Comments on: Reading and Respectability

By: Livonor

Livonor — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 16:16:51 +0000

I can even imagine you punching your face on the wall after discover that the word was ライトノベル

By: Livonor

Livonor — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 15:56:13 +0000

I didn’t experience that with books, since most people don’t even care to literature anyway, but with music the story is different, music is soooo overrated, everybody talks about it as being the #1 to define a human being, when people came at me the first question they make is “what music you like?” and when I answer “no one” they look at me like I was a vegetable without life, like if there’s nothing but music in the world, I do listen to music (アニメソンばかり) but I don’t care to it, I don’t know or like any band, or singer, please leave me alone.

By: Livonor

Livonor — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 15:46:35 +0000

WOW you can say that again! I would post the same if you didn’t do so already

By: One Minute, One Action, Every Morning Change Your Life | Samurai Mind Online

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 12:08:43 +0000

[…] in the dust even if I paid bookoo dollars for them. I am inspired by AJATT’s column on “Reading and Respectability”: If you have to limit your reading to what is considered respectable, you might as well physically […]

By: Jaybot7

Jaybot7 — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 01:34:52 +0000

Light novels, as bubble said are actually called, ライトノベル , and the trashy stuff usually end in 文庫 (then again almost all publishers end in that, but…!) for example 電撃文庫、スニーカー文庫、GA文庫 just go on amazon.co.jp start from here: amzn.to/acuoHk and end up on pages like amzn.to/aH8ns7

Enjoy 🙂

By: bubble

bubble — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 18:50:16 +0000

Light novel はライトノベルじゃなかったけ？ WikipediaによるとラノベもOKみたい。ふつうのnovelは小説（しょうせつ）。

This post is very timely because it is now Banned Books Week, during which we celebrate freedom of expression and of thought.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 18:25:18 +0000

“You should kill yourself.”

…..Wow.

Don’t get me wrong, I love your post.

But it’s really racey. I get the feeling you’ve been reading Taleb’s work again, lately.

By: nippyon

nippyon — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 15:53:50 +0000

遊・戯・王　for the win!!!
Last night I went to Bookoff and bought about 25 manga and two 乙一 books(the Japanese equivalent of Dean Koontz!)and a newspaper. I started learning Japanese so I can read manga anyway, so if I didn’t read things I like I probably would have quit long ago. I have tons of melodramatic 少女, 少年 complete with swords and a villian or gangsters and guns(GTOが大好き！)

By the way, does anyone know the word for “light novel”? I was trying to explain to the clerk that I wanted to read 時をかける少女(the light novel version) but I had to keep on saying “時をかける少女の本。漫画じゃない。本です。”
Now I’m going to go back to reading Yu-Gi-Oh—in Japanese!

By: Emese

Emese — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 07:53:38 +0000

That’s soooo right. Well, I wouldn’t even think about reading those books if it wasn’t for studying, ne? And as soon as I got some fluency, I would leave those stupid books again, so why suffer? I must get some Stephen King books in Japanese, right now. *grin*

By: watt

watt — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 07:09:56 +0000

@Brutus
Based on what you read, even if you’re “like dumb”, you probably won’t end up being “love dumb”.

By: Brutus

Brutus — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 05:59:51 +0000

I just like to read the Relationship and Humor columns of a Swedish forum…mainly. Does that make me, I dunno, like…dumb?

By: gboschen

gboschen — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 19:20:42 +0000

マンガ、バクマンは好きですよ。Guilt over ones reading material is highly overrated. And this comes from someone who used to feel lots of it! It’s great to be free 🙂

By: Caomei

Caomei — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 19:00:37 +0000

Awesome. Now I’m gonna go back to reading Twilight in Korean, guilt-free. ^______^

By: Jaybot7

Jaybot7 — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 15:47:42 +0000

Couldn’t agree more. I didn’t learn to read English by reading fancy literature until I was forced to in highschool, and even then, it wasn’t all that interesting (Great Gatsby and a few others aside, but even those I liked every 5 paragraphs or so, the rest was just filler). I’m a big fan of reading entertaining trash, especially in Japanese.

Right now I love reading books aimed at middle school girls involving witches (黒魔女さん）, and some totally trashy stuff aimed at the average male with something about zombies and hot chicks (これは、ゾンビですか？) and of course the stack of クレヨンしんちゃん漫画 next to my toilet.

Adult books are good too, I guess, anything on the best-seller shelf is *readable* to the average person and it’s usually entertaining. （最近の告白っていう and 卒業っていう come to mind)

But seriously, stay away from ‘literature’. Even children’s literature (魔女の宅急便) will go on a two page metaphorical rant about a could floating through the sky. You don’t need that. You have more important things to do, like read about how to survive a zombie attack.

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 15:42:45 +0000

Can I apply this philosophy to the music I listen to, too? Please? Okay, thanks, because my friends apparently think that listening to too much German A capella music is going to kill me, or something.

Long live die Wise Guys.