📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 🏖 ☀

[natarin]

August 2 Home Post

I said I’d have more time to read today and I sure did I started off by finishing this week’s ルーパーズ chapter which was wild for sure, then finished chapter 19 of 海辺(うみべ)のカフカ, then played a bunch of バディミッションBOND, so I’ve had a lot of emotional whiplash today haha. It’s cool to think about though, any one of those things would’ve seemed pretty impossible not all that long ago, so making that much progress in a day feels good

buddy bond things

Well it’s all but confirmed that ルーク was at the lab that blew up, and the code for the chip is in his memories, but they’ve been locked away presumably because of that. And unless it’s somehow someone else, アーロン presumably knows about most of that. There’s some real trauma in those memories though… ルーク’s starting to remember but his brain really doesn’t want him to and it’s just probably not going to go well for him

In less angsty news, チェズレイ went to アーロン about モクマ like he was asking for his blessing lmao:

And アーロン’s just terrified of チェズレイ making a sappy face like that

アーロン also did a really sweet thing for モクマ; when they were evacuating マイカ, モクマ saw his old master’s katana and had a lot of internal strife about it getting left behind, but after the evacuation アーロン came up and explained that he’d grabbed it and asked コズエ if モクマ could have it and just アーロン is good!! He’s really just as soft as ルーク is, he just tries to repress all that with a tough facade because the world’s wronged him repeatedly but he’s getting there :')

[DIO-Berry]

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ジョジョの奇妙な冒険23

21 - 79

I’m remembering why these are some of my favorite chapters. A lot of shonen manga and anime are super focused on fights, but these Orsis chapters are all about gambling and cheating. Nothing super outlandish, just the kind of stuff that’s physically possible unlike two idiots trying to hit the shit out of each other while jumping around, hitting bystanders and religious buildings, to resolve their conflict.

[enbyboiwonder]

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Aaand the first book I finish in August is the 3rd omnibus of Uramichi-Oniisan in English. And I got a bday coupon from Tokyo Otaku Mode, and I used it to order the first few volumes of it in Japanese. They’re “special order” or whatever though, meaning they don’t know for a fact that they’re in stock at their supplier, so well we’ll see. Hopefully it doesn’t take like an entire year to get here like the volume I used my bday coupon two years ago to get.

The volumes that make up this omnibus aren’t included among the ones I ordered, but. I’m really curious about the cicada song, and whether the English prefix “semi-” was actually included in the original because it’s a homophone for “cicada,” or if the English translators added it as a reference, as like a little in-joke or something for the readers who know that, in Japanese, cicadas are called セミ. Because I expected to see a translator’s note, either in the chapter, on the lyric page, or in the back, but there was none.

I read ch 3 of キミに言えないことがある.

It's another rough one, lads. And we get Kasumi's backstory.

He also has a terrible father who treats him like crap, and his parents divorce when he’s young, sending him off to live with his grandmother because neither want him. That’s why his Tanabata wish was what it was: he just wants to be loved, and to be happy. But while the “marriage” part of it is the main focus for Kyousuke, for Kasumi, it’s that he wants to always be together with the person he falls in love with (though he doesn’t think that’ll ever happen for him, even as he writes the wish, in 5th grade before he’s ever fallen in love). We also learn that he’s liked Kyousuke at least since middle school. So he also has self-worth issues, and he looks up to Kyousuke and sees him as 正しい, so he believes him when he tells him that what he feels isn’t romantic love.

In the present, the married woman he was seeing (who’d made him feel seen and loved, the way only Kyousuke did, when he was feeling particularly depressed, and he was convinced what they had was the real deal and she was planning to leave her husband for him) breaks up with him, telling him that he was only ever just a diversion. Which of course breaks him. The previous chapter had ended with Kyousuke realizing that Kasumi hasn’t replied to his last message two days ago, and while it’s common for Kasumi to leave him on read for a while before replying… he hadn’t even read it yet. So he grew worried and, when he was unable to reach him on his phone, ran off to his apartment. And here is where he finds him. He ends up kissing him and then confessing, I think telling him that he’s always wanted to make him happy, but if he’s just gonna make him unhappy (if they’re just gonna be unhappy?) anyway, then he wants to make him unhappy?

好きだ。俺は佳純には幸せになってほしいってずっと思ってた。だけど、どうせ不幸になるなら、俺がお前を不幸にしたい。

Ugh, my heart hurts.

There are three more chapters left, not counting the epilogue/描き下ろし, so I think the next two are also probably gonna be rough. They’ve got… a lot that they’ve gotta work through.

