Was planning to try and squeeze one more volume of manga in today but decided against it since I still have some translation work to finish up and I shouldn’t procrastinate any more than I have already. There were a couple of days where I didn’t finish an entire volume, but other days where I made up for it by reading two. I had a total of nine this week, plus some anime and a bit of a new novel.

I decided to start reading 青春ブタ野郎 vol. 5 (おるすばん妹) and set a very relaxed pace to finish it by the end of the month, which hopefully won’t put too much of a squeeze on my other obligations. It works out to about 6-7 pages per day and I’ve been sticking to that pace without feeling the need to go too much faster. As such I’m not too far into the book so far, and this is all review anyway since this is the last arc covered by the anime. Nothing much to report except the obligatory comment about the writing style being nice.

Caught up with last week’s airing shows (four episodes total), but I’m behind again this week since my sister was gone again this weekend too. We’ve now passed the point that I had read up to in よふかしのうた and honestly the anime has made me want to give the manga another shot. I wasn’t blown away by it originally but the adaptation is so good that I feel almost certain I’ll want to read ahead once this season is over. This is the first week of watching シャドーハウス season 2 and it’s already been a bit of a ride.

For non-airing shows, I also finished up はるかなレシーブ (ep. 8-11) and started watching ハイキュー season 4 (ep. 1).

Also subtitled サマータイムレンダ ep. 16 and 17. This week had a lot of bits that were tricky to wrangle into english but I’m pretty pleased with some of the phrasing I came up with. This is more translation than reading but translating がいーじん！がいーじん！as “gooo home! gooo home!” made me feel rather pleased with myself.

Moving on to manga: I finished 夏へのトンネル、さよならの出口 (vol. 3 and 4) and enjoyed it a lot. I could see myself reading the novel version at some point too, and I definitely want to check out some of the author’s other work. Looking forward to the movie.

I also finished 鍵人 (vol. 2) and as much as I’m a huge 田中靖規 fanboy I have to say this one was a disappointment. If it had one more volume to wrap up the story I don’t think I would complain but it gets to a point of climax and then just…ends. Maybe he was going for a kind of “the future looks bright” type ending, which I’m theoretically okay with, but it just didn’t work for me.

アオのハコ vol. 6 came out this week and I read it right away naturally. The cliffhanger from last volume didn’t cause a major upset like I expected, but now there’s some simmering angst which is even more troublesome! There were lots of good moments in this one though (even if the cover art is false advertising).

The week before last I mentioned trying out 火葬場のない町に鐘が鳴る時, and this week I decided to continue it. I wasn’t convinced by the end of vol. 3, but I decided to go ahead and buy one more volume before making the call about whether to continue, if nothing more than to pay the author back for the entertainment I’d gotten for free so far. Honestly…even after vol. 4 I can’t say for sure whether I like it or not. It’s one of those series where I’m totally hooked despite being keenly aware of major flaws. I don’t honestly think this series is good; the story seems very ad-lib, the main character is unreasonable, and as I’ve mentioned before, the art is pretty rough a lot of the time. Nevertheless I find myself burning through 50 pages at a time. I guess it kind of comes with the territory of campy horror. In any case, I read vol. 2-6 this week and will likely continue it as long as it keeps pulling me along.