３月３日、４日 ー 星界の紋章Ⅰ ー帝国の王女ー p. 11/269
I’ve started the Odyssey of reading my first book, a casual L37?? sci-fi space opera light novel. I was wondering how this was ever categorized as a light novel but yeah, there’s the cover and they later turned this into an anime series.
This series of books has been my forever goal since around year 2002, and I’m not getting any younger, so let’s just get straight into it. What I lack in skill I’ll make up for with determination. What could go wrong? 
Account of wrestling with the book for next two, three hours
The first page was almost easy. 「よく晴れた夜空。」 I can do this!
…and literally one page later we are faced with the problem of how this particular sci-fi universe allows interstellar travel:
「効率のいい恒星間旅行の前には質量比の問題が横たわっていて、生きているうちに隣の恒星へ旅しようとすれば、船と積み荷の何百倍もの重さの燃料を積まないといけない。それが物理学の定めたおきてだ。」
The answer is of course a god particle, found in ancient past from a familiar sounding backwater solar system:
「オールト雲調査船が、太陽から〇・三光年離れた空域で不思議な素粒子を発見した。質量は陽子の一〇〇〇倍ほど。… およそ五〇〇メガワットのエネルギーを放射していたのだ。… この粒子はユアノンと命名され、研究が始められた。」
It’s not quite clear how this mysterious particle works: is it 異次元, 亜空間 or perhaps 超空間 where the extra energy is pulled from? No matter, let’s just call it a ホワイトホール.
Before long, we have achieved the dream of 対消滅推進. What follows is an intricate description of how the propulsion drive is basically a 筒 where we insert some 高温超伝導素材 and how the 荷電粒子 released by the ユアノン reverberates with the fuel, creating energy and tons of extra heat that we can store in 放熱板 and dump into 真空. We can direct the energy with 電磁波 and voilà, we have エネルギーの奔流.
「技術的・経済的障害はあまたあったが、当時の人口問題とそれによって惹起された紛争は末期状態にあり、ユアノン推進実現への強力なバックアップとなった。」
I guess this happens all the time, but I hadn’t seen ・ break up kanji clusters before this.
Three pages in, I wipe my sweaty brow and consider this wild amount of new vocabulary to learn and memorize. I’m actually very surprised by how much I could kind of sloppily deduce based on learning from WaniKani. Coming across words like 星系外移住計画 and 恒星間移民船 and it’s just a matter of not panicking and reading the kanji.
I am also impressed by how extensive the physics vocabulary of JMdict is.
I guess it always takes a bit of time to settle into the rhythm of a book. It’s not uncommon to have some heavy setup at the start of a sci-fi book. I’ll keep fighting at least until our protagonists meet and the dialogue starts. It can’t be this heavy all the way to the end. 
Finished
So, the 2 month challenge is completed. I manage to read every day at least a little bit, and I think that it helped me to develop a very good habit!
Really nice to see genuine progress as a result of reading more!
2024年3月3日 
with 突然.
かえるくん、東京を救う, Super Frog saves Tokyo by Murakami Haruki, 3 pages.
花野井くんと恋の病 vol. 2, 12 pages.
)
If I can, I don’t want to drop this series. (I hope that was an acceptable amount of spoilers!)
