Sunday update, have read 3 chapters of spy x family vol 5. After the more action focused part in the last volume, this one has bits and pieces of daily life. Nothing is boring with this trio tho.
I found the kids making an animal out of paper in the arts club to be the most fun of the the three chapters so far.
I’ll post a new update when I’m done with volume 5. Hopefully I know what to read next by then.
It’s definitely a challenge trying to keep perspective of what is which level of difficulty, especially when the majority of my books are either A) Super old Aozora books or B) Crime novels
And to your point on J-J dictionaries (in the review) - my default popup dictionary is J-J so I probably didn’t notice they were hard to find. 
I’ll try to be more mindful when grading anything in the 20s. I definitely don’t want to frustrate people by badly leveling them.
January 9
君の名は , 8 pages.
Home Post
Read a Tadoku graded reader today, シュモーハウス, was actually a really good story about a man helping build houses in post bomb Hiroshima. Really glad I know about this guy now.
Link to the book here, its free to read, and most lvl’s should be able to read it.
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Does reading the twitter feed of Suzuka from 新しい学校 count for the day?
Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220109 
Tanuki Scroll IX: 寝ているだけの仕事 
Pretty tired today, spent awhile just lazily clicking through pages with no idea what I was in the mood to read, then saw this:
My mood today perfectly summed up in one picture.
It was under a section of the site I’ve not really explored before (all stories for the zodiacs), but it says it’s a folktale from Wakayama Prefecture.
About a man who is lazy and wants to be paid to sleep and eat rice, conveniently a circus owner is looking for someone to do just that… but he has to wear the skin of a tiger and pretend to be one. (?)Their show tiger died, so… get a human to do it? (??) All is good, he gets paid to eat and sleep.
But then they want a tiger vs. lion braw. He gets put in a cage and the lion approaches him and whispers that he is also a guy wearing animal skin pretending to be a lion. (???)
I have so many questions about this story
The narrator is also hilarious, it sounds like he’s having so much fun 
☆ Learnings ☆
見せ物小屋「みせものごや」ー Circus / Freak show
とんでも無い「とんでもない」ー Unthinkable; Absurd (or my favourite: Preposterous!)
檻「おり」ー Cage, pen
インチキー Cheating; Fraud; Bogus; Trickery
These are such nice books, I love the art!
Today’s article was 「推しを嫌いになりたくない」と思った日のこと from p-dress. The title is more or less ‘About the day I thought “I don’t want to hate my fan crush”’
友達思い - valuing one’s friendships
貶める - to look down on
垣間 - a gap (like in a fence or doorway). There’s an implication you can see through when you shouldn’t
笑い飛ばす - to laugh off
まぎれもなく - means the same as 間違いなく or ‘doubtless/certain’
憤る - to be indignant/pissed off about something
則る - to conform (ex, to gender roles)
独りよがり - inflated ego
当たり障りのない - harmless (ex, conversation)
気圧される - to be mentally crushed (?) not sure if I’m explaining that right
下ネタ - dirty jokes or conversation
省みる - to reflect on oneself
傲慢 - thinking highly of yourself and less of the other person
This article kicked my butt. I spent close to an hour on it and there are still some vague parts for me. I’m going to bookmark it to read again at the end of this challenge to see if it’s any easier. Probably just not having to look up all those words will help a bit!
Okay this convinced me. I had to listen to the whole thing.
I don’t regret anything 
That was awesome, thank you so much. And so random.
January 9 update:
Read a page of 時をかける少女 again. This time I tried to only look up words I deemed necessary to get a general understanding of what’s going on (which was maybe 5-7 words for the page I read), and this made reading much more enjoyable. The intention was to compensate for this by reading more, but the page conveniently ended a chapter, and I was a bit short on time, so I decided to call it a day. Reading this way (this is what others seem to call “extensively” as opposed to “intensively”?) is much less onerous, so I feel like I can keep going for a long time – until I either finish the book or decide that I don’t want to finish it.
January 9 
Home Post
Read 錆喰いビスコ again today, I’m really getting invested now (despite my better judgment haha, it’s definitely a higher level than I have any business reading at this point but 
). It’s really a love-hate relationship, like every time I start I feel like “omg this is so dense, I’m never gonna get through this” but then I finish that section and get sucked into some nonsense or emotions and suddenly it’s three pages later - there’ve been multiple days where I’ve completely missed my normal wk review time wading through it without even realizing
A lot of the more complex sentences take me a bit to figure out, but I really do love the way they’re written. Working with the text so closely might even be amplifying it actually; I was getting pretty emotional while it was talking about ビスコ and ジャビ’s relationship, and ビスコ being so adamant that he won’t let ジャビ die and getting really upset when ジャビ tried to get him to accept it and just 
even though I’ve barely known these characters for like a chapter. The power of literature 
But yeah I read four pages in basically one sitting which I think is the most I’ve read in a day so far? So as difficult as it may feel I am getting better! 
