I’m glad to hear it, because I had seen you describe his writing as simple and I was wondering why I was having trouble with some phrases, and why I was enjoying others so much 
He really seems to take joy in his descriptions in this one.
You’re too kind. My excuse is that I was already tired and it was late at night when I compiled it, but I really seem to have not entered a single name correctly 
If you get a chance, read the 試し読み on this book - 夜警. That’s far more representative of his writing that I’ve read so far. Very straight forward, shorter sentences, dialogue heavy.
Day 3 has come and I read another page. Sadly, not much dialogue and a lot of words I had to look up - including one word I remember when I learned it first but could not remember for the life of me remember the reading 
Granted, it was also used in a context that I didn not know before:
それでも草薙を見る目には警戒心が宿っていた。
So far, I only knew it in the context of “staying a night somewhere (an inn or hotel)” not in the context of a certain feeling staying in someone’s eyes. Fun to learn.
The last sentence of the page, while easy to understand was pretty hard to translate and I’m still not happy with it. I might have to look over it again and dissect it on paper to turn it into a proper German sentence.
So it is time for my weekly Weekend update post: Homethread 3/61
I started well into the challenge and completed the first 3 days with flying colors. On Friday and Saturday I finished up my reading from the advanced book club for the week (薬屋のひとりごと) wich I will drop from now on. It was fine but my lack of vocabulary made it more time intensive than I would have liked.
Today then I completed the reading from the beginner book club which starts to get moving pretty quickly. Can recommend it to anyone still looking for something interesting and simple to read to add to this challenge. Join us we are just getting started!
All throughout this time I’m still doing my Anki reviews and reading some news articles, watching some Japanese Youtube. My Anki load is pretty low at the moment so it’s perfect to fit it into breaks every now and then. Since I do full sentence reviews it probably also counts as reading ^^.
Moving forward I will do the reading for the かばいばあちゃん club in the beginning of next week (2-3 days). Also after now having dropped the advanced book club I will probably fill some days in with Slam Dunk again. Additionally I put my Tobira readthrough on hold ever since I started the advanced book club. So my plan is to start slowly working through it again. The reinfocement of the already familiar grammar feels useful and here and there I also find some word I didn’t know yet.
Still enjoying the updates of everyody so keep them coming. I’m reading them intensely even if I only post my update every week!
Tanuki Den (aka Homepost): Date 20220403 
Tanuki Scroll III: 弁慶 
Today I decided to read about the legend of Benkei.
Though now I really can’t remember if I did the same in the last challenge or I just thought about reading about Benkei and then never got around to it, I think it’s probably the latter 
Anyway, I definitely didn’t read from this source before. The page is kinda big so I just read as much as I could. It was pretty hard and there was a lot of words I had to look up, so I will run away back to children’s stories tomorrow and cry about my Japanese abilities 
(though saying that I am always surprised at how much I can read and recognise)
Japanese found in the tall grass
郎従「ろうじゅう」ー A servant who serves a samurai or kokushi.
称する「しょうする」ー To take the name of; to call oneself
没年「ぼつねん」ー The year of someone’s death
殉じる「じゅんじする」ー To sacrifice yourself; to become a martyr
基いて「もとづいて」ー Based on; grounded on
草子「くさし」ー Written work (especially a bound book rather than a scroll), seems to be more commonly written as: 草紙
登場人物「とうじょうじんぶつ」ー Character in a drama or a play
脚色「きゃくしょく」ー Dramatization
英雄豪傑「えいゆうごうけつ」ー Hero, but like an unparalleled hero of greatness.
具体的「ぐたいてき」ー Concrete; definite
大納言「だいなごん」ー chief councillor of state. Also a type of adzuki bean!
奥歯「おくば」ー Molars / back teeth
前歯「まえば」ー Front teeth
哀願「あいがん」ー Plea; appeal; petition
疱瘡「ほうそう」ー Smallpox
垂髪「すべからし」ー Hair tied up and hanging down; long flowing luxurious locks
元服「げんぷく」ー Male coming of age ceremony
度々「たびたび」ー Often; over and over again
放逐「ほうちく」ー Expulsion; Ousting; Banishment
剃髪「ていはつ」ーTonsure; to shave one’s head upon entering Buddhahood
太刀「たち」ー Long sword
悲願「ひがん」ー One’s dearest wish
Historical Stuff
吾妻鏡「あずまかがみ」ー Japanese text from the middle ages that chronicles events from the Kamakura Shogunate (12C - 14C)
義経記「ぎけいき」ー Collection of tales about the legends and war stories of Minamoto no Yoshitsune.
幸若舞「こうわかまい」ー Style of dance popular during the Muromachi period.
Places
紀伊「きい」ー A former province. Now present-day Wakayama and south-Mie.
比叡山「ひえいざん」ー Mt. Hiei, in Kyoto
Off to a great start missed the first two days of the challenge even though I’ve been preparing since last week.
