Day 8, in LP - back to 動物園をつくりたい(#5).
“前回のぼろ負けだったのに懲りないな”
Hey, look, it’s 懲りる, my new friend from yesterday right from the start!
In Cannibal Flan there were plenty of pages with little text, so I reached the page 25/33.
Phrase of the day from the manga:
願ったりかなったり 【ねがったりかなったり】[n] everything working out as desired
9.6.
Today I read some bookclub stuff and the second chapter of 世界一周とんでもグルメ (one more to go! Chapter 2 introduced the last of 3 main characters, changing dynamics. That’s always fun! ) as well as a couple pages of 赤毛のアン. The short chapters were a lie, there’s another long one snuck in there! D: Seeing that made me lose all motivation, haha. Guess I’ll be slowly plugging away at this one again.
Today I’ve read:
Today I finished ふらいんぐうぃっち manga vol.1, my first manga. I have, of course, read manga before but only chapters not a whole manga.
・Started reading SAO 7. page 10 → 20. I’ve gotten used to reading books on my phone now, it feels completely different to read a physical book. Maybe it was the summer heat or the fact that I’ve slept less than 4 hours last night, but it was really hard to keep eyes open and concentrate on reading.
・Started Honzuki 5 too. 0 → 5% Yay, more Honzuki! Am excited 
・Subete ga F ni Naru: Quickly reread the last scene of ch. 9.
2021-06-08
氷菓, 4 pages, 15 minutes
2021-06-09
氷菓, 23 pages (184–206p), almost 2 hours
Only 7 pages left. I’ll finish it tomorrow!
The mystery is solved already, just the epilogue left.
June 9th. Time: 1 hour. Manga Pages: 4
What: Manga からかい上手の高木さん (Volume 1), current pick of ABBC. Chapter 7, Pages 1-4
I’ve met a new word ドジ, it was used 4 times in these 4 pages. jisho says it is “blunder; bungle; clumsiness”, but I had a feeling that it was about a person (like バカ) rather than an act of a person. I’ve checked anime subtitles, and there “dummy” and “airhead” were used. Will see what bookclub’s 先輩 will say on the matter.
June 1: かがみの孤城 上 (63 pages)
June 2: かがみの孤城 上 (20 pages)
June 3: かがみの孤城 上 (90 pages)
June 4: かがみの孤城 上 (40 pages) + 日の鳥１ (10 pages)
June 5: かがみの孤城 上 (112 pages)
June 6: かがみの孤城 上 (69 pages) ~ Finished
June 7: かがみの孤城 下 (170 pages) ~ 46%
June 8: かがみの孤城 下 (81 pages) ~ 68%
June 9: かがみの孤城 下 (116 pages) ~ Finished
Whew, I’m done. I thought I’d finish it this week, but not in just 3 days. That was one satisfying ending. So glad I finally read this book! I may go into more detail in the 多読 thread later.
What’s next?
I’ll probably continue with 風立ちぬ now which is very short (just over 100 pages), but a little bit harder to read than most contemporary literature.
I also really want to read Nahoko Uehashi’s first novel, 月の森 に カミよ眠れ, and I’ve got a huge backlog of manga I should get into. But for some reason reading actual books is more relaxing.
We’ll see! I won’t plan too far ahead and will just hope to keep this momentum going for a bit longer.
Day 9: June 9th
What did I read?: 不可解なぼくのすべてを Vol. 2
How much did I read?: 27 pages (1 chapter)
How long did it take me?: 50 min
Back to FukaBoku! I feel like this chapter took me a really long time for some reason. I think it was because I spent a long time going back and forth trying to make sense of the conversation at the beginning of the chapter…confused characters = a doubly confused me xD But I got there eventually.
My usual daily manga reading, and my Summer 2021 Read Every Day Challenge book reading, keep overlapping.
In reading the Detective Conan movie novelization yesterday, I came across:
頬を赤く染めながら答えた。
I looked up 頬 and 染まる, but didn’t think much of them otherwise.
