Nuriko Wrote:One of these days, Alice, bang, zoom, straight to the moon!

Ah... The good ole' days when domestic violence on TV was funny

ichi the killer
ぶっ殺してやるな、チンピラ野郎…

how are you guys inserting images in your posts?
[edit... cheers, thx]

you do
[ img ]url of the page [ /img ]
without the spaces in the []'s

I was reading this until I lost it on my first day in Tokyo I almost lost hope humanity could produce a quality vampire story after all the Twilights, The Vampire Diaries and any other crap for 12yo girls but this is actually a very decent story. Disturbing as hell but interesting.

I haven't seen the movie yet and I'm not going to before I finish the book. Amazon just made a Web Reader Kindle, maybe this is how I'll get my hands on a copy.

Does anybody think I should try to drag myself through 「こころ」?

P.S. And I doubt I should try. Japanese kids, if they have read this, read it during high-school as part of the curriculum. I just thought I'd ask because... damn, it's so cheap!

@TheVinster if you want to read 「こころ」, but expect to spend some time using a dictionary. 夏目漱石 is a great writer. I feel that 夏目 is to difficult for me.

「夏の庭―The Friends」 is a good book. It is shorter at 221 opposed to 378, and the Japanese is easier. The only reason that I am recommending it is because I saw it on the same page as こころ, but it is more expensive.

I got bored of GOSICK and now I'm reading 殺人列車への招待 by 西村 京太郎
内容紹介
十津川警部に「殺人ゲームがしたい」と謎の電話がはいる。やがて、１１月７日東京駅発の寝台特急『さくら』の車内で「ア」で始まる名前の女を殺すと、挑戦状が届く。悪戯か、本気か。当日は用心のため、「ア」で始まる女性二人を探し出し、ガードをつけた。だが、車内で別の女性が殺される。さらに、第二の挑戦状が…。窮地に追い込まれた捜査陣に大逆転はあるか！？傑作鉄道トラベル・ミステリー。

白い部屋で月の歌を interesting stuff.
At first I was like are my japanese skills really shitty?? (there's no way since I've already 30 books) since I didn't understand what was going on but that was not the case ... that's just how it's written and by the time I got to the end everything was clear and made sense. I was surprised by the ending... love it when that happens. there's 2 stories in the book, I just wrote about the first story which is called shiroi heya de tsuki no uta wo .

oh and speaking of which I got my first "NICE" on this dokusho meter site. lol..
http://book.akahoshitakuya.com/cmt/12944900

Omoishinji Wrote:@TheVinster if you want to read 「こころ」, but expect to spend some time using a dictionary. 夏目漱石 is a great writer. I feel that 夏目 is to difficult for me.

「夏の庭―The Friends」 is a good book. It is shorter at 221 opposed to 378, and the Japanese is easier. The only reason that I am recommending it is because I saw it on the same page as こころ, but it is more expensive.

Thanks, I stopped by my local Japanese market (also has a bookstore) and picked up 「夏の庭―The Friends」 for about $7.50. I also got the first issue of One Piece for roughly the same price. I don't really read manga, but whatever. I was going to get another issue of 「マジックツリーハウス」 but it costs twice the price for some reason (around $14). I did glance inside of 「夏の庭」 and it's really motivating when you see kanji without furigana and understand it. It really drives home all the work you put into studying.

Now if only I had decent listening comprehension...

Nice thread. I usually spend most study time in Anki doing core 6000 sentences, but when I get a chance I read the manga 20th Century Boys (currently on volume 7). Will probably try some of the books in this thread now.

Finished reading all of Inuyasha (took about a month of riding the train to work to burn through 56 volumes) and am now reading Samurai Champloo. There are only two volumes so I'll need to find something else quick. Maybe Rurouni Kenshin..

This book　日本語練習長, it's getting interesting, I'm on page 38 and it's starting to talk about the origins of the japanese language/culture (like, in the nara jidai they introduced kanji, etc etc).

I'm still reading the yoshimoto banana's book. However I'm focusing on the above mentioned book because a teacher gave it to me and I want to have read at least 100 pages before school restarts. Hopefully it will continue interesting, it wasn't interesting before because it mostly talked about the differences in words with similar meanings.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%...4004305969

吉本バナナの「キッチン」。

I don't read Japanese books that were written a long time ago... (or at least I have yet to) you know the ones that are hard to understand/read. However I found this show segment they do on this nogizaka show where the girl reads a passage from the books that I mentioned I don't read.

