I've Become a Parent and Get Little Sleep, but at Least Light Novels are Saving my Sanity!

As a new dad, I don't get a lot of sleep. I've spent many nights watching Crunchyroll anime while chugging Redbull and rocking the baby. Because many of these anime serve as twelve-episode snippets of lengthier manga and books, seasons can end abruptly without tying loose ends in any satisfying way. For that reason, I've started to seek the light novels these anime are adapted from, which wasn't always easy to do when I started watching anime in 2009.  

The 2010s saw an increase in Japanese light novel translations from Seven Seas Entertainment, Kodansha, and Yen Press. Now, such novels can easily be found in my local Barnes and Noble or ordered from Amazon. My first experience reading them was in 2013 with Haruhi Suzumiya. Back then, that anime was universally praised in the blogosphere and Twitter, but I've never watched it. I thought reading it would be a great experience... and I was surprisingly bored. I quit three books in.

Recent anime like Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets Wise Wolf and How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom helped me rediscover light novels. In the case of Spice and Wolf, I read the first volume so that I could understand the business and finance talk being thrown around so casually. (I actually wrote a post about it here.) For Realist Hero, I liked the anime so much that after season two, I decided to continue the story. It's good! I'm a serious nerd for strategic and tactical decision-making, if that's a thing one can nerd out to.

When it comes to finding these books, I prefer commercial venues over underground or fan translations; I like to think my money is supporting authors and publishers. That said, although Amazon is easily the biggest game in town for this, J-Novel Club is now my go-to business. They're slightly cheaper than Amazon and seem to work with publishers to translate and release chapters/books on a regular schedule. I like the fact they have community forums; bringing people together in spaces other than the major social networks is probably better for humanity.

As far as the next book I'll read, Chivalry of a Failed Knight Volume 4 should pick up where the anime left off, so I look forward to that. Lord knows I'll have more than enough to read it. Our baby is going through a sleep regression, so all the training we've done has gone to shit.