While reading ARIA today, I encountered them again:
After that, getting to today’s Detective Conan, them showed up another time for good measure:
頬を赤く染めて
My word frequency list says 頬 comes up a total of 14 times in this Conan book, and seven times. Here’s hoping this RRS (reading repetition system) works out!
Back to work on my 2% for the day…
June 9 Update
Today I read through 進撃の巨人 chapter 2. I originally only intended to read through half the chapter, since these chapters take almost 3 hours to read but I lost myself in the emotion of the story and managed to find the time, I guess? It’s interesting that I don’t find Eren annoying yet while reading the manga. While I love the anime, Eren speaking tends to grate on my nerves, and that hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it’s the voice actor?
The chapter was fairly straightforward, no unknown grammar points, and about 68 unknown words over about 40 pages. Not too bad. I’m starting to think I might need to pick books from a higher reading level if I want to get back to encountering new grammar with greater frequency. Maybe now is a good time to give 君の名は another go?
Yes that’s definitely not the best. It turns out to be not as bad as expected but it’s not like you could know about it. I did love the fact that the author was conscious about it and turned that into a joke in the afterword of volume 4.
Anyway, I realized I only had the last chapter left to read, so I just went ahead and did that during my lunch break. I feel like things got solved way too fast considering how bad it was. Not that I know how this kind of situation would resolve since I was lucky enough to have a very accepting and supportive family myself.
Anyway, I am now out of LGBT-related stuff to read… Back when I was learning English, I spent many an hour on a website called tgstorytime (warning: writing quality is questionable at best, but my English wasn’t good enough to realize that at the time; also, damn, that website is still up and running?!?). I kinda wish I could find something like that in Japanese. I have found some stuff on 小説家になろう but the tags are way less specific… If anyone has any idea, I’m open to suggestions.
(Maybe I should ask in the lgbt book club, but it’s kinda dead at the moment)
[main]
I eeny meeny miny mo’d between NHK Easy News articles today and landed on the one about the マンボウ fish. Found it to be a really easy and super short read, which I followed with the second chapter of Japanese Short Stories for Beginners. That also happened to be extremely short and I felt it was a smooth read. What I understood from the Japanese text was pretty spot on with the English translation 
Later in the day I read a little bit of 美少女戦士セーラームーン Vol. 1 I didn’t read very far – just to the end of the scene where Usagi first encounters Luna, but I spent a fair amount of time looking up a couple phrases I found difficult. (Started a vocab list to keep track 
)
By the way, you might be aware of that already, but there was a 美少女戦士セーラームーン book club on the forum as well. I don’t think there was a word list, but you might find answers to the questions you have in the thread (you can also ask if it’s not in there!)
Ooh, this is awesome! I didn’t about the 美少女戦士セーラームーン book club. This should come in handy, thanks!
If you’ve not read it yet, I’m only 2 chapters in to ボーイズ・ ラン・ザ・ ライオット but would really reccomend it so far! It’s actually written by a trans creator as well which is great. It’s centred around a closeted trans male high school student, he meets a new student that comes to the school and they decide to start a fashion label together. From reviews I’ve read it looks like there are more characters with various LGBT identities introduced later on. I’ve also read ‘my lesbian experience with loneliness’ in English a while back and remember it being good - though more autobiographical. that’s about as much as I know of but I’ll be keeping a watch of other suggestions you might get as I will probs want to read them too at somepoint!
Ah, yes, I actually have my eyes on it since I saw your posts in this thread!
In this case though, I’m mostly interested in volume rather than in a single entry, so something like the なろう website, but specifically for LGBTQ+. I don’t mind if it’s garbage fanfic self-publication level. (At least, I don’t mind at the moment).
If I look up tags like トランスジェンダー on なろう, I have ~200 hits, which isn’t much for that website… and I feel there isn’t much variety in the results I’m seeing. What if I want a TG character fighting dragons? Why is there no dragon-fighting story in there? Do I have to write it myself?
Being a tad more general and going with トランスジェンダー 異世界, I get 検索結果： 7作品
Once in a while I go on a google spree to find a more relevant website, with no success so far (but I might just be bad at it). There are many relevant websites that I know of in English, so I feel it must exist though 
So I thought I’d just ask here.
