Just bought the whole nine volumes of ひらやすみ at BOOKOFF. I’ve already read the first half of the first volume.
This manga feels like I can actually read from beginning to the end (for once 
).
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This feels accurate, yeah. Would also be funny to have a sort of whump like a big book falling onto a pile or something, maybe.
Congrats! I don’t have the confidence yet to try and get through a light novel, so I’m extra impressed.
That’s a much better turn around time than most of my purchases - the peril of my to-read pile already being quite so towering, lol.
Unfortunately I’ve gotten very little reading done since my last check-in (I was right about the busy week and travel not leaving me much time), so the only progress I can offer is having finished the last liiiiitle bit of Vanitas’ volume 4 and another couple pages of 傷物の花嫁, I think.
And now I’ve realized that natively lets you search its book list using genre tags so I’m in danger…
Hope everyone’s making progress, though!
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Nooo bad SekiHan! pops your hand
We DON’T buy more books in this thread!
I finished 恐怖コレクター 4 over the weekend. 
I’m 88% through with Kiki’s Delivery Service 2, but it may be a few more days before I’m able to finish it. I usually read at work and work has been very busy lately.
I’ve also been playing a DS game through melonDS on my tablet called 放課後少年. I do physically own it, but it seems more socially acceptable to play something on a tablet at work in your downtime, than to bust out a DS. I don’t know why. I also haven’t been able to play this since last week. I’ve enjoyed it so far though. It’s very BokuNatsu adjacent, which is why I bought it in the first place. (many years ago, might I add)
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Anyone else finally grabbed the thing they were meaning to read thanks to the cloudflare outage? 
I finally sat down to enjoy my copy of 夏目友人帳 today~~ it’s such an indescribably cozy title 
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woops
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Quickly slides my bookoff wish-list behind me.
I feel you on the reading at work though - obviously actual job stuff takes priority, but it is always disappointing when it gets too busy for any hope of reading practice 
@rune oh man I read some of that in English ages ago - I don’t really want to pick it back up right now, but I do remember it having a very unique kind of intimacy to its story. Hope you have fun with it!
Okay, you can’t just drop that and run!!! What’s the context! Is that just a wishlist, is that owned books??? Are we in the presence of a God Of Unread Books?
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guys… I do not have enough space in the book prison for all of you…
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…because it’s all taken up by too many books?
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Digitally, I am quite OK because I realised that I should only buy what I will read and for 1 year and a bit, I drastically tried to NOT buy lol. It was mainly because I did not like how I have soo many manga / light novels unread yet I kept buying more haha. Currently, I think 90% of what I have bought, I have read.
Physically… I think I have read 15% of the manga / light novels that I own … 85% has not been touched. There is a reason though!!! I gave away a lot of my books. I only kept what I have not read or treasure too much.
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My reading update this week is woefully inadequate. I haven’t done much of anything, apart from reading half a chapter of flying witch. I need to be better about setting aside reading time… Where and when do you all read?
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I mostly read on a personal computer I have at work, if I don’t have much work to do at least. I’m on call tech support in a middle school. So I’m either running around constantly or it’s absolutely dead. Right now it’s weird because it’s right before Thanksgiving break, so I’m getting almost no tickets, but higher ups have asked us to work on some things so that’s still keeping me busy.
Otherwise, I read on my tablet in bed before going to sleep. This one doesn’t happen anywhere near as often during the week. A lot of the time when I get home the hubby and I will snuggle up in bed and watch tv instead. I do try and make it a point on the weekends in the morning to spend an hour or two in bed, while my cats are sleeping, to do a decent amount of reading though.
Sometimes even when I take my cats outside I’ll read, but that’s only if they’re being good and trying not to hop the fence. It sucks because before they realized that was an option I used to literally stay outside for hours in the mornings with them and just read. 
Dang lil hooligans.
During my Thanksgiving break (which is all next week) I’ll probably try to read an easier book on my tablet, while starting 本好き over with the audio book going on my phone this time. I made it halfway through before burning out, but now I have audible so I’d like to see if I can make it through with that added. Sometimes reading and studying during breaks can be hard though.
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…welp, not adding to backlog challenge: failed - in 2024, I bought a magazine - Spoon.2Di vol. 103 - while on holiday in Taiwan and while I read bits about series I know once through in a rather cursory manner, it’s been sitting next to my laptop, going neglected while I try to churn through Bunpro reviews.
The reason I bring the Spoon volume up is I limited myself to 1 magazine then for the sake of luggage space, so I missed out on getting another magazine - NewType Dec. 2023 (I mentioned Hypnosis Mic in passing already, but Hypnosis Mic is on both these magazines’ covers due to the 2nd season of the anime coming out around the time of publication) - and that’s what I caved on this time, alongside another NewType magazine (Oct. 2025) with Binan Koukou Chikyuu Boueibu Haikara! content in it.
