Although I dropped out of officially doing this to relieve pressure, I’ve still been reading almost every day cause this is just more or less my main hobby now, heh. Wanted to check in with how I’m doing:
スマホを落としただけなのに - I’m a few sections from the end! Something like 92%! There were moments earlier where I thought there wasn’t enough personality but I think the end has pulled me in more. I’ve got a lot of specific thoughts but I’ll try to put out a Natively review when I finish (in a day or two? 
). Seems to be cruising to a solid 3/5 barring any huge last minute swings. It’s been the perfect level for relatively comfortable reading (great call there @pocketcat) and I think I’ve gotten a lot better at listening with the audiobook, too. Whatever details I lose, I basically follow the plot every time on blind listen now.
Loopers - Fun stuff! Pretty nice reading level. But I’ll save most of that for the club. Just, having a good time when Loopers day rolls around.
Flowers - So I’m hitting a point where a lot of new characters are showing up, and that’s great, cause the cast started off really tiny. What I’ll say at the moment is I think this is a good VN, but it’s bordering on difficult enough for me that it’s detracting from the experience. Truly harder than I expected. Virtually every sentence has one new word max, usually a few, and they’re dense sentences using weird kanji for words I know too. Really getting tested on my memory for 此処, 其処, 何処, that sorta thing, heh. It taught me that 佳い for いい exists. There are worse examples but you get the point, this sort of “what is a kana form?” writing is entirely the norm.
It seems to be a good VN! But it’s a descriptive, relatively slow moving one, and the issues come from that combination. I fight tooth and nail through sentences that are ultimately just descriptions of what someone looks like, using new words with new kanji I’ve never seen before for particularly fancy ways to say willowy or something, haha. I can’t really appreciate the quality of the prose when I’m still puzzling through it, so the “reward” of the actual text feels anticlimactic for the work involved, you know? It’s me, not the VN.
So most days I get through about 3000 characters and get tired and quit. I’ve been debating what I want to do, but at least so far, my stubbornness to continue (mixed with lots of easier reading material) is winning out. I think if I do finish this one, I’ll at least be taking a break with something else before starting part 2. There are times in the past where I’ve fought pretty hard through something and it felt pretty valuable to my learning, but I’m slightly unsure here. The part of the difficulty in grammatical constructs feels like a good mental workout, but when it’s so full of words I don’t know, I’m not convinced they’re words I’m going to reinforce any time soon unless I seek out particularly literary and highly descriptive works, which I don’t expect to do soon enough to feel like what I’m learning is truly worth the effort. If that makes sense.
and have now finally finished volume 1!
Maybe I should read Yotsuba more often.
floating timelines are fun 
Aug 1st 
July 29
That really opens up the world of listening material for you. There’s actually 3 books in the series and I know at least the second one also has an audiobook although I haven’t listened to it yet. So long as it’s still in the nomination list for the Mystery Book Club (for next rounds of course) I’m going to try to abstain from reading / listening to it 