JNC's June Catchup Travel Guidebook
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One of my favorites is on the list this month. Yay! More people can try out D-Genesis from the beginning without an extra charge. :) Reading about an ordinary office worker quite accidentally becoming the world’s top-ranked dungeon crawler at the very beginning of the story, watch an ex-coworker and him decimate slimes with household cleaning products… There’s government bureaucracy, huge sums of money, cults, and awesome puppies! I’m buying these books.
Housekeeping Mage is a good series, although my preference is the light novel. I’ve been buying the light novels.
Land Mines has been a fun one to follow, as Nao, his not-quite-harem, and the other guy go on adventures , deal with classmates, pick fruit, and invest in real estate. The current book isn’t quite as good as previous ones so far, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that it will improve or that it’s just a dip in performance. I’ve purchased some of these so far, with intent to buy more.
SOAP! was reasonably good, very clean, and a quick easy read, but I didn’t like it enough to buy the books.
For the other titles, I’ve been reading the Full Clearing manga and found it to be alright (I’ll probably try the novels), and I haven’t touched My Friend’s Little Sister at all ( ;p ).
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I wish there were more series like SOAP!. Nice, leisurely read. Good (if not too complicated) plot and likeable characters, and a story that has a complete arc: i.e. a satisfying ending. Something is is woefully lacking all too often in LNs.
I also can't recommend My Friend's Little Sister enough. Quality summer reading, again not too deep, but plenty of good funny moments and situations where there are many characters to cheer on. High school hijinks abound
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@Jon-Mitchell said in JNC's June Catchup Travel Guidebook:
I also can't recommend My Friend's Little Sister enough. Quality summer reading, again not too deep, but plenty of good funny moments and situations where there are many characters to cheer on. High school hijinks abound
Don’t forget all the lovely meta-commentary on the romcom subgenre 😊
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I will work on Land Mines this month. I read the first Volume of My Friend's Little Sister but for the life of me cannot remember a lot about it. Might give D-Genesis a whirl.
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I almost entirely forgot all about Soap.... That one was fun. Simple, but fun. I liked how the MC was a normal resident of the world and the isekai'd Saint was a side character. Puts a bit of a different spin on it.
Land Mines is nice cause it gives things a slightly more realistic approach. No one is overpowered, at least not off the bat. You can really get a feel that they earn their wealth and strength through effort and hard work, as opposed to most isekai where they either start off super strong, put in minimal effort and get explosive results, or they 'yada yada' training like it was a montage.
I like Goddess with Zero believers, too. I fell behind on it at some point, so I'm looking forward to picking it back up. Same with Housekeeper. Good month for catchups...
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Good selection this month, maybe not top tier but pretty close. If you have not read any of the novels included, give it a try.
I have been reading all of the titles except for SOAP and Full Clearing. So, light load this month for me. I have a few books from other publishers on my Kindle I bought recently, so now will be the time to read them.
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Its a problem when there are a lot of good catchups all at once especially when I am streaming a bunch of other stories. Hard to choose which series I want to push so I can read it as a stream as it continues to be published.
I usually take a look at how many parts I have to read to catchup.
Land Minds = 70
D-Genesis = 64If you had to pick only one of these which would be the one?
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@geetop said in JNC's June Catchup Travel Guidebook:
Its a problem when there are a lot of good catchups all at once especially when I am streaming a bunch of other stories. Hard to choose which series I want to push so I can read it as a stream as it continues to be published.
I usually take a look at how many parts I have to read to catchup.
Land Minds = 70
D-Genesis = 64If you had to pick only one of these which would be the one?
There’s much less D-Genesis to read than Land Mines. The three published D-Genesis books total about 680 pages on my iPad’s Books app, while the first three LM novels were about 600 pages (and there’s three more published LM books after those). I enjoy LM, but I prefer D-Genesis (so far, at least). I’ve read plenty of books about high schoolers isekai-ing into a fantasy world, but fewer books about adults in the real world (that just happens to have had dungeons develop in it a few years previously). D-G’s references to American/European(?)/Asian pop culture are pretty fun, too. :)
Try for both series, though! ;p
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D-Genesis is my favourite of the series on catch-up this month. It's sort of goofy and lighthearted, while also having more technical details and enthusiasm for the scientific method than most light novels.
The main characters are adults, and the villains are middle managers.
If that sounds like something you might like, then I recommend it.
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I too have to recommend My friend's little sister, a really enjoyable series to read if one likes romcoms.
