Indeed, thanks for the insights Fillanzea.

nest0r wrote:

BTW, I'll probably think of an obvious solution and feel silly later, but any tips for when one has a hypothetical batch of .txts with a certain encoding, and wishes to make of the texts a searchable database, esp. when their default OS explorer doesn't search them properly?

2 things come to mind...  Use Linux instead, or...  Write some kind of PHP (or other language) script that gives you a nice index of them and let your browser help you with the searching.

Edit:  lol and that's not irony   I've always said that I'm learning JP to read the books that don't get translated.  After I read it in English, I'll mainly read it in Japanese for practice more than anything.  (Same as Harry Potter.)

Last edited by wccrawford (2010 February 19, 12:03 pm)

Fillanzea wrote:

Kirino Natsuo is not overly hard. I think she writes in a relatively conversational style. But although I haven't read more than a few pages of any of her books, I feel like mystery and suspense can be hard to read, as they tend to use some more specialized vocabulary.

On the other hand if you're reading a mystery then a level of comprehension sufficient to understand the plot is still an enjoyable read: the main point of the book is the plot, not the author's use of language. (I've recommended 赤川次郎 before for that kind of thing.)

If you want to read a light novel, I suggest staying away from historical, fantasy, and science fiction, just because they tend to have a lot of words that aren't connected to everyday life. And you get more of the culture in a book that takes place in modern Japan than one that takes place in medieval-Europe-with-magic, too. "Maria-sama ga miteru" is fairly easy. "Suzumiya Haruhi" has some surprisingly hard vocabulary in it, and the narrative voice feels a little odd to me.

I'd agree with all that (and have just picked up Maria-sama for a reread, coincidentally). I think the grammar in _Haruhi_ is also a little harder (more longwinded sentence structure, mostly).

Light novels aside, I think the easiest book I've read is "Kitchen" by Yoshimoto Banana, which is very short in addition to being easy to read.

Yep. That's where I started...

For those interested in reading the Kino no Tabi light novels, if you try to google something like "kino no tabi raw light novels", you MIGHT find something interesting...... ;-)

Updated the random string of letters and numbers from my first post, as they didn't seem random enough. So, I tried another totally innocent combination that you definitely shouldn't be suspicious of: http://snipurl.com/0HGQZSRO - Do not attempt to look closely at this link by reading the second paragraph of the initial post.

Last edited by nest0r (2010 February 20, 3:06 pm)

danieldesu wrote:

Fillanzea wrote:

Nanakamado hates boys, except for her childhood best friend Yukikaze.
Everyone says that they look alike. Everyone suspects that Nanakamado's promiscuous mother slept with Yukikaze's father.

Am I the only one that thinks this doesn't make any sense?

To hopefully get it to make more sense: Nanakamado's mother slept around a LOT, and then got pregnant with Nanakamado. Because she slept around a lot, she doesn't know who Nanakamado's biological father is, but there's a strong possibility that Yukikaze's father is also Nanakamado's father. (And no one talks about this.)

@thekonfuzed

Not on my computer. I think you must have had a false positive, though I'm not sure how, given it's all basically txt/jpg, kind of hard to screw that up. ^_^ Theoretically speaking of course, about imaginary files that I don't know what you're talking about, and wouldn't have on my PC even if I did.

Last edited by ruiner (2010 February 20, 11:24 pm)

yukamina wrote:

Fillanzea wrote:

danieldesu wrote:

Am I the only one that thinks this doesn't make any sense?

To hopefully get it to make more sense: Nanakamado's mother slept around a LOT, and then got pregnant with Nanakamado. Because she slept around a lot, she doesn't know who Nanakamado's biological father is, but there's a strong possibility that Yukikaze's father is also Nanakamado's father. (And no one talks about this.)

So does everyone know that they have the same mother? That's kinda hard to hide. Not  knowing who the father is would only make it a problem of whether they are half or full siblings.

No, they have different mothers.

So it's a problem of whether they're unrelated or half siblings.

Oh and something that just occurred to me because I'm slow is that one can check the fidelity of many of the novel scans with amazon.co.jp's 'search inside' or perhaps Google Books (but I don't think there's much on the .jp version). I haven't seen any light novels with Amazon previews though. Then again, there's plenty of image scans elsewhere... I'm 99% sure 99% of the books are 99% accurate, however.

I mean, the novel scans that are artifacts in this alternate reality game I'm playing where you're trying to stop pirates but you have to prove the books are scans first. I'm not even really playing it, I'm theorizing that I'm playing it. Also, I don't know what you're talking about.

Last edited by nest0r (2010 February 21, 7:34 pm)

Ahha! Thanks for the added detail. It's smoopy.exe isn't it? I don't think that's a trojan, that's some kind of reader or something. You can Google for more about it. I meant to delete it from the archive because .exes creep me out.

AVG is what I use, it doesn't give false positives like that. (Actually it recently told me Combofix was a trojan or something, rather annoying.)

http://site-clue.statice.jp/software/help/smoopy/

Here's the results from Jotti's online scan: http://virusscan.jotti.org/en-gb/scanre … f3ced394e4

Last edited by nest0r (2010 February 21, 8:14 pm)

whitefox wrote:

Yep, looks like that's the cause then. I guess McAfee's a little overzealous, but better safe than sorry I guess. Shouldn't be too hard to work around now that I know it's not a virus. Thanks a lot for looking into it.

http://snipurl.com/0qev2aow (same deal as previous innocent links ;p)

Last edited by nest0r (2010 February 21, 8:22 pm)

Oh and something I should mention, one of my favourite novels is Kaori Ekuni's 'Twinkle Twinkle': http://www.vertical-inc.com/books/twinkle.html ... I've never read it in Japanese, but it's quite popular: http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%81%8D%E3%82 … 4101339112

Last edited by ruiner (2010 February 21, 10:17 pm)

Yeah, Vertical Inc. was my first introduction to contemporary Japanese lit, earlier in the decade (or last decade, whatever). They were life-savers at the time, but since then of course, many things have changed.

Last edited by ruiner (2010 February 22, 12:08 am)