Reading Report: 26 March 2023
This week was fairly productive considering I was blasted with school assignments all week. I managed to finish all my due work and I managed to finish フィッシュストーリー, so in all it was a satisfying weekend where I felt like I got a lot done.
フィッシュストーリー 66 pages
The end of ポテチ, and a nice conclusion to the nicest and longest story in the book. The chemistry between the main cast, 今村, 大西, 黒澤, and 今村の母 was all really good, I loved the themes present in the book. The idea that who you are today is sort of the result of coincidences and seemingly inconsequential decisions is one of those fun things to think about and I think it's expressed really well between 今村 believing he was swapped at birth with town-hero and baseballer 尾崎 and 大西 only being alive due to a series of coincidences that brought 今村 to her at her hour of need. Outside of that it was mostly just a pleasant story with a lot of fun writing.
ダンダダン９巻
After finishing フィッシュストーリー I wanted to work on my Manga goal for the year (100 volumes, pretty manageable) and this had been sitting on my (digital) shelf for a while. Volume 8 ends with a Kaiju closing in on the main cast (plus 坂田金太) and develops better than expected. Not only is the fight handled well but the new character after the fight ends is extremely good and seems like she'll add more fun to the cast. As per usual with the series the writing and art is extremely tight.
やがて君になる１冊 (Manga ver.)
I got the first volume of this because there was some buzz about it on NtE. Sight unseen I gave it a try. It's alright so far, a pretty conventional romance between girls. The main pair are sort of likeable, kind of just normal teens suffering through high school. I do like the "twist" that 小糸 hasn't experienced a romantic attraction in the same way that 七海 has, but it feels a bit meaningless at this point, both of them are just behaving like a regular slow teen couple. There have been some interesting individual lines and it's definitely one of those "it reads like a 小説" mangas with a lot of introspection and narration that I like so far. Honestly I thought it was originally 小説 but I just googled it to doublecheck and it was apparently a manga first.
Life Stuff
As mentioned, school has cooled down a little bit. I now have one assignment with an upcoming due date (next Sunday) and the rest are a few weeks away. I'm still a bit stressed out about some end of semester assignments that really need to be seeded now, but I'm gonna cross that bridge when I have a bit more mental energy.
Work things have been put on hold again... not much to add.
Tired but surviving... 😩