I know that I should not be starting a new book right now, but this is what happened: I started watching the drama 『ビブリア古書堂の事件手帖』and I liked it very much. Then I learnt that the drama was an adaptation of a light novel by author En MIKAMI (三上延). Some days later, I found this very novel in a bookshop, piled up on a table. The reason why the bookshop made a pile with a novel published 7 years ago (2011) is because there is now a film adaptation of this story. It was released in Japan on November, 1st. If you like solving mysteries in second-hand bookstores, you have the choice between reading the light novel, watching the drama or watching the film. It would be interesting to make a comparison of the three, but I am not sure if I want to watch the movie. I think that I will read the book first and certainly watch the drama afterwards. Having read the book before, I should be able to understand the drama better. My …

『リカーシブル』by Honobu YONEZAWA (米澤穂信) is the last novel on my reading challenge list of 2018, and I want to read it before the end of the year. It took me two weeks to go through the first pages, though. I knew that to finish this book before December, 31st, I had to start it in November. This is the reason why one of my goal for the month was to start and ideally, read half of this book.  I started 『リカーシブル』at least 5 times during the past two weeks, and could not get into it. I was even thinking of giving it up altogether. But I think that these repetitive failures were due to my state of mind at the time rather than to the novel itself. These past two weeks, I haven’t worked much for my Japanese and starting a new novel felt like a daunting task.  What helped me overcome this state is this post by Ten Thousand Hours that gives great tips to start reading books in Japanese. Even after reading several …

I still have three books to read this year to complete my 2018 reading challenge and 『探偵倶楽部』(たんていくらぶ) is one of them. It is a collection of five short stories, featuring the mysterious “Membership Detective Club”. I already read the first two short stories and I plan to read the third one in November. The membership detective club is a detective agency composed of only two persons: an unnamed detective and his assistant. They work for wealthy and selected persons. The interesting feature of this book is that little is known about this detective, not even his name (as far as the first two short stories are concerned.) The stories seem to focus more on the staging of the murder and the events afterwards. As a reader, we follow the characters involved in it, but at the same time, we never quite know who did it, which makes things very exciting. I read the first short story at the very beginning of the year, but I found it rather difficult at the time. The writing was …