Day 14
July 9
Day 15
July 10
Day 16
July 11
Day 17
July 12
So far Hanako-kun doesn’t look like my thing, but - it’s only the beginning.
It does mark 3rd series I’m currently doing where protagonist has something to do with farming:
Today I read 5 pages of ひげを剃る。そして女子高生を拾う。
Still not through the first chapter, but already seeing a lot of progress in known words and known grammar points from studying that makes reading manga a lot easier 
July 8
Read 2/3 of 花のみぞ知る 3.
July 9
Read remaining 1/3 of 花のみぞ知る 3. In the end I still decided to sell the books - the art is lovely but the story just didn’t resonate with me. I still have 3 volumes of other stuff by her that I can admire/re-read in the future, so not as heartbroken as I thought I would be.
July 10-11
Was super busy for two days straight and as such fell off the reading challenge (and WaniKani) waggon. 
July 12
I had kind of already accepted that I’m still too tired to read anything today, but then late in the evening I thought I might as well read ONE page… and then I read 2. And then another. Ended up reading 12 pages of ふしぎ駄菓子屋 銭天堂 1.
This challenge is magical, I’d like to thank each and every one of you who post updates about your progress - peer pressure is the only reason I managed to read anything at all today. 
Summary post
July 12
Didn’t get much reading done today. Gave Ningen Shikkaku a try, but wasn’t exactly what I needed to read right now, being a bit of a droopy plant the last few days, so to speak. Instead, re-read a bit of 冷たい密室と博士たち - Doctors in Isolated Room, chapter 1 part 6. Has been a while since last time, after all. Was all I managed today.
Long title, how to abbreviate… 
冷たい密室 
yeah
Not done an update in a while! Last week was a real struggle, had so little motivation to do anything at all. However - I only missed one day, which is disappointing after I hadn’t missed one so far but a lot better than it could have been. The days I did read, I generally managed one chapter a day, which is less than I was reading for most of last month but still something I would have seen as really impressive before this challenge so I’ll take it 
Feel like today I’ve finally got over my setback and feel pretty much back to normal. I celebrated by reading 3 chapters of 鬼滅の刃４ - It was a true shonen manga experience where the first chapter took maybe 40 minutes, then the next two chapters were mostly fighting so only took 15 mins each. Still, was really nice to get back into the flow of reading again. Oh also, in my last update I said that I was going to aim to be starting the 鬼滅の刃 light novels next month…I’ve since looked up reviews and it appears that they are real bad hahaha. So back to the drawing board! I do still quite fancy the idea of a light novel of something I’ve read the manga of so perhaps ハイキュー!!
Read for… longer than planned today. Need to stop having mini cliffhangers between chapters of this manga. I finished another volume today and am just opening the new one, since the last one ended on some big fun drama!
Read 1 chapter with my fewest look-ups ever because I was lazy and had something else running on my phone that I didn’t want to swap away from…Only looked up 17 words, when I was really bewildered. It was fun just going with the story and I was more okay with missing a few details than usual. I think it helped that there were relatively few wall-of-text segments in that chapter.
Going to try to reduce my look-ups as I continue through - I’m realizing that I get more of it than I think I do.
As a side victory, there was a text message in one of the panels (so no furigana) and I could actually read all of it - it was not difficult, but still exciting! (Okay, I screwed up on the person’s name at the top of the message, but to be fair, they never use his last name so I didn’t really remember what it was, and it contained some of the same kanji as another character’s name - context made it extremely clear that I was reading it wrong very quickly)
Did I mean to spend a large chunk of today reading? No… no I did not.
Am I glad I did? Heck yes!
Day 42: July 12th
What did I read?: レンタルおにいちゃん Vol. 3 (finished the volume)
How much did I read?: 113 pages (3 chapters)
How long did it take me?: 1.25 hours
That last chapter…my emotions 
I’m sort of nervous about what the next volume’s going to bring… I’m happy for Kanami finally deciding to get out of that house with her brother, and for Makoto being the sweetheart he is wanting to take her in, but why do I feel like a BIG confrontation between Makoto and Kazutaka is coming…I’ve been sort of waiting for that to happen ever since the first volume and I feel like it’s going to get even uglier now that Kanami’s actually running away to live with Makoto. Definitely going to have to start the next volume tomorrow.
I still didn’t clean my apartment…tomorrow for sure.
July 12th からかい上手の高木さん 2 difficult / non-trivial panels from Chapter 6.
Still haven’t recovered from the move, and there are more tasks still to do including sorting out problems with our internet connection, so it’ll be a slow crawl for me for a while still.
