GJ部 1

I only listened to this as an audiobook, which has 5 voice actors plus the narrator and is very well done. As other reviewers mention, it's a series of slice of life stories in the titular GJ部. As a novel, I could see it being repetitive after a while, but as an audiobook it was fun and low stakes listening that I could do a few minutes at a time.

In the atogaki the author said he calls the stories 四コマ小説 in that much like 4-koma manga they are short, easy to read quickly, and don't require you to read them in order. All of those aspects can be very helpful for language learners, especially those breaking into reading slice of life LNs which are usually in the 200-300 page range.

Everyone has to start reading somewhere

I decided to try and break into reading LNs/novels a few months ago and started looking at lower difficulty options; having watched GJ-部 ages ago, and seeing that the suggested difficulty was so low, I gave it a shot. The language used was pretty daunting at first, but after a few weeks of reading, making flashcards, and re-reading earlier chapters, I quickly got the hang of things and reading became much easier. I especially noticed improvement when I took a break to try reading something else a bit easier, and was genuinely surprised at how much easier it was.

The story is episodic and each chapter is mostly self-contained, so you're never really at risk of missing any sort of plot critical information. The actual content is nothing special being just another inoffensive slice of life high school affair, but in the context of language learning that's preferable. The episodic nature also makes it really easy to re-read chapters to test your improvement if you're mining for words or grammar points.

Overall, I feel like I could have picked a worse starting point to start reading, and for what it's worth it makes a pretty decent studying resource.