Some vocab of note:

不一致 (ふいっち) [noun] discrepancy; discord; disagreement; mismatch; dissonance
杞憂 (きゆう) [noun] needless fear; groundless apprehension; unfounded worry
腑に落ちる (ふにおちる) [expression, 一] to understand; to be convinced

@Ditto20

This would really be a challenge for me

Oh, I read that as 57 at first and thought, oh, that’s not that bad, I definitely have more (conveniently forgetting/ignoring that it’s taking me forever to get through them, even when most of them are manga). No, it’s 574. You’ve definitely got me beat. I’ve only got 118. (And I still can’t keep myself from buying more. I think I love books too much. And have zero sense of what a lot of books is. ほんとに活字中毒ですね……)

57 would still definitely be enough to make it a real challenge, though.

[ChristopherFritz]

Day 33: August 2nd

Longer work day = shorter reading day.

からかい上手の(元)高木さん Volume 5 (31% ➨ 39%)

ふだつきのキョーコちゃん Volume 5 (0% ➨ 21%)

[WaniTsunami]

One more chapter of 青春ブタ野郎2. Will finish tonight before bed. I really don’t know what I should read next. I’m torn about taking a break with something else or just reading more.

[WaniTsunami]

Finished. The cliffhanger wasn’t as good as the first book. So I’m ok reading other books I’ve bought for a while. Next let’s read 夜は短し歩けよ乙女！

[omk3]

Day 32 :

化身 ~ 17-18%

Day 33 :

化身 ~ 18-19%

Day 34 :

化身 ~ 19-23%

Too little time for reading these last couple of days. It was better today, and I finished the current section, which ended on a surprising twist. If I do find the time, I may read a little further today. One more section to finish the story. Very curious to see how it all ends.
I’ll write more about the story when I finish it, but I’m really liking it so far. The horror is only of the existential kind, and if it was classified as general literature instead I wouldn’t have been surprised at all (unless the last part hides some shocking surprises of course). It’s probably the hardest modern Japanese book I’ve read. Some of it is due to lots of unknown vocabulary and a different writing style than what I’ve encountered so far, some of it is the story itself. It’s very descriptive and necessarily introspective, as the narrator is the only person throughout, barring some animals. And it’s also a very interesting take on existence, survival and the meaning of life, all from within a tropical lake.

[Zakarius]

The Tanuki Beach Resort: Date 20220803

Tanuki Scroll of 日本南極探検

Random article - about the filming of Japan’s expedition to Antarctica in 1911-1912.

Japanese found in the sand

Subzerowords

短篇「たんぺん」ー A short (like a film, story etc.)
撮影技師「さつえいぎし」ー Camera operator; cameraman
上映時間「じょうえいじかん」ー Running time (of a movie)
映倫「えいりん」ー Japanese film classification and rating board (abbreviation)
The full name: 映画倫理機構「えいがりんりきこう」

Names
日活「にっかつ」ー Japanese film company, Nikkatsu

[WaniTsunami]

Changed my mind. Gonna read and try to finish コンビニ人間. Its so tiny and I have little to do tomorrow. According to the audiobook I have about 3 hours remaining. Let’s go!

[MarnieDEB]

Had to jam p. 155-164 of よつば&! in between other activities today. This chapter is so much fun: the bit in the department store is one of my favourites.

New terms

鳥よけ: bird repellant
ご迷惑 (ごめいわく): trouble, annoyance
食う (くう): to eat (masculine)
黙る (だまる): to be silent
お負け (おまけ): something thrown in for free
英気 (えいき): strength, willpower
負ける (まける): to lose, to be defeated

[Daisoujou]

@MarnieDEB

鳥よけ: bird repellant

By the way, if this is your first time encountering this, it’s more widely applicable as a pattern for repellants! For example, 虫除け .

Oh and I know exactly where you mean in the manga and I adored that part too.

[rikaiwisdom]

@Daisoujou

By the way, if this is your first time encountering this, it’s more widely applicable as a pattern for repellants! For example, 虫除け .

Interesting! There’s a word I like with this I learnt not long ago: 魔除け . Now that you mention it, it makes a lot of sense ^^

[meagstudies]

august 3 home post

Read 極主夫道 Ch. 48 and (finally) finished Orange Ch. 2

[Sylph]

August 2

Yesterday I had a few hours of free time, so I read ビブリア for about an hour (8% → 12%). The excuse for going back to the bookshop was in the vein of what I’d imagined but not quite. And I guess it might have made more sense for the granma to get nervous to the point of hitting if he was holding on to her most valued book (still a bad reaction but…).

I had a few more free hours and I was ready to read a bunch when the universe decided it was not to be and it started raining like crazy and the basement flooded so I had to spend my precious free hours + some extra bailing out water . Oh well, at least it wasn’t as bad as other times and nothing seems to be damaged too badly. I rewarded my efforts with about 20 minutes of バリバリ before falling asleep exhausted.

[MissDagger]

August 3
(home post)

Super Mario Odyssey

So I should be reading Night Café, but… So far I haven’t sat down to read. And I doubt I will get around to it, so I’m making this update now.

