<So You Want to Live the Slow Life? A Guide to Life in the Beastly Wilds>: Volume 5 - Also known as “Preserving food guide with cute squirrel mascot”. It’s a slow-life series, so absolutely nothing is happening, just as it should (or shouldn’t in this case).

<Taking My Reincarnation One Step at a Time: No One Told Me There Would Be Monsters!>: Volume 8 - Hated that volume. It’s entirely just teenage romance drama. At the midway point, I was hoping that the dungeon would kill one of them off or even get rid of both of them and end the series right there. The stupid drama resolved at the very end, so there’s hope for the next volume to be entertaining again, but this volume can go and burn in hell. Seriously, if I’d read physicals, I would burn this volume.

<My Quiet Blacksmith Life in Another World>: Volume 11 - I never thought I would see an obscure Hololive reference in a light novel (other than that one about the drunk vTuber). But here we are. Made me grin stupidly.

<Cooking with Wild Game>: Volume 29 - What a great volume, beginning to end. It’s the in-universe one-year anniversary that brings something to a conclusion that was in the making since the first volume over 6 years ago. The two bonus stories were also outstanding. EDA is a master in making the reader care for the side characters in those small side stories. I don’t know many other works that can make me shed some tears in just a few dozen pages. In the afterword, it was said that this concludes the second arc and that in the next arc,the story will shift greatly in other ways moving forward. I don’t think that I like that very much. Especially since EDA calls it the “Uproar" arc. This is my favorite still-running series now that Bookworm is completed, and I really don’t need any arcs called “Uproar" in it.

<Long Story Short, I’m Living in the Mountains>: Volume 2 - MC is still such an extreme wuss. You can tell that the author’s intention is to garner sympathy for MC by playing it up as if he’d be that brave survivor of a terrible incident that made him a recluse on a mountain in order to heal his soul. But the terrible incident that triggered this extreme reaction is just his girlfriend breaking up with him because she wants to study abroad. The entire time this is depicted as a totally normal reaction to getting broken up with, and the author clearly expects the reader to feel the same. The same goes for the neighbor from another mountain who got a girl stalker in the past, which made him also become a recluse and makes him faint now when he sees a girl. Again, not depicted as a parody or a joke, but the author absolutely expects the reader to sympathise with those two. Maybe it’s a cultural thing with Japanese people just getting more and more socially inept, or it’s something generational with my generation just not being connected to our emotions enough, but I’m just sitting here and thinking the entire time that those two should just grow a pair. Here is an excerpt:

The perpetrator quickly forgets about it and moves on, while the victim carries it with them for the rest of their life. It’s an unfair and unreasonable world we live in.

Again, that’s because someone broke up with MC. Also, let’s not forget that this is by now over half a year later.