The book I chose for my 1st quarter reading SSR is Kizumonogatari (Wound Tale), by Nisioisin. It's a supernatural, comedy, tragedy light novel and is 344 pages long. The book is essentially a prequel to the Monogatari book series, explaining about how our main character, Koyomi Araragi, steps into the world of Ayakashi (the supernatural, aberrations). Everything started with his first meeting with the beautiful classmate Tsubasa Hanekawa, the perfect "class rep of all class reps." Araragi, a gloomy highschooler with no friends, due to a "certain" turn of events, finds himself befriending Tsubasa Hanekawa. This in turn causes Araragi to stumble upon a dying vampire, the strongest of all aberrations, and what he did next has probably changed his ordinary mundane life to something that could be said to be anything but that.
The main character, Koyomi Araragi, is pretty much like the typical harem protagonist, which slightly saddens me. He is a loner and a very gloomy person, saying that making friends will make him "lose intensity as a person." Yet somehow, he ends up talking to the beautiful school madonna and made friends with her. He is quite the normal person, yet too kind to a fault, as he was willingly giving up his life to save a dying vampire he just met. The plot points are consistent, predictable enough with experience, but still gives a fresh feeling to the genre of light novels. The occasional jabs at comedy was quite humorous, but can be cringey at times. I was very worried how this book was going to turn out as it was translated from Japanese, and the author is known for making difficult wordplays and full time references to the anime industry, so those who weren't very familiar with such topics will end up feeling very confused. The occasional "fanservice" was for me a little too much but understandable since Nisioisin was trying to mock the anime industry. This book turned out to be a great read for me and let me understand more about the main character's past before the world of the supernatural came to him. There are a multitude of eloquent uses of vocabulary in this book and I had to look up some of the words to try and understand the context. If I could, I would change some of the awkwardly inappropriate scenarios in this book and make it into something more meaningful and less embarrasing to read. That is my thoughts on the book Kizumonogatari by Nisioisin.
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