佐賀のがばいばあちゃん

Really laid back, but I had a pretty good time. I've always liked media that allows for seeing ordinary people leading essentially mundane lives. Their stories are meaningful. And what we have here really is just a loose collection of anecdotes about growing up in poverty post-WW2, living with grandma. It starts pretty sad, considering it's nonfiction, but they soon become just sort of lightly touching. There's nothing that keeps you in suspense, yet I got on with it better and better over time and just found the whole thing pleasant.

As language learning material it has its quirks, but overall feels like a good early book. Grammar is relatively simple, though I took a little time to adjust to the way it's written because it feels a little more conversational than the detached style of narration of other books I've read. It helps on the psychological side that chapters are short and the pages actually include a lot of blank space with many breaks for tiny paragraphs or short bits of dialog. If a big page of text in Japanese still intimates you at all, it's a nice little boost.

The rough sides I see come in 2 parts. The first is Saga dialect. It's a less common one and since I'm doing much more close reading of other material, I opted to not really try to learn it right now. Conversations aren't too hard to intuit without looking deeply into it, but it does lead to some pretty frequent word/conjugation substitutions. The other problem is that the book's difficulty, inasmuch as it has it, is pretty frontloaded. The prologue dumps a lot of economic terms, and I found the chapters immediately following to be a little heavy on words I didn't know when describing his new living circumstances or referencing somewhat traditional Japanese tools. Still, relatively speaking, I think it's not too hard.