Hey, I’m back to contributing, @nineswords having moved this community here seems like it’s already been a good choice.
The Saga Of Tanya The Evil Vol. 1-9
I love this. I’m in love. I’m reading this as fast as I can.
I love the general setup. I love the main characters dumb monologues about the economy. I love how you see the perspective of different people. I love the incongruent self view of Tanya and the external view.
If you like long drawn out strategic battles/war this is for you. It’s not happy. It feels like a sinking ship.
Idk what else to say. I read too much of it to comment on any Volume in particular
Last week, I said I would try to read Vol 3 of Konosuba by this post. However, I failed to live up to those expectations. I wanted to ask this community how people are reading their LNs on Android. I have usually used the kindle app/store to read in the past. However, I the Konosuba volume I have as a .mobi file for some reason (honestly no recollection of what source I got it from). I have found the Kindle reading experience for it quite poor and was wondering if there are other apps I should try out. So, I am looking for suggestions for an improved reading experience on Android (I know the option also exists to just re-buy Konosuba from the Kindle store).
For WNs, I typically use LNReader which is usually good enough, but never really great either. Are there other solutions people use for WNs?
As for what I have read this past week, its really just one WN; I Can’t Exploit My S*aves Because of Their High Expectations and Evaluation. I had originally come across this series in manga form and thought it was funny. With the manga only up to 4 chapters, I thought I would try to see what the source was like. It was…not great. It is written in such a weird, sometimes first- sometimes third-person way that is not very clear. Things are often implied and never stated, but with the rough translation, it makes it very tough to parse. I don’t know enough Japanese to say how much of this is in the original text vs. having a poor translation. However, what I could read of the WN was tough going and lost most of the humor that I enjoyed in the manga. So, to sum it up, I will be waiting for more manga chapters to come out.
I use Shosetsu for the couple of WNs I read. Took a bit of effort to set it up the way I like but it’s been working well for me since then.
For LNs and other books on my phone I typically use the Kobo app so that it (poorly) syncs up with my Kobo reader, but the experience isn’t anything great. For the few mobi files I have around I’ve used calibre to convert them to epub to read on my Kobo. There are a lot more options for reading epubs on android than mobi files, but I’m not super familiar with them.
Converting formats is a good idea. I haven’t really played around with ebook formats that much as I have usually either just bought something through kindle or read fan translations of WNs. I really have no idea why I ended up with mobi files for a handful of the early Konosuba novels. I am going to try that out and see how it goes.
As for Shosetsu, I just installed it and have been experimenting with different sources after figuring out the extensions repo thing. I see what you mean now about taking some time to get it set up. I am going to tinker around with this in the background since LNReader similarly took me a long time to get set up and (so far) is still working. The main thing I was worried about is that half the extensions in LNReader seem to be nonfunctional and unmaintained. However, that also seems to be the case for the handful I tried out in Shosetsu as well.
I can’t help with first hand experience but on r/lightnovels it seems like Moon Reader is the preferred LN client. I would assume that the app can read .mobi files.
Just wanted to update here that Moon Reader worked like a charm. It let me set up to read my mobi file exactly how I liked without any kind of weird restrictions due to the file type. Thanks for the recommendation!
RVing My Way into Exile with My Beloved Cat: This Villainess Is Trippin’ Volume 1 - What has to be the most absurd title in a long time, turned out to be just as you would expect. It starts with a carbon copy of every otome game light novel ever. Especially the Level 99 Villainess setup: Overworked corporate slave and otome game player dies and gets reincarnated as the daughter of a duke in her favorite game’s world as the villainess character. She gets her engagement to the prince broken because the game’s main character is falsely accusing her of bullying. She is also mistreated by her family because she is a dark magic user and has black hair which that civilization is discriminating against. Never mind why someone despised by society for black hair and dark magic would ever be chosen as the future queen, but whatever… As I said, they literally threw together all the genre tropes they could think of. MC then uses her special unique skill to summon an RV and head into the sunset. And if the otome game tropes aren’t enough they added the “A strong monster appeared and my evil party kicked me out as monster bait” trope. But is the actual story and that is just 20% of the book. A good 60% or so is just an explanation of what she is cooking. Think of the cooking parts of "Campfire Cooking with My Absurd Skill” and you get it. The remaining 20% are just MC wondering how cute her cat is or how convenient her RV is. That right. musing about the cat and RV takes up as much page space as the actual story progression. I don’t exactly mind aimless novels that are just comfying (yep invented a new word) around but then they have to be at least entertaining while doing so. This one isn’t. And to top it off: If there is a problem the solution to it pops up out of nowhere immediately. For example, they take a herb-gathering quest and MC is having a problem differentiating the good herbs from the bad ones. A paragraph later her skill levels up and now she has a convenient appraisal skill. Another example would be a large monster appearing and not even one paragraph later her skill levels up again and conveniently her RV is now not a small camper bus but one of those large moving home thingies. Not that that was needed though since the solution to that fight was so badly planned that it would have worked with the smaller camper bus as well. I honestly can not think of one redeeming quality of this LN other than the cute cat illustrations. - 2/10
Peddler in Another World Volume 6 - The adventurers found a dungeon that can bring back loved ones from the dead. As you can imagine this was a bittersweet volume that plucked at the heartstrings. I like the series quite a lot and this was the best volume so far. It’s a beautiful conclusion to my favorite character’s backstory and a beautiful setup for my second favorite character’s story going forward. Maybe my judgment has been thrown off a bit by reading the terrible RV Villainess right before, but I give this volume a full 9/10.
Oh man, RVing sounds rough. You aren’t kidding about throwing every genre trope in there. They even squeezed in some other genres’ tropes it sounds like. I also did not really get that there would be a focus on cooking at all from the synopsis. It seems like it was just trying to gather all the right tags on syosetu that were popular, throwing them into a pot on a camping stove, and making isekai-otome-villainess-iyashikei stew that is way too overdone.
And the cooking part angered me as well. It’s just so stupid There is a point where MC cooks for some NPCs and they are all blown away because she fried an ingredient in a pan. The NPCs have the pan and they have the ingredient, but in the entire world apparently no one ever had the idea to fry the ingredient before our isekai MC entered the scene. I really can suspend my disbelieve in novels where they are using complete recipes to create something the isekai world didn’t know before (recreating curry out of dozens of rare spices for example). But just throwing a single ingredient into a frying pan without anything else? Nope.
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