How about つめたち? I think the japanese way to abbreviate is until you can’t recognize it anymore unless you already know about it. 
11.7.
I read 2 chapters of 青の王 as well as 2 chapters plus side stories of 異世界妹, finishing 電子版2. From time to time the art and concept/characters really do remind me of disgaea. I haven’t felt like playing games in general lately but maybe this will spark that again. ^^
12.7.
I read volume 2 of からかい上手の高木さん. I wasn’t planning to continue this series, but the first 4 volumes are free to read on Amazon kindle (and probably other platforms) right now, so why not.
Then I got busy with work and finishing a drawing, but I managed to read one more chapter of 青の王 in the evening. Things are drawing to a close! I was wondering when it seemed to be the endgame at 80% already, but it seems they’re wrapping up all the loose ends.
Hahaha So true! I was thinking I need to abbreviate ぼくはイエローでホワイトでちょっとブルー、but had no idea how to go about it. By your logic maybe I should try ぼくブルー 
20 more pages of 1Q84 Book 2, up to 190. I’ve decided to have another reading session each day, for a total of about 1hr 30+ minutes. I’m really intrigued by this book (and, honestly, really depressed by it too haha)
Day 42
Read 1/3 of chapter 4 in 僕はブルー!
It’s walls of text with a lot of information about the education, political, and housing systems in the UK. I’m not getting a lot of fun words or phrases to share with you all (one reason being the author is using and explaining a lot of idioms from English.) I’m hoping that by the end of this I’ll be able to read the newspaper.
Today I read ひげを剃る。そして女子高生を拾う。again, this time page 15-21, and it is not even evening right now ^^ I’m so happy that I’m taking the time to learn all the grammar and look up all the words right now. This was the first time I could read some whole sentences without looking anything up, which makes reading so much faster!
I hope I’ll get some more reading done tonight and the rest of this week. See if I can finish the first chapter by the end of the week (43 pages).
I haven’t read much lately, but the 2nd half of July will be better. This will be another busy week, but from next week I’ll have more leeway.
I still haven’t missed a single day, though, and making good progress with 魔女の宅急便その６ (the final volume). At page 260 out of 407 right now, will wrap this up within the next week or so. This means I’m on track for my 500 pages goal.
Oh, and and I’ve read ほのぼのログ, but that’s only a collection of illustrations with very little text.
I’ve also ordered books and manga for the first time in two years. My backlog is still long, so I didn’t buy any new manga series, only missing volumes of とつくにの少女, あさドラ！, 3月のライオン, 銀の匙 and よつばと！.
As for novels, I bought the remaining books in the がばいばあちゃん series I’m so fond of as well as 推し、燃ゆ and コーヒーが冷めないうちに. I’m confident I will read these soon. It’s always good to have some 200-page books that I can comfortably finish in a few days between the longer 400+ pages ones.
I’m hoping to finish one or two more books in July after 魔女の宅急便その６ and a couple of manga volumes. We’ll see.
４ more pages of Forbidden Scrollery(2). About 12% complete of the saga where heroes wonder the eternal question: why rum sake is always gone.
Good choice.
13.7.
Today I read half of それでも歩は寄せてくる vol.1 and the last 4 chapters of 青の王. 
the other 2 in the series sadly aren’t available on unlimited. And they’re expensive! Almost 2000 yen per volume! So I won’t be reading those until either the price drops or I find them used somewhere. I liked the book, and the art is lovely, so I’ll be looking forward to that time.
It’s not like I need more books to choose from anyway.
Summary post
July 13 More droopy plant mood
Remembered that there were stuff I couldn’t remember, so I re-read/skimmed through chapter 1. Got the important details now.
omg, spot on I have no idea what to go for yet, but thanks for the tip!
Finished the first volume of the manga マジャン ～畏村奇聞. Lol I didn’t understand any of the mahjong game rules or what happens during the mahjong game. They were screaming リ-チ and ポン all the time. Nothing interesting happened in the second half. The evil dudes tricked the girl Takumi into entering a room which is forbidden for woman, As a punishment they were playing mahjong and Takumi was the prize. Every round the evil guy ウナギ won Takumi had to take of a piece of her clothing. She was sitting in her underwear at the end of the manga.
I wonder what I should read tomorrow. I still have over 100 manga volumes to read, some books, manga magazines, videogames, visual novels…
Maybe it’s worth reading up on the rules of Japanese mahjong if you’re gonna read a manga called “mahjong”. 
There’s a whole wikipedia article about it. ポン = three-of-a-kind set, リーチ = player is announcing they’re one tile away from winning, because the hand is worth more points when they do that.
