it also used a たる adjective so I guess I’m not surprised? All the competitors written about in it are in the current competition, so I guess it’s just supposed to lend a feeling of oldness to the setting, even though no one really talks like that in the dialogue aside from some of the elderly characters. An elderly priest who gave me a quest at the Nelson Inn used a 二段 verb! 憂ふ/憂う (うれう), “to grieve; to lament.” Its modern counterpart is the 一段 verb 憂える (うれえる).

I did not get to fake-marry Erik today. I’d thought for sure the quest from 勇者の実家 from the DQIII altar was where you’d do a wedding rehearsal with one of your party members (I don’t get how you can have a proper wedding rehearsal when it’s not even the people who are actually getting married running through it, but hey, I ain’t complaining, I get to pretend gay-marry my aibou) since that’s the only one I remember having anything to do with a wedding, but apparently not. I have no idea which one it is, then.

Some vocab of note:

忌まわしい (いまわしい) [い-adjective] unpleasant; disagreeable; abominable; disgusting; unsavory
キリがない [expression, い-adjective] endless; boundless; innumerable. endless; never-ending; going on forever.
根に持つ (ねにもつ) [expression, タ五] to hold a grudge; to hold something against somebody
八つ当たり (やつあたり) [noun, する verb] venting one’s anger (one someone or something); taking one’s anger out on
むなくそが悪い (むなくそがわるい) [expression, い-adjective] disgusting; sickening; revolting; nauseating
めぐりめぐって [adverb] (after) bouncing around from one place to the next
手に汗を握る (てにあせをにぎる) [expression, ラ五] to sit on the edge of one’s seat; to be in breathless suspense
見損なう (みそこなう) [ア五, transitive] to misjudge; to mistake; to misread. to misjudge (someone); to overestimate.
栄えある (はえある) [prenominal] splendid; glorious
影が薄い (かげがうすい) [expression, い-adjective] in the background; not standing out. Made me think of KuroBasu’s Kuroko; maybe that this is the expression for not having much of a presence is part of why he’s a “shadow.”

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June 15

First I want to thank everyone for their votes. :bowing_woman:

Considering the interest in reading Orange in general and together with me :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:, I’ll set up an independent/misc book club for Orange in the next few days. After looking through my volumes, I saw there are 26 chapters, so if the club started soon and read a chapter a week without break, the whole series could be read by the end of the year. Not saying that is the schedule that will be done, but it was a fun realization.

Edit: Turns out another volume was released in April this year, so it is now a 7-volume series. O_O

So my personal next pick won’t be Orange. It will probably be Sailor moon and Yotsuba& in some configuration. But Orange is definitely gonna happen, and soon-ish, depending on when most people can start reading it. ^^

Read the next story in the Best Selection 2 by Yuu Watase, and I keep being surprised by how good the stories are. Maybe the first volume just happened to have a lot of stories that I didn’t like, or maybe I’m just a bit better at reading now, so I understand the humor better?

パジャマでおじゃま had this super fun panel that I had to share. There are probably minor spoilers for the story in the panel, so I guess I’ll hide it.

Fun panel

Couple of vocab that keeps coming up, one of them specifically in this collection and another that I just keep having to look up because I guess it doesn’t quite make sense to me (meaning-wise it isn’t sticking):

おまじない = good luck charm, uttered when doing spells, abracadabra ; seems popular for young girls doing love spells, or maybe just this author uses it for that a lot
くせに = and yet, despite, though, when, in spite of (this is the one I keep looking up) ; kinda funny now that I think about it, because I use “and yet” quite a bit in my own writing (in English)…

There is now only one more story in the collection, so I might read that later today and finish the volume. I tend to do that when I’m almost finished I’ve noticed.

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45108627

I used to only read series that are completed, but right now I’m reading something like five to ten ongoing series, so I suppose Orange will be in that category when we start! (Unless this is the for-real final volume?)

It looks like Kobo added a bundle for the first six volumes, which must be only for convenience as it’s the same price as buying the volumes separately. But the table of contents looks like there may be extra or bonus content filling about 120 pages at the end (I’m not certain).

Hm, I’d prefer separate volumes for storage on my computer, but if there’s extra material in this digital super omnibus release… Time to be indecisive for a while!

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No worries, the extra material/story is also in the normal edition. Just divided, aka one chapter at the end of volume one through five. So you won’t miss anything.

I think the story was complete before with 6 volumes. I’ve always been told it was a complete story. I did read the summary of volume 7 to get a feel for what it adds, but I don’t think I can say anything without potentially spoiling something…

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I was thinking that might be the case, but it’s good to have confirmation.

So…I’m still left indecisive on whether to get the compilation or the separate volumes =P

Maybe I’ll get the compilation, but split my backup copy into per-volume folders.

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I think you can one click buy all 1-7 volumes separately on Kobo too.

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It is now a thing:

Because why not procrastinate on important things by starting a WK book club? Amiright?

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:tiger2: :books: The June Tanuki Den: Date 20220615 :cherry_blossom: :raccoon:

No Longer Tanuki Progress: 22.61%

Quite a bit of speech in the section today which is a little bit easier reading, almost a quarter of the way through!

