Strange Attractor
I've been reading some Japanese light novels, translated into English.
They cheer me up! It's been a while since I found fiction that does that.
The first one I read was "Do you love your mom and her two-hit multi-target attacks? Volume 1" by Dachima Inaka
https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/do-you-love-your-mom/9781975328009-item.html
Strange Attractor
"Do you love your mom and her two-hit multi-target attacks?" is a Japanese light novel about a teenage boy who goes into a government-sponsored video game world with his mother.
He has some pretty good powers and equipment, but his mother's powers and equipment are much better. The game is rigged in favour of mothers, but I get the impression the author is presenting a plausible dynamic between mother and son, reserving judgement.
Strange Attractor
What I didn't realize when I started reading it is that this book is part of an entire genre. Once I read more books in the genre, "Do you love your mom and her two-hit multi-target attacks?" started to make more sense to me.
It was fun to have the feeling of "I think there are tropes here, but I don't know enough to recognize which ones!"
Strange Attractor
Next, I started reading "Saving 80 000 Gold In Another World For My Retirement" by FUNA
https://englishlightnovels.com/2019/04/25/saving-80000-gold-in-another-world-for-my-retirement/
That one had a different feel to it. It reminded me a bit of L. Sprague de Camp's time travel novel Lest Darkness Fall, in which a 1930s classics professor ends up in the Roman empire in 535 AD, and starts out making brandy, and gets sucked into politics.
Unlike de Camp's novel, the main character of Saving 80 000 Gold can travel between worlds.
Strange Attractor
"Saving 80 000 Gold In Another World For My Retirement" only has one volume out, so I looked for another series of light novels.
I found what has become my favourite series of light novels so far: "In Another World with My Smartphone" by Patora Fuyuhara. It was written on a smartphone.
More volumes are out, so I could read a longer story.
I think part of the "light" in "light novel" means light-hearted.
Strange Attractor
Then I found "I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level" by Kisetsu Morita
https://englishlightnovels.com/2018/04/21/ive-been-killing-slimes-for-300-years-and-maxed-out-my-level/
It's about a laid-back main character who highly prizes slack and downtime. She only kills slimes (the feeblest and most abundant monsters in the world) on her walk down to the village to eat every day, and deliberately does not do more. Her approach to most problems is "how can we make this more relaxing and avoid overwork".
Strange Attractor
"I've been killing slimes for 300 years and maxed out my level" reminded me of a character in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan universe: Ivan Vorpatril in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. Ivan in that book attempts to seem middling and mediocre even when he isn't. (As an aside, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance has my favourite heist in a novel, though it is not a Heist Novel.)
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781451638455/9781451638455.htm
Both characters remind me a bit of ribbonfarm mediocrity-themed blog posts.
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