I started on "Reason", a Japanese crime novel, last December, as I've mentioned previously. It's really addictive - I must know why the Koito family has fled; what Katakura lodging house has to do with the murder; and why the superintendent has to air out one of the empty apartments every week to remove a strange smell (I actually asked my teacher this; she just laughed and asked if I really wanted to know beforehand).
I've been reading it during my morning commute, and yesterday I reached chapter 5 ("The hurting woman") on page 153. That makes 93 weekdays for 148 pages (it starts on page 7) - that's about 1.5 pages per day. Now, my average reading speed lately is a bit more than 2 full pages every morning (dialogue is fast; the digressions on the Tokyo housing market are really slow). I'll keep speeding up as I learn more, to three pages or so. That's 15 pages per week, and as the book ends on... *leafing through the back* ...page 676, that makes 523 pages to go, taking 34.8 weeks, to finish the book in early December.
At 10 minutes per page that's about 110 hours of entertainment, which really isn't bad value for an 800 yen paperback. Japanese fiction is nothing if not cost-effective.
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