Guess I’ll just start counting from the 3rd. The definite symbol of a great speedrun is a mandatory reset right at the beginning they say.
Had an absolutely insane Friday was busy with work-related stuff till early in the morning and Saturday was all about sleeping off the previous week and irl stuff. Honestly, I’m amazed how people in relationships can manage to keep up with wanikani, slight misalignment in the schedule caused two full days of missed reviews for me. (No worries though I’m already all caught up, not my first blunder.)
Actually, I’ve managed to see ドライブ・マイ・カー at the late showing on Saturday. It was truly horrendously dubbed but beggars can’t be choosers I guess, nonetheless quite enjoyed it. Someday you hear me someday I will be able to read Murakami (actually I doubt it myself.)
On a side note, the burn reviews starting to hit HARD.
The first 400-ish were totally alright, they were few and all scattered and didn’t bother me a bit but now they’re pouring. I guess they saw me slacking and totally hit the ground running.
Let’s talk weather. It’s been snowing excessively for the past few days so no spring mood for me. Yet I’ve managed to get that funny feeling of being alive for a moment over the weekend, and it’s not really a frequent visitor in my head.
— end of whining section
Today I’ve been catching up with two of the book clubs that I’m somewhat on schedule with. The 三ツ星カラーズ and Happiness. Even though I was planning to read mostly Fukaboku on the weekend, it’s all scuffed for a moment. I have lots of things in the backlog and I’m working on them.
Saw a recently learned kanji today 藤 albeit in a name 斎藤.
Side note: You guys write a lot, 250+ unread messages in a thread just from 3 days, nonetheless I’m going to check each and every one of your replies, just you wait.
If only we wrote in Japanese, reading this thread alone could count as reading for the day 
maybe the book titles and related vocabulary count?
I only read a bit of it (I have trouble concentrating on samples for some reason, my mind doesn’t fully engage when it knows it won’t keep reading anyway after a point), but I see exactly what you’re saying. Very different style of writing. Interesting how he’s able to adapt his writing like that. And he’s written so much. Is he really just one person?
April 3rd!
Today I read chapter 14 of Mitsuboshi Colors with the Offshoot club from the BBC, then I also read Chapter 3 of Happiness with the ABBC.
I was only actually supposed to read the first half of Chapter 3, but I was really enjoying it and forgot that I needed to keep an eye on the page numbers. So I didn’t realise I’d gone too far until the chapter ended
The story is getting more and more interesting, so it was tempting to keep going! But I like reading along with the club so I didn’t want to get any further ahead than I already have.
Day ３ - Calendar
I continued with chapter 7 of 夜カフェ today. It was a fun chapter indeed. Hope I’ll see more cooking in the next chapters but I guess so.
Day 3 
三毛猫ホームズの推理 ~10% to 14%, chapter 1 section 3 and a little into section 4
I’m really liking all the quirky characters - every detective novel needs plenty of those, as well as a flawed protagonist( and a detective who’s afraid of blood, women and darkness is as flawed as they come, or at least in the entirely wrong profession). Now most detective novels don’t also feature a cool cat like Holmes, but I’d argue they should. 
目を凝らす - to strain one’s eyes, to look closely
首をひねる - to cock one’s head in puzzlement, to wrack one’s brain
半信半疑 - half in doubt, half convinced, dubious
石畳 stone paving, cobble paving (“stone tatami”!)
とどめ - finishing blow, coup de grace
相好を崩す - to smile broadly
夜明かし - staying up all night, all-night vigil
I also learned that 骨を折る can mean “break a bone”, but it can also figuratively mean to take great pains, try hard (but not getting the expected outcome). In this sentence (not a spoiler, but just to be on the safe side:) 固い椅子に、できるだけ楽な姿勢で座ろうと、しばらく骨を折る。 I suppose the meaning is the latter, but who knows
April 3rd
・Honzuki no Gekokujou 9 (84% → 93%)
Funny how I said I would do a tiny read challenge and then I go ahead and do a super read two days in a row. Such a clown 
Relate I was looking up ふがいない and found F外失 which apparently means “apologies for writing to you without either of us following each other”. A Twitter slang!
(Not on Jisho, but on Takoboto :3 )
Yesterday I totally forgot to read my French book, but today I read in it again! I also continued 沖で待つ - I’m slowly getting closer to the end, and the story is getting weirder and weirder… it feels like there is a big morale coming at the end, but then again this is a Japanese story so you never know Anyways, the story is giving me huge 小川未明 vibes which I think shows the author’s skill (the book was published in 2009!).