:seedling: Japanese found in the tall grass :seedling:

Learnthings

アンコール ー Encore; and also Angkor, Cambodia
へとへと ー Completely exhausted; dead tired; knackered
頬張る「ほおばる」ー To stuff your cheeks; to fill your mouth
ロイド眼鏡「ロイドめがね」ー Round glasses with thick plastic rims
(had to look this up, seems the ロイド comes from Harold Lloyd, an American actor in the 10s-40s, who was well known for his comedic round-glasses wearing character)
I just spent awhile looking this up and then in the very next sentence of this book it explains to me who Harold Lloyd was… it also explains that he was popular at the time in Japan.
蚯蚓「みみず」ー Earthworm (usually written in kana)

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june 15 :cherry_blossom: home post

I finished up 極主夫道4 this morning just in time for Volume 5 to start! Then I read chapter 5 of 夜カフェ. It’s getting a lot easier to read that book, to the point where I barely have to check the dictionary or vocab sheet! Now that I’ve gotten used it, it’s feels on par with something from Satori Reader. But there’s still some parts that are a bit tricky (I’ve especially noticed it with dialogue)

I’ll likely be joining y’all with Orange :smiley:

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June 15th!

Chapter 71 of Yotsuba today. I loved this one! In it Yotsuba tried pizza for the first time, which was super cute :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

(Home Post)

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You don’t know how often I’ve had that happen. :sweat_smile: Mostly while I was reading graded readers, to be fair, but after a few times it was bonked into my head enough that I remembered to glance at the next sentence to see if something I didn’t understand was explained there. :joy:

We’ll be happy to have you! :tangerine: :email:


June 15 continued

So because I can’t wait until tomorrow to say this, I’ll just finish off my reading post from before.

I did finished off Best Selection 2 by Yuu Watase, aka read the last story. I actually enjoyed most of the stories in the collection. Now I wonder if maybe I just wasn’t good enough to get the stories in the first collection. Maybe I didn’t do it justice, last time I read it. Also, maybe… my expectations were a lot higher, so they got seriously dashed. :joy:

And after setting up the Orange book club and realizing there are 7 volumes, so I need to buy another of that, and I need to buy at least one BBC book (and probably a couple of the proposed ones), well… I figured my next read will be:

銭天堂

And now you are all like: WHAT?! How did that happen?

Well, let me tell you. Beyond the original poll I did in this thread, showing that Zenitendou was very liked because book, that series also happen to have many books in it. I happen to own the first three, but how do I know if I’ll want more? Read it, of course.

So I’m reading that next so I can learn if I like it and therefore should add it my next physical book order that I’ll probably do early July.

And because I was impatient to try it, I read the one page prologue today and it wasn’t hard, except my brain didn’t remember how to read narrative sentences anymore. So I was all confused about how the shop was expanding to fill up some space somewhere. Super magical and mysterious…

Oh no, actually, it was all talking about a murmur expanding to fill the space of the shop. Not as mysterious or magical. :joy:

In other words, longer sentences are now actually connected (aka one sentence) unlike in dialog/manga when long sentences tend to mean multiple sentences put together. My brain need to adjust…

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Summary post :bookmark:

June 15th :cherry_blossom:

・SAO Progressive 1 (30% → 38%)

I finished the first part (+ intermission). Very engaging so far, defo much better storytelling than the anime. Point of view switched every chapter between Kirito and Asuna. Usually I don’t like it, but here it was done pretty well as it lets the reader know what they’re thinking/experiencing and to describe what the other character looks like, how they’re behaving, etc. Complementary, I guess one can call it. Well done in my opinion.

Look-ups has been okay too, surprisingly. With one hand I hold the book, with the other hand I take a potato chip and eat it search jisho on my laptop. Only one monster kanji gave me trouble today and had to search by radicals (殺戮の戮). Sometimes there’s furigana which is cool, sometimes there’s a gairago for furigana (usually gamer lingo) which has mostly been okay, but a tiny bit annoying when I want to search the Japanese word but don’t know the reading.

The plan was to read the first part of this book while waiting for the Saikawa & Moe book club to start up again on Saturday. I guess I’ll keep reading for now :eyes:

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Paging @sycamore with a quasi-relevant post to this thread just cause it was mentioned here last: did you know there’s a new episode of Given up on crunchyroll?

apparently it’s an OVA that was made available to those who purchased the manga awhile ago, but it only showed up on crunchy 2 days (going by the comments). no knowledge needed from the movie. i just watched it, and i didn’t notice anything that would be a content warning like i had with the movie.

it’s listed as “season 4” on crunchy, but there might not be any more coming.

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I finished となりの怪物くん 1 in exactly two weeks! I’m amazed that I finished a shoujo manga so fast. Well, it wasn’t so bad reading this manga in Japanese. There were a lot of words that I didn’t know but worse than that was the handwritten Japanese sprinkled here and there which I gave up trying to decipher. However, I understood most of the plot based on context clues.

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