Due to Norcal being on fire again, recently I've been stuck inside even more than before. So, I started reading raw light novels, which is something I had avoided doing for a long time because I assumed it would take be forever to read anything. (Okay, to be fair I did read the T7S novels, but that’s about it.) And while it does take me a long time to read, it wasn’t nearly as slow as I had feared, which is good.

The thing that really slows me down is having to look up words I don’t know. To be fair, often times I can kinda guess the word’s meaning based on context, but I’ve got a thing where I try to put new words I come across into an Anki deck so I can study them later. Right now my (Android) dictionary app of choice is Akebi, which integrates well with AnkiDroid. In addition to the normal radical lookup, Akebi also comes with its own handwriting input, though I’ve found it to be pretty strict at times (my handwriting’s pretty messy okay). I’m sure something with OCR etc might be a bit quicker, but it’s honestly good enough. (By the way, if you’re on a desktop browser and want to add words from websites to Anki, I suggest Yomichan.)

While I initially was reading on my iPad, which is what I typically read manga on, I was able to get my hands on my dad’s old Kindle (Paperwhite 3, 2015), which I’ve been reading on since. I remember trying out the Kindle for reading manga back in the day, but at the time I felt that the screen size was a bit too small. But it works great for light novels, espcially because the screen size is actually pretty close to normal light novel paper size. Also it’s a bit easier on the eyes, I spend too many hours staring at screens as is. To get stuff onto the Kindle I used KCC (github) plus KindleGen, which Amazon very recently dropped support for, but thankfully archive.org has it backed up (eg linux).

As suggested in the image above, I decided to start with Imosae. I enjoyed the show while it aired, and recently found out that the last volume (14) came out earlier this year (though at my current reading pace it’ll take me at least another month at least to get to that point). It really makes me miss playing board games with friends though… it just ain’t the same online. Anyway, I keep track of what I’ve read (raw) on Bookmeter, so feel free to check that out.