Hit my manga goal of 7 volumes this week, plus some novels/audiobooks and a bit of anime (though I am falling behind on my margin again).

I’ll cover novels first this time. I finished 学年ビリのギャル and thought it ended pretty well. The impact of reading on さやかちゃん’s life was pretty explicit which we love to see. The あとがき was literally half an hour long and I feel no regret for skipping it. Started listening to スーパーカブ vol. 2 and…don’t really have anything to report here again. I haven’t listened to much but I feel like yet again extremely little has happened.

I also finished 桜子 and I have to say my enjoyment of this book took a sharp downturn around the halfway point. The important events didn’t seem to have much of an impact on each other and it ended up feeling like it didn’t really have much of a point. I originally picked it up just because it was written by a woman from 和歌山 but as the book went on, the narration crowded out the dialogue so I wasn’t even getting the benefit of reading in dialect most of the time. It was a worthwhile experience I suppose but ultimately my initial reaction of “am I really going to read a self-published novel?” was unfortunately pretty accurate.

Anime next: Spy family ep. 11 and 12 (completed), the かぐや様 double-length final episode, サマータイムレンダ ep. 10 (finally finished subtitling it but I’m a week behind), and ハネバド ep. 1. I decided to give ハネバド a try because I was curious about how badminton works after reading アオのハコ, and I don’t know if how far I’ll continue with it, but one thing I will say is that the animation is very striking. It has some interesting rotoscope work, which I generally don’t like, but it feels like it’s integrated well.

Manga time: I read アオのハコ vol. 3, 4, and 5, so I’m caught up for now. Enjoying this one quite a bit, and definitely feeling like my initial impression of “this is gonna be rough” is accurate. The last volume ended with a cliffhanger big enough that the artist included a doodle of himself reading it and saying ここで終わり？！ which mirrored my feelings exactly.

Read 呪術廻戦 vol. 15 and 16 in one sitting each. Finally out of the shibuya arc but things are getting pretty spicy. I’ll be waiting on this one for a while since the next english release isn’t out until august I think and I’ll have to wait for that one so my sister can read it forst.

At the recommendation of a guy I talk to on Tandem, I gave のだめカンタービレ vol. 1 a try since it happened to be free this week. Definitely not what I expected from a shoujo manga; the main girl is a complete disaster and the main guy is kind of a jerk, but they play off each other really well and both the visual comedy and writing had me cracking up.

Finally, I decided to try out ブラッククローバー since I have a ton of it sitting in my library and I thought it would be nice to find another action series I can get carried away by. Will be finishing vol. 1 tonight as I fall asleep. So far I’m wondering if Mashle was actually inspired by the first few chapters, just taken to the extreme. Enjoying it so far, will probably read a few volumes to see if I can find some momentum and blitz through it.