Comments on: KBL: Khatzumoto’s Book List, August 2008

By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » Book Review: 怨み屋本舗 / URAMIYA HONPO — Revenge By Proxy

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:53 +0000

[…] been a while since the last edition of Khatzumoto’s Book List. Maybe it’ll be a monthly list again, maybe seasonal, maybe just “whenever”. […]

By: anonymous coward

anonymous coward — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:36:59 +0000

I can’t believe you spell colour without the u ! 😉

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 05:33:59 +0000

@Alyks
My word! I hadn’t realized that…thank you and sorry!

By: Alyks

Alyks — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 01:52:54 +0000

I would like to point out that the yesasia links for Samurai Champloo are for the Chinese editions (they don’t have it in Japanese). I didn’t pay attention and didn’t realize this until it arrived today =[.

By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » Link-O-Mania: Mostly Japanese Websites — Blogs, Think Tanks and Some Inspiration

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 03:00:32 +0000

[…] うさぎさんの毎日/The daily life of Little Miss Rabbit. It’s a blog. Written by a friend of mine. So, more shameless plug than anything else . She told me she’s worried the content is too “normal”; I told her we can’t always limit our discussions to what’s in 論点/The Issues. […]

By: rich_f

rich_f — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:22:45 +0000

For cheap books to the US, I prefer www.bk1.jp, because they have semi-sane shipping rates, and a point club. You can choose from EMS, Air, SAL, and Ground. (And there’s an in-Japan shipping option as well that’s pretty cheap.) No handling fees, either. And it even meets the AJATT requirement of being ruthlessly Japanese– there be no English on this site!

Manga-wise, I like ハヤテのごとく because it’s a pretty easy read, furigana and all, and I also like the manga version of テレパシー少女蘭, because it also abounds with furigana, and doesn’t force me to hit the dictionary 10 times per sentence. I’d wager that the テレパシー少女蘭 novels are also a pretty easy read, since they’re also aimed at ~6年 reading level, but I haven’t had a chance to get them yet.

I’d say they’re both good for ~ JLPT level 3+. So if you could nail level 3, but not quite get level 2, these should be somewhat easy to read– you’ll still have to look a lot of stuff up, but it won’t drag your reading speed down.

My preferences for reading involve books that I can read with some looking-up of stuff, but not constant looking-up of stuff. There’s that fine line between reading for fun and making work out of fun, you know?

By: kochiragochira

kochiragochira — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:34:46 +0000

Hey Khatz- post was truly “teh ossum” – just what the doctor ordered.
Just wondering if anyone else here knows of a fujisan.com alternative that operates in the United Kingdom, well England specifically. Like most people have observed, amazon has obscene shipping charges-> -ve lolz.

By: quendidil

quendidil — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 04:03:32 +0000

i”d have to say デス・ノート　is a really well thought out manga series too. The anime is great for around the first 23 episodes, and follows the manga dialogue closely, with some reordering of events, but is a bit messy after that.

The 涼宮ハルヒ light novel series is not bad either; light novels IMO are the easiest step to reading after you find reading manga comfortable. 狼と香辛料 is good too.

I like 時をかける少女 too; it isn’t really a light novel, it’s a kid’s novel really. It’s easy to read and not too boring, though I prefer the adapted anime.

By: Ken

Ken — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 01:52:49 +0000

Life saver! I was looking for a magazine to read in Japan!

By: Chiro-kun

Chiro-kun — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:08:03 +0000

「焼き立て!!ジャパン」っちゅうのを忘れてもうたやろ？

By: Sandersmc

Sandersmc — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:13:44 +0000

Hey Khatz thought you might like this to compliment your book column that you have started writing

www.bookrabbit.com/

Many Thanks

Martin

By: Daco

Daco — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:03:15 +0000

Many thanks for this, um, extremely wide list of books. 🙂 You can’t go wrong with Crayon Shinchan, especially as (IIRC) the text is hand-written. Gotta get used to it sooner or later anyway.

By: alex

alex — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:48:26 +0000

We want alternative links to support Khatz with some financial monies, not because we cant find them on our own. If its too difficult and time consuming thats another thing, just a thought though.

By: Sandersmc

Sandersmc — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:07:55 +0000

Thank you very much for this Khatz much appreciated mate, your bookshelf must big pretty large with an array of books that you read.

Keep up the monthly update of what you are reading or interested in, as it is not going unappreciated

Thank again

Martin 🙂

By: nest0r

nest0r — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:22:25 +0000

That Issues for Japan is something I’ll look forward to reading. I don’t care much for American politics, but I find Japanese politics very interesting.

I wasn’t sure where else to ask this besides the RevTK forums, but anyone here know of an equivalent to Mangajin/Japanese the Manga Way, for French?

By: justin

justin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:38:51 +0000

Ummm. Cool. I’ve taken your tv drama recommendations in the past and wasn’t lead astray, so I don’t expect to be lead astray with the books either—thanks!

For anyone looking for a full-length novel entirely with furigana, check out 少年H. Even if your Kanji is good, it’s good to make sure you don’t permanently burn any mis-readings into your brain. Furigana is on the first instance of a word on a page, but further instances don’t have it—so you still gotta remember. Fair warning though: all dialogs are in dialect.

By: mark

mark — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:51:06 +0000

vgambit:

Google is your friend.

Khatz is spoon-feeding us all enough already (Thank you Khatz!). Do you want him to read the books for you as well too?

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:17:05 +0000

Vgambit – are you in the US? If so, I can recommend using this site:

www.fujisan.com/

Their book selection is impressive and the prices/shipping are reasonable. I bought three books from them recently and it only cost me around $35 including shipping. The only down side to them is they only ship within the United States and the shipping time is somewhat slow (my order took 2 1/2 weeks to arrive). But overall I was very satisfied.

To Khatzumoto’s credit, posting alternative links for every book would be very time consuming, plus, as I’m sure the readers of this site are spread around the world, any alternative link posted may or may not be applicable depending on shipping policies.

By: vgambit

vgambit — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:36:08 +0000

I appreciate the links to Amazon.co.jp, but for people outside of Japan, it’s generally the most expensive place to get books from. You should post alternative purchase links for people who still live elsewhere.

I mean, I’m all for buying through your referral links, but not if I have to pay 5 times the normal rate for shipping.