However, there is good news out of this - the condition I set in order to buy those magazines was to read a specific manga in my Bookwalker backlog, a Touken Ranbu anthology. Turns out I’d read most of it already, however briefly, so I just read the rest and marked it as finished on AniList.
As for those reading challenges, I do those on and off, since I’ve disciplined myself to do the challenge in one shot from start to finish (from the moment I post template text for the day’s reading in a private Discord server to the moment I finish Anki reviews) - so I tend to not do it if I don’t have enough time (it usually takes about 20 minutes if there is vocab to mine).
Some of the pictures I took are illegible near where the pages meet each other in the binding - alternatively, I put my finger/s (or thumb) over some of the text, rendering a character or few illegible - so I have to throw those pictures out if those hamper comprehension (I returned Legend Anime without finishing it properly, although I briefly skim-read it while I took photos, while Haken Anime I properly finished and only took photos where new vocab appeared). Sure, I could borrow the books again to find out what the missing characters are, but the library I borrowed them from is one of the furthest from me and I have more than enough photos (I took multiple angles of some pages), so I’d rather avoid having to go back.
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Ya know… Christmas is coming and I’m trying to decide what I want.
Should I… ask for some more books? To put with the books that I still need to read? 
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I must confess the same. Ive been fighting a really annoying runny nose and was weirdly busy this week so I havnt really read.
I Typically read at school because its how ive conditioned myself to study. Im not very good at doing it at home. and recently I bricked my laptop(I somehow uninstalled the option that allows me to put in my password??) And Ive been lazy about reinstalling windows. I used to go to a cafe and study there on Sundays but havnt for a few weeks.
I wanna read at night but right now me and the wife are in different time zones so I call her when im going to bed and typically zonk out when done.
Anyway, Ill get the next chapter of Koizumi loving Ramen here today and ill work on it over the weekend too! Three day for me so I have some time.
Another Gunpla fan I see? The newtype magazine difficult to read? I wanna start trying to go through one but no good time and when I open it im assaulted by unknown kanji.
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Well, we’re in good company then, since I haven’t got much reading done this week either. It’s a marathon, though, not a race - just gotta see what we can get done next week.
Personally, I don’t tend to set aside specific times for reading - sometimes I simply don’t have the motivation to put my brain to it - but my two most common opportunities are during down time at work and when I’m riding the bus/train somewhere. I work as an assistant language teacher in Japan (ALT) so if my class materials are ready then my time between classes tends to be relatively free. I don’t usually break out a book unless I’ve finished my wanikani and bunpro for the day though, which can take a while if I’m having a hard time or getting distracted.
Well we’re all here because we’re not very good at that particular challenge, I suppose
Why even ask? You could get yourself a nice little Christmas present instead, right?
Yeah, I feel like maybe this got mentioned elsewhere already, but by the time I get home my brain is always like "no more Japanese pleaseeeeeee 
"
Whereas while I’m at work it feels like a relatively productive option for something to do when I’m done with materials prepping/have no classes.
Anyway, good luck to all of us! I’m really hoping I’ll be able to do some reading next week - we’re getting close to test week for the kids, so my classes are getting whittled down as other teachers ask for more review time. May as well use the time for my own studies as well, yanno?
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Finally finished getting through my first book, １０分で読める伝記 (1年生）、its 10 short biographies of famous people so it was reasonably interesting. The age target did mean it has very little kanji which i found a little harder to read at first, but it’s 1 down now!
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I literally just realized…that I asked my mom for two japanese books for christmas. 
And here I am trying to get on to other people for buying books!
(it was Yotsubato 16 and the second Yomawari book if anyone was curious)
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Finished 魔女の宅急便 2! My first book finished while reading along with the audio book. I think the experience was vastly better. They’re old books and written like old books. Having context from the voice actor was very helpful in determining who was speaking. They do small time/scene jumps often and it can be a little confusing.
Now to start tackling 本好き again. There was just too much vocabulary for me in some of the chapters before. I even watched the anime and came back to it, and it still wore me down. I CAN DO IT THIS TIME THOUGH! RAAAAWWR! ᕦ(ò_ó)ᕤ
Idk what it is, but this little thread has brought my spirits up. Mid year this year I really started falling off of my reading goals, despite crushing them last year. I definitely still won’t make all of them, but I’m already doing much better than I was before, so thank you!
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As a side note to maybe help
Does anyone have a good manga app? I went to an internet/manga cafe for the time the other day to charge my phone and accessories since I was car camping and picked up Gal and her Dino.
Found most of the chapters for free online via 『ギャルと恐竜』 【無料公開中】 | ヤンマガWeb
But I know not everything is free or easy access
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Depends entirely on what you’re looking for to be honest. Every publisher has some kind of app or site where you can read chapters, and if you’re there from the beginning, you can usually read it ongoing for free as the latest chapters tend to be (with the backlog either paid for or removed once compiled into a book).
Generally I use BookWalker as my one stop shop for digital copies as they do a lot of great deals for reasonable prices.
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