親代わり - (one acting as a) foster parent
鍛え上げる - to train well, to temper thoroughly
霊薬 - miracle drug
和らぐ - to soften, calm down
持て余す - to be too much (to handle), to find unmanageable, to not know what to do with
足を引っ張る - to hold back (from achieving something), to stand in the way
January 9
・かがみの孤城. I finished week 7. Now I’ve caught up with the book club as it is currently on week 8. I think I’ll continue reading at my own pace though. Slowing down now doesn’t make sense. Unless I become too busy, that is 
…It’s already past bed time now tho, has been kinda busy today ehehe oopsies
Progress: (38% → 44%)
Blurred for extra protecc I know some of yall are reading this book too :3
Ah, I cried ;-; We finally get to know the last “piece of the puzzle” to as for why Kokoro started to stay home from school. The good part from today’s reading is that she seems to feel better around the other girls now and chances are she’ll get along with them from here on c:
We now have three in our mini よつばと! reading pals club! It’s a party! 
Read (or attempted) to read lots-o-Japanese today, and it’s slow going but lots of fun! Hoping to read more before bed tonight 
I will change the profile picture in one or two weeks once people are used to the name change.
夏葉 of course, it’s from a visual novel.
Speaking of visual novels there is still a sale on the japanese Nintendo e-shop which has some visual novels in it, if people here are interested in visual novels.
ドメスティックな彼女 volume 1
I read 15 pages it has lots of words or expressions I didn’t know, which I will put into my anki deck.
たった今 たったいま just now; a moment ago; this very minute
成り行き なりゆき development; outcome; result
馴れ初め なれそめ start of a romance; beginning of love
合意 ごうい consent; mutual understanding N1
何となく なんとなく for some reason or another; without knowing why N2
下種 げす low-life
井戸端会議 いどばたかいぎ idle gossip
チャラ男 チャラお shallow playboy; frivolous lad
給え たまえ please do N2 grammar point masu Stem + たまえ
金田一耕助ファイル２
Just one page I didn’t have time to read more of it.
Ooh, I might take a look at that, thanks! Though I feel like at this stage I have to have text hooking so it’s hard to move off the PC.
I’ve been curious about trying this game, so I’ll definitely be watching for your thoughts on it!
Ace Attorney: An hour and 40 minutes today, almost finished the investigation phase, but not quite. A little over 2 days (at an average of ~90 minutes) to finish a segment like this isn’t so bad I think. Either way, I’m learning. There are a few sections dense with the sort of specialized words I wouldn’t know like oxygen deprivation, but overall, Ace Attorney is chill. Since I like to attach an image for fun, well, you just can’t do better than this line:
My favorite new word is definitely 月並み （つきなみ), which can mean “every month,” but has a secondary meaning of “trite; commonplace; conventional; hackneyed.” If Jisho can be trusted, this was " orig. used as an insult towards old-fashioned poets who would meet monthly to write poetry." I don’t have the knowledge needed to make any sense of that, but it’s amusing.
Zoo 1: I’ve read a few pages. Certain words are getting repeated so much that they’re drilling into my head, but as I mentioned before, it’s a story more loaded with descriptive words for environments and now actions, which is a little more challenging. I’m finding my book reading stamina really low, but I think I’m just tired these days. It’s so dark outside all day; winter is never fun. Hard to drag myself out of bed, and hard to feel like I’ve ever truly woken up after I do. Still, however much I manage, I’m still doing it.
Sure playing on pc is more convenient. I just mentioned it here because people on this forum sometimes ask, where to buy visual novels.
Day 9!
I finished reading the first volume of 極主夫道.
(Big thanks to @MaraVos for their help with the vocab sheet, it was a big help!)
I enjoyed this manga so much more than I expected to. I’m quite tempted to buy the next volume, but I know I should probably read some of the stuff I already have first 
I also did a little bit of reading with one of my tutors today. It was an article full of “Would you rather…” questions. Things like “Would you rather know when you are going to die, or how you are going to die?” and “Would you rather be given £100, or 100 lottery tickets?”
It contained a lot of new vocabulary, so he was helping me to read each question, and then we compared our answers. It was a lot of fun 