.be

there's a whole bunch of this so i look forward to watching them all and bask in the literary beauty.
It's really nice to hear someone read it out loud when it comes to archaic writing.

Just from this episode I can figure out most of what he wrote from my knowledge of modern japanese and japanese intuition there's some stuff where i'm not sure if he means IS __ or is NOT __ . I'm not sure if I want to look it up. Maybe it's more beautiful if i don't know lol.

I bought 東野圭吾's 「怪しい人びと」. Anybody read it? I just picked it up because I want to Sanseido but they didn't have 「サマーウォーズ」 or 「時をかける少女」. Ordered those two books from Kinokuniya when I got home though.

[s0apgun]

宇宙兄弟 / Uchuu Kyoudai / Space Brothers

吉本バナナの「まぼろしハワイ」

I just finished Norwegian Wood and am moving onto my next book. Has anyone here read 永遠のゼロ and can tell me what to expect? Since it depicts WW2 I can expect some strange language from time to time I'm sure, but in general how difficult is the overall style of this author? Would be much appreciated.

I'm halfway through reading アリソン by 時雨沢 恵一, the same author as キノの旅.

It is similar to キノの旅 in many ways, except that it is a single long story rather than lots of short ones. アリソン is the main character and she is a strong-willed teenage girl who flies a plane. The plane does not talk (she flies various different planes) but she has a boy side-kick so it has a similar dynamic. The world it is set in is also キノ-esque, as it is not Earth, but nothing too far out (it is not sci-fi). The imagined history and geography of the non-Earth world seem to play a fairly large role in the story.

I think I prefer キノ to be honest, but since that is not available on the Kindle I thought I would give this a try instead. It's not bad but I can't imagine reading all of the many sequels once I have finished this one. It is a light novel, but it is in fact quite long.

Other books I have read recently that deserve an honorable mention:

死神の精度 by 伊坂 幸太郎
ゼロの使い魔 by ヤマグチ ノボル
失はれる物語 by 乙 一
グラスホッパー by 伊坂 幸太郎

All on the kindle. Out of all of them, グラスホッパー was my favourite.

小公女 ;) Don't laugh. It was one of my favourite books as a kid and I still read it a few times a year. Figured it would be a good intermediate read in Japanese.

I'm 30 pages away from finishing the fist Harry Potter book (賢者の石). I've never read it in any other language, so I didn't quite follow the quidditch rules and stuff like that, but at least I enjoyed the story. :p

The next book has to be a Japanese one though... HP is quite a tough read, and I suspect the fact that it is a translation is partly the reason for that.

This thread is so awesome I thought I'd bump it. Anyone read anything interesting lately?

夜は短し歩けよ乙女


I like this author because of his big vocabulary lol. it's literally stimulating but... i have no idea what the f is going on ie who the main character is or if the narrator is changing every chapter. I have no idea. it's not my japanese ability... it's just the way the book is written. I'm only on page 30 so I don't know if it's going to become clear/clearer or this is what people liked about the book that I don't get. I will have to keep on reading to see if i like it. there's mixed reviews on amazon... I've read a book by him in the past which was okay

BEfore I was reading　フルハウス 　BY 柳 美里 AND GAVE up because it was just boring and I didn't get the point of the book.

I'll definitely post if I come across a book I really like... but this is what's going on for now!

[Zgarbas]

I re-read Kitchen, this time in Japanese. I loved it in English, but the Japanese version was just amazing <3. 人間失格 was also good enough for me to stop referring to Dazai as "that emo kid" and like him as an author.
In not so similar news, 雪国 is just as boring in Japanese as it is in English. I also read 紙の子供達は皆踊る and realized that Murakami should stick to door-stopper sized novels; the shorter his stories the worst.

Currently reading Welcome to the NHK, which is pretty damn good. Much more explicit than the anime, and also more captivating.

Oh, and I also started browsing the 万葉集。Damn that anthology is depressing as hell. 古今集's got nothing on it.

Japanese: ハリーポッターと秘密の部屋 (finished Murakami's 世界の終りとハードボイルドワンダラーンド a month ago)
German: Ein Mann, ein Tod - Kayankayas dritte Fall

I read a lot more in German (my other target language) than in Japanese simply because of the convenience of Amazon's Kindle. (Because of my vision, I can't read paper novels that well, let alone Japanese novels.)