I stopped reading Land mines after the fist two or three volumes because it didn't seem interesting enough for me...I might start reading again to see if the following volumes are better if I have some fee time. We'll see. -
@strangeattractor said in JNC's June Catchup Travel Guidebook:
@geetop
The main characters are adults, and the villains are middle managers.And cult leaders don't forget cult leaders
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@strangeattractor said in JNC's June Catchup Travel Guidebook:
D-Genesis is my favourite of the series on catch-up this month.
Agreed. That one has the best banter - by far - out of all series I have read on j-novel (Landmines is a distant second and I can't think of a third place). The life details are entertaining and the relationships flow naturally. Its illustrations with their style also stand out among a sea of novels with pictures that are blatantly misaligned with the text and whose only purpose seems to be to stick some meat in the eyes of the readers.
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I decided to read the first Volumes of both Land Mines and D-Genesis (due to all the praise). That way I can decide which one to push.
I also am trying out Soap to try and squeeze it out.
I currently have 14 series I am streaming with a few series probably gonna start again soon.
I also got three free months of Kindle Unlimted my brain will explode soon!
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I have finished the first two volumes of Land Mines. I like the story but I think all the food stuff is starting to get a teensy bit too much. I guess I thought there would be more combat than there is at least at this point in the series.
I also started Soap and it really is quite enjoyable. I should be able to read all three volumes even if I just read one part per day until the end of the month.
I also started D-Genesis. Didn't expect to see all the "math" in the beginning about the stats. It is a lot easier to read than Land Mines since the Parts are shorter. I will probably take a break on Land Mines to get ahead on this story and than go back to see how much I can get done by the end of June. I am on the first Volume Part 3 or so. He is just getting started learning about his skill and I suppose maybe a romantic interest?
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@geetop said in JNC's June Catchup Travel Guidebook:
I have finished the first two volumes of Land Mines. I like the story but I think all the food stuff is starting to get a teensy bit too much. I guess I thought there would be more combat than there is at least at this point in the series.
For me, I like that Land Mines is a more-or-less true "adventure story from scratch" since the approach is much more grounded instead of "oh, my skill lets me do X without really trying." Basically, I call it "Grimgar without the tragedy."
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@geetop Your commentary just reminded me of the poll about the batch of new additions that Land Mines and Housekeeping Mage were part of.
...I should really have done more of those. Not sure why I never posted another one...
Anyway, getting back onto the topic: Land Mines actually landed in second place. A lot of people (me included) liked how that story started out. Even if Nao was basically a cardboard cutout of an Isekai Protagonist back then.
I will say that the food stuff is probably at its most prevalent in Volume 2, though it does get a couple more mini-arcs later in the story... Oddly enough, one in each even numbered volume, with the fishing in Vol 4 and the Inspiel Sauce Competition in Vol 6. Here's hoping they break the pattern in Vol 8...
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Looking over the list of items on catchup this month...
...I already own all of them.
I've read them all as well.
[We all know that purchasing a book doesn't mean one will ever actually crack the cover, and that's not restricted to textbooks.]I'd heartily recommend all of them.
Not for the same reasons, clearly, but I enjoy/enjoyed all for what they are. -
I can finally catch up on Housekeeping Mage and Full Clearing! Thanks!
I hope newcomers to D-Genesis enjoy the series. It's one of my favorites. x3
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It's interesting that Land Mines and D-Genesis are two of the choices for this month, because they're flawed in very similar ways. They both suffer from the authors not knowing what the most important thing is to focus on, at any given moment.
In the case of Land Mines, this turns into completely random digressions of stuff that has nothing to do with anything. For D-Genesis, it's replacing character development with pop culture references.
I'd been keeping mostly up to date with Land Mines, but stopped buying the books once it was clear that the author wasn't going to get any better at his bad habits. I hadn't read D-Genesis before, and it seemed to have a pretty strong start; for a while, I was almost convinced that it was Land Mines, but competent -- at least in terms of advancing the plot. Then I realized how much time I was spending skipping over the absurdly detailed science explanations and random pop culture references.
I could excuse the former because the main characters are researchers, but the latter took me straight out of the story. A lot of the references are incredibly obscure -- and yet, somehow, every single character knows them by heart. Once I understood this, I realized that the characters weren't being written or developed at all; they're all stand-in cyphers for the author's incredibly specific pop culture tastes. It was quirky and fun for one book; by book 3, it's pretty tiresome.
I haven't read Ready Player One or seen the movie, but D-Genesis feels a lot like how the worst reviews of RPO describe them -- an obsessive list of references without substance. That's probably a bad sign.
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I'd had To Another World...with Land Mines on my list of books to check out one day and lo and behold, I can now check it out.
I'd also been hearing about Full Clearing for a while now so I will also check that one out. Soap is short and looks sweet so I may round out my June reading with that. Looks like this month will be quite full for me. :)
