📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2021 🏖🏖

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!

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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 :thinking: So I thought I’d just ask here.

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I’m not sure how LGBT-related that book would be contents-wise, but I just remembered that we discovered this trans author in the Akutagawa thread. This is her prize-winning book: https://bookmeter.com/books/526437

(Also, 乳と卵 maybe?)

I would include a warning regarding my recent discovery that Akutagawa winners can be hard to read and/or confusing, but I don’t think difficulty is your major concern anyways :sweat_smile:

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It’s less the difficulty of the text and more the difficulty of the content that is a concern at the moment. Life is busy and stressful right now and I just want to unplug my brain. Based on the samples of 乳と卵 I’ve seen, probably not compatible with that condition.
(That being said, I’m definitely reading both those books at some point).

I think another reason for wanting err consumer-grade writing is that I can just stop reading it whenever and forget about it, so I don’t feel bad about just reading for whatever amount of time I have. Prize winning books, I feel like I should give them proper attention™, reading with a fancy glass of wine and scented candles or something. (Actually both of those whole probably be distracting and thus worsen the experience, but anyway). At the moment, I do not feel like I have the mental fortitude for that.
Heck, even not for prize winning literature, for some reason I’m having a hard time picking back 鹿の王 2…

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Today I read:

  • Today’s NHK Easy News.
  • Some more はたらく細胞 light novel. Reached page 22.
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Summary list

June 9th I finished the first chapter of Kikis yesterday…and that was all of the reading I did haha. I read the final two pages, one at lunch, one later on. I think with Kikis especially I’m going to need to figure out when I count reading. I already did a read of the whole chapter where I didn’t look up anything I didn’t know, just marked them and moved on. So coming back through has been doing a more ‘close read’ and actually looking up unfamiliar vocab and trying to puzzle out things I didn’t quite get. I’m actually fairly happy with how comfortable I’m finding kiki to read - none of the grammar has been an issue so far. The one thing that took me a little bit to get used to was keeping track of who was saying what in dialogue without speech bubbles and pictures to keep me right - but I think I’ve got used to that now. Excited to get further into the story!

Yesterday was a very busy day, so Kikis was all that I managed. Today is quieter through so hopefully more reading time! :slight_smile:

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Understood. Being somewhat at the other end of the spectrum, I should better stop suggesting things to you then :wink:

Sorry to disappoint you - I recently discovered by accident that it won the 本屋大賞 in 2015 :rofl:

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Have you tried bunpro? It might be a good way to remember the grammar points you find.

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Main Post

June 7th, 8th and 9th Update

June 7th – A bit more of ヒカルの碁 (I’m a go player!)
June 8th – A chapter from かぶと虫 on japanese.io
June 9th – Articles from NHK News Easy

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I take all and every suggestions. It’s just that it will probably take years until I get to them.

Speaking of which, only two weeks until I get すねてがFになる from the library. Just a tad late.

That explains everything.

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This is a great thread! I might not read everyday but I definitely have some readings planned for the summer. I’m finishing からかい上手の高木さん with the ABBC soon and then I plan on starting with よつばと!In July I have a few weeks vacation so I have decided to take on ワンピース; I really liked the anime but there were too many dragged out fighting scenes so I figured with the manga those scenes can be skimmed over more easily while still enjoying the story :blush:
Anyway, maybe I won’t do things everyday, but I have some goals and I’ll probably lurk around for motivation! Thanks for the thread and good luck everyone with your reading goals this summer :beers:

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I already got pretty far in there, I mostly have difficulty with accents and gendered language. The book I’m reading has two characters that are super manly and super girly.

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So if you get it in exactly two weeks’ time, i.e. on 24th, you will be able to finish it just before we start volume 2 on 26th :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Same :joy_cat:

So far I don’t really know what to make of this prize as it sounds somewhat like a marketing machine to me, so I’m not necessarily expecting literary quality, but who knows :woman_shrugging:

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But I won’t have volume 2. I guess I’ll be just on time to get volume 2 after all of you are done reading it.

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In the context it was weird!

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:ballot_box_with_check: Day 10

Today was the first day I didn’t want to sit and study, but I did it!! All thanks to you guys here, and seeing everyone keep going :sparkles:

Today I finished カラフル chapter 3!

Interesting words from today:

世話せわのやける=to be troublesome
茶飯事さはんじ=commonly occuring thing
はやとちり=jumping to a wrong conclusion

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Finished days 4, 5, and 6 but didn’t update.

I’ve been bouncing around but two days ago I decided I was going to use Dragon Quest X as my daily reading. Playing RPGs in Japanese was my main motivation for learning the language so it made sense to me to start doing the thing that I love. It’s slow going but so is everything else when I read!

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Day 9.
Finished reading Cannibal Flan.
Neat phrase of the day:
一から十まで - (idiomatic) from A to Z
Word of the day: 深淵 しんえん abyss; ravine
淵 was quite hard to find.

And also they are both in the same sentence.
一から十まで教わってたら深淵を研究できないわ

I also bought an English version and reading it, apparently I understood way, way less than I originally thought. In Eng version the sentence above were turned into If you simply learn from others, from A to Z, you’ll only ever scratch the surface

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Main

Since I read in the evenings I never have the energy to update my daily reading once I’m done. I still like to lurk during the day though, to see what others have been up to. :eyes:

June 8 - Continued reading やがて君になる, 56 pages. I thought I’d struggle more with casual speech, but luckily it’s been pretty doable up until now.
June 9 - My 名探偵コナン 紺青の拳 light novel arrived so I of course switched over to that. Read 11 pages (with most of those being 95% pictures and the tiniest bit of text). I watched the movie in Japanese without subtitles last year so I have a general idea of what’s going to happen but I’m certain I missed the majority of details. Excited to read it and understand all the small details this time around.
June 10 - 名探偵コナン 25 pages. Furigana made looking up unknown words much easier which in turn helped with the reading speed. The fact that this movie/novel reads like a fanfiction of my main ship helps the most when it comes to reading speed though. :upside_down_face: On that note, I still have some time left so I might just go read another couple of pages.

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I noticed that I also have the second volume of the Flying Witch manga but I will read it some other time.

Instead I started to read あさこ volume 1 it is slightly harder than Flying Witch but still not too hard.

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