Realized I'd been mixing up some tag and category labels, either missing spaces, or using a tag as a category and vice versa. That should be a bit better (for) now. I'll probably have to do another tag review down the road to help keep things organized.

Classic Light Novel title giving you the basic premise for the story. And another entry in the 'kicked out of the hero party' sub-genre which seems to have developed a few tropes around it. Mainly that the character is viewed as useless but actually does serve some important function, or their abilities/special skills are considered weak or useless but are actually very strong. This one dials up some that trope by not just kicking her out of the party, but selling her into slavery. There's a fair bit of gore that gets played up due to the Flum's healing ability once the sword mentioned in the title is acquired. Mild yuri elements get sort of shoehorned in, but provide the heroine with some new purpose or direction to keep going with life instead of giving up. Other tropes include the ambiguity of the role of the demons the hero party is supposed to be fighting against versus the chruch that is backing the heroes. The end of the volume teases a lot here, so it really tries to hook the reader in to keep going to find out the details.

Yuna fulfils her promise from the previous volume. Escorting some students in the capitol. Of course there's some extra trouble involved to keep things interesting. After her friend from the seaside town arrives and everyone is busy getting the new shop ready. Closing out sets up the events for the next volume in looking for a new knife for Fina. As always anyone new who disparages the bear gets a lesson in judging a book by its cover.

The (mostly) slow life continues. Despite the continued interference of jealous rival tamers the business ventures of Ryoma continue to do well, so well that he is expanding into another town. There is some other developments with Ryoma starting to make preparations to raise his adventurer rank in order to claim the inheritance of his adopted grandparents. But that will have to be in later volumes. There were a few minor additions from the WN version in this volume, but nothing really of note.

Leon continues to cause trouble for himself with every choice he makes. He attempts to get the expected story of the game back on track after all his meddling, but that fails and he finds some resolve to take responsibility for how things have gone astray. Main events are the wrapping up of the school festival, followed by the school trip. Some new side characters are introduced, and some characters have a more favorable view of Leon by the end of this volume despite all the trouble he'd caused in volume 1.

A rather traditional 'isekai' story. The protagonist is an unfortunate office worker reincarnated with the skills acquired while he was alive plus some extra gifted skills like the requiset magic. In the first volume he reincarnates, proceeds to live a 'slow life' in the woods for awhile, until meeting a noble and his guards, then moving to the nearby town, becoming an adventurer, etc. The kind of standard fare you'd expect from a fantasy isekai. Volume 2 continues the story where the protagonist takes a break from adventuring to work some side hustles alongside his adventure guild tasks. Volume 3 has his side job in full swing, and ends with parting with the noble family that had been central to him coming into town in the first place. Which if I remember correctly from when I read the web novel version this more or less wraps up the first major arc. It's a fairly solid slice of life isekai if that's what you're into. There's no grand quest for him to slay the demon lord or save the world. There is some side plots with a bit of intrigue here and there, and the standard way that reincarnators stir up various kinds of trouble and attention that keep the story moving along.

At first glance the title seems like a chicken and egg problem, but it's not about the mechanical aspect of being able to read and understanding the words, it's about how to parse and select books to see if they might be 'worth' reading, or if you need to read several books on the same topic. I originally found out about this book when it came up as a recommendation for people pursuring graduate studies or researchers. In some ways I feel the value of this particular book has diminished somewhat thanks to the internet, especially when looking for books at the beginner and intermediate level for any given topic. It's typically quite easy to search the web and find book lists or blog posts that suggest a solid set of books to start with for just about anything you can think of to search for. But if you are moving into advanced research, or looking for niche topics where such convienent lists may not exist or be hard to come by, that's when the ideas presented in this book come in handy.

Seeing news about SNL and Elon Musk online has been kind of weird. I haven't even thought about SNL since the early 90s when I only watched it rarely since my friends and I were more into In Living Color. So it has been strange seeing people talk about a show that I've largely considered dead or irrelevant for some time now. Which got me thinking about if that's just my own bias, which it largely is, or if there's something more to it. To try and puzzle that out I pulled up a cast/write list for SNL on wikipedia to see which names I could recognize. Going back to when the show first started in the mid-late 70s I see some very well known names, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, although I know all of those from films, going into the 80s I see Gilbert Gottfried, Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Damon Wayans, Jon Lovitz, Dana Carvey. Getting into the 90s I see Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, Chris Farley, David Spade, Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, Norm Macdonald, Will Ferrell. Coming into the early 2000s I can recognize: Tracy Morgan, Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and 2010s I only notice Bill Hader, all the names after that I don't know at all. So it feels like SNL has really gone downhill in the last 10 years or so. Maybe I'm wrong and the current cast are great, but they've done nothing to penetrate the media filters and algorithms that would make me notice them and I've only seeing the names for the first time due to SNL getting Musk to be the guest and doing a tiny bit of research. Although the viewership looks down from the 80s and 90s it's up from the lull around 2006 where it dropped under 7 million, and has been over 8 million or a bit under since so it does still seem to be doing well enough for itself. I suppose it's not as irrelevant as I thought.