Day 3
Also more 三毛猫ホームズの推理, only like 8 pages though, taking me from 5-8%. Still took me almost an hour though. reading a new book is hard. But I got to the introduction of !!! Very excited. Also read another section of すべてがＦになる after my update yesterday. It felt like such a lovely vacation after 三毛猫, which is funny, because I’d initially planned to read 三毛猫 before すべてがＦになる because I thought the difficulty levels would be the other way round (guess I should have checked Natively haha). It’s worked out nicely though, it’s pleasant having a kind of stretch book and a more comfy page turner on the go.
I’m also really enjoying this! Yesterday I was reading and kept on mentioning to my boyfriend more fun facts about our protagonist and he was like “You know, seems like this guy shouldn’t really be a police officer” and then I kept reading just a little further and got to the section where 片山 is thinking about how he probably shouldn’t be a police officer and was very much “you know, you’re not wrong there.”
Yeah, I actually read the 試し読み for 夜警 before when I was trying to choose what crime novel to read and found it pretty straight forward so I think I underestimated 三毛猫 based on that. It’s pretty cool though, I feel like the dryly humorous and less direct writing style of this one seems to fit with the character of the protagonist.
Read 13 pages for かがみの孤城 🪞 Week 19
The kids (or マサムネ at least) are really starting to speculate about what is going on 
Some nice words:
Yes, feel free to join in! Late starters are definitely also welcome!
Natively putting this at a guesstimated 38 seems way off to me fwiw. ロクヨン is currently at 36 and these are some example sentences I pulled just now from my review of the book to give a comparison to 三毛猫ホームズの推理:
警務部長室と記者室の間で、そして刑事部と記者室の狭間で、翻弄され続けた広報室は消耗し、疲弊し、嘆息の巣と化していた。
and
灯のせいもあろうが、顔には皺の数だけ疲労の影が落ちていた。
Keeping in mind that “N1” tops out at 40 I kind of assume anything past that is any of these things:
My opinions, yours may vary, but that’s why I think 38 is way off 
I think the current Natively level is just the system taking a blind guess. We’re the first users to read it. The level will probably shift a lot once we finish and grade it. I agree with @pocketcat that 38 seems too high. Still…
Same here. I can read this, but it isn’t what I’d call “simple.”
I wonder if 赤川’s style changed over the years. After all, 三毛猫ホームズの推理 is from 1978, and is one of his earliest published works as a young author.
A few months ago I read three 三毛猫ホームズ short stories from 1988-ish in a Tsubasa Bunko compilation, and the writing styles seem very different. At that time I checked the 試し読み for 三毛猫ホームズの推理 and just reading the prologue it was a totally different vibe, with a more complex sentence structure, broader vocabulary, and just generally more atmospheric overall. I assumed the difference was some combination of 赤川 focusing more on the bare bones of the plot since these were short stories, and also Tsubasa Bunko maybe having selected these stories because they would be more approachable for young readers. But maybe it’s also that he was writing in a plainer and more direct style by then. It’s a big difference in vocab level. In 40 pages of this 1978 book I’ve hit nearly as much new vocab as I did in all 150 pages of those short stories from 1988.
I really like the dichotomy in that sentence! Is this representative of his style in the book so far? 
Today I read 40 pages of 終わりのセラフ 一瀬グレン、１６歳の破滅 manga vol.2 it’s the prequel to Seraph of the End. What should I say it’s way better than I anticipated it. It’s awesome seeing the younger version of some of the characters from Seraph of the End.
April 3
Final Fantasy VII
That’s awesome, good luck! The first thing I read in the last challenge was the first Ace Attorney game, although I had it on PC and was using Game2Text to make lookups easier. Love that series, though. Looking forward to updates on your progress 
Oh now that you mention it, I’m the same way. It takes some real effort right now for me to focus my brain on anything in Japanese that isn’t something I feel sufficiently committed to.
Daisoujou sleepiness update: I sure am still sleepy. My cat has decided that she’s in the mood to start yelling all night again, and I perform particularly poorly with pretty much any interrupted sleep or sleep loss at all. So I misread a bunch of words, had to shake off the approaching migraine feeling a few times, and was slow all around… but I made it to 5000 characters (385 lines) before stopping. My streak of hitting that goal remains unbroken.
The plot itself is neat; I’m getting into the meat of the route and things are taking a more serious turn. There’s an oblique reference to Tsumugi’s route that kind of ties up a loose end there; I’m really glad I read them in this order so that didn’t just feel like a random thing. One little bit I appreciated about reading in Japanese is that a perspective shift was signaled like 75% through shifting from 俺 to 僕, and catching that was cool.
My favorite new word is an idiom: オブラートに包む (オブラートにつつむ), meaning to say indirectly so as to not upset someone. オブラート is a sort of thin wafer, so the idea is wrapping ones words to make them not so hurtful.
Oh and last night I sat down and read all of chapter 1 of 佐賀のがばいばあちゃん for the intermediate book club! The chapters are quite short but it’s kind of a new experience for me to be reading in a regular chunk like that and not just tapping out at random spots when I have to, heh.
