First things first: I decided to pause 月夜の島渡り for a while. I finished the first chapter and while I could tell I would like the rest, I was extremely unmotivated to prioritize it and kept falling further and further behind. When I eventually get back to it I might restart from the beginning. It’s definitely a me problem. Just trying to follow the fun. On that note, I decided to start reading 探偵はもう、死んでいる after finding the anime to be surprisingly decent. I’m about a quarter of the way through it and interestingly enough, the entire structure is completely different from the anime. It with a very brief teaser flashback, then picks up in present day when the detective is actually already dead. I’m curious why the anime did so much rearranging. Anyway, I’m having fun with it. Of the new vocab I’ve learned, 鎖骨 is one that stuck out to me and weirdly enough I’ve seen it a few places since.
Only four episodes of anime this week: ep. 5-6 each of 僕のヒーローアカデミア and Spy Family. Not looking forward to all the catch-up I’ll have to play over the next week. Also listened to three audiobooks; スーパーカブ vol. 6 (5:38, med focus), スーパーカブ reserve (4:42, low focus), and やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている 1 (7:09, low focus). Honestly, I was quite enjoying vol. 6 because it was more like what I expected from the series to begin with — travelling to faraway places, trying new food, meeting new people, being more or less agreeable– and then it ended. Oh well. Reserve was kind of an おまけ volume and I don’t remember much about it. 俺ガイル was extremely meh.
A total of nine volumes of manga this week, with four of them being read aloud (new experiment). I’ll group them by series instead of sticking to chronological order.
瞳のカトブレパス vol. 1 and 2, another early series by 田中靖規 of サマータイムレンダ, and just like 鍵人 it had a kind of weirdly open-ended story, probably due to being cancelled early. It didn’t seem like it had a lot of potential honestly, but I did like the characters a lot more this time around. The main girl was delightful and was always talking in 関西弁 so it wasn’t a total waste. One very weird thing that stuck out to me — the last chapter, an おまけ, was literally the same key story beats from the original first chapter, almost like an alternate retelling or something? It’s already weird to have a bonus chapter after the end of the story but this was an especially weird way to do it.
I’ve had よつばと！ vol. 6 on my shelf untouched for years at this point, and I figured it had gone on long enough. This series is so good. I was laughing the whole time and as soon as I finished I went on mandarake to buy the rest of the series. Will probably be tearing through these pretty soon.
Read いじめるヤバイ奴 vol. 1-3. I’ve had these in my library for a little while but was recently reminded of them and ended up reading all three in quick succession. Basic premise is that the main girl has some kind of kink or something where she likes getting bullied in public, so she bullies this guy (apparently her childhood crush? but maybe he forgot?) into bullying her in a variety of awful ways. At first I thought there was some potential for interesting character depth (was getting 火傷少女 vibes for a little bit) but I think that’s probably expecting too much. It’s definitely not something I’ll be continuing unless they keep giving out free volumes, but it was gripping enough to keep me hooked most of the way. I read vol. 2 aloud and regretted it. Every character is a psychopath.
Finally got clearance to read 呪術廻戦 vol. 17 and as usual I devoured it. There were a few extremely text-heavy pages which were exhausting to read aloud but besides that it was just a wild ride from start to finish. Probably my favorite volume so far.
Lastly, vol. 6 and 7 of それでも歩は寄せてくる. I’ve decided that I’ll be reading the rest of the series aloud in order to keep it from going by so quickly. Reading aloud is fun and this is a perfect series for it (also makes me feel slightly less like I’m cheating with the low page count/difficulty + slightly more like I’m getting my money’s worth).