I’ve been meaning to replay Super Mario Odyssey (and Breath of the Wild) since I played them about a year after release. And today was the day I (re-)started SMO, and decided “why not do it in Japanese?”. And not only have it so far turned out to be completely within my ability, it hasn’t made reading the text that much slower.

I’m not really playing it for Japanese practice, but it is still reading. Plus I ended up quickly rereading the 2 page あとがき for Orange v1.

And it made me realize something. I’m in the forties for Wanikani. I don’t think I’d realized how different that is from even the early 30s and how far that is from when I was in the 20s of WK. Things I would have had to work at to read before, I can read easily now. The Orange atogaki have no furigana (except for the mangaka’s name), and yet it wasn’t a problem. There were 3-5 unknown words over two pages of a lot of text (for a manga). And while I couldn’t read the names of the publishing companies or the names of a couple of parks mentioned, I recognized what they were instantly and could skip over them when they seemed incomprehensible to me.

And added on to that, Super Mario Odyssey, even the little information placards, are easy to read. Not very sophisticated at all, but even these kind of simple things would have been something I had to put energy into. It would have slowed me down, and now they just add little bits of fun bright spots (because I read Japanese and it is easy!).

Contrast that with the 200+ look ups I did for a chapter of Loopers that made my brain start to melt. Loooooong way to go yet.

I’m glad both happened kinda close together, so I didn’t have to feel the slump of realize how much further there is to go without also feeling how far I’ve come.

[Daisoujou]

I did it! スマホを落としただけなのに finished! That’s 4 books down. I think コンビニ人間 is next; I already have it and I think I’d like to do the audiobook pairing again with it. Could go for another easy read while I push myself elsewhere. Perhaps I’ll take a quick pause to finally read Azumanga Daioh though; we’ll see. My Natively review, for those curious. I might try to seek out the movie adaptation too… it’s not supposed to be particularly good, but hey, fun to see anyway.

@MissDagger

Contrast that with the 200+ look ups I did for a chapter of Loopers that made my brain start to melt. Loooooong way to go yet.

Congrats on the other progress! And you know, right now Loopers is kind of to me what these others are for you. Though nothing is free of lookups, of course. Point isn’t to brag but to repeat what I’m sure you already know: it’s a seemingly endless treadmill, as I have my own painful reading now, but sometime, maybe not even that long from now, you’ll move up the same way.

[MarnieDEB]

House maintenance is definitely the one thing that sucks away the most of my reading time! Glad to hear the damage wasn’t too serious. I keep reminding myself that my house is the place where my reading couch lives, so it’s all worth it.

[delthea707]

DAYS 18/7-3/8/22
I’ve forgotten to update so here’s from my beginning to this day.
I’ve completed:
レンタルおにいちゃん１
からかい上手の高木さん１
よつばと!1
Still in progress:
それでも歩は寄せてくる１ 34%
シャドーハウス 1 33%
ふらいんぐうぃっち１ 55%

I missed one day but it’s okay! After all I’ve read almost everyday since I began. Some days it’s been few pages and others it’s been chapters. All in all I’ve quite enjoyed this challenge!

[softlyraining]

@Daisoujou

I might try to seek out the movie adaptation too… it’s not supposed to be particularly good, but hey, fun to see anyway.

I looked up a trailer, and I actually saw this on a plane trip once! The acting can be a little over-the-top (especially towards the end of the film), but it was a decently fun ride. Certainly worth the listening practice, plus I’d be curious how it ends up comparing to the book (since I’ve only seen the movie).

[MissDagger]

@Daisoujou

Congrats on the other progress! And you know, right now Loopers is kind of to me what these others are for you. Though nothing is free of lookups, of course. Point isn’t to brag but to repeat what I’m sure you already know: it’s a seemingly endless treadmill, as I have my own painful reading now, but sometime, maybe not even that long from now, you’ll move up the same way.

Oh definitely. Give me slice of life/school life manga and I can fairly easily read that, even if it is in LN form (Night Café) as it turns out. But my domain knowledge for vocabulary commonly used in these types of VNs are, as it turns out, very low. I can just hope Loopers keeps using the words so they start getting added to my mental bank. (I don’t do any SRS besides WK right now.)

@Sylph

I had a few more free hours and I was ready to read a bunch when the universe decided it was not to be and it started raining like crazy and the basement flooded so I had to spend my precious free hours + some extra bailing out water . Oh well, at least it wasn’t as bad as other times and nothing seems to be damaged too badly.

Ouch. Glad it wasn’t as bad as it has been in the past!

@MarnieDEB

House maintenance is definitely the one thing that sucks away the most of my reading time! Glad to hear the damage wasn’t too serious. I keep reminding myself that my house is the place where my reading couch lives, so it’s all worth it.

House stuff is a big ticket item here too. My roof is gonna be completely renovated starting in later September (or there about). Not to mention my brother will be changing my heating system (also probably in September) to something more efficient. And not only is my wallet crying, but I have a feeling my peace of mind will be gone for the whole time of the roof renovation.