REVIEW: My Neighbor Seki (manga, vols. 1-6) by Takuma Morishige

I'm finally getting around to writing the first of my vacation "review" posts. If you're unfamiliar with how I do these, be warned that they're mostly intended for the me of about a year in the future. They're absolutely filled with spoilers. I suppose those are unnecessary when I've finished a manga series, but they're incredibly helpful when I'm reading an ongoing series, have to stop at a certain point, and plan to pick it up again during my next vacation. If you're wary of spoilers, I do plan to start each post with general impressions of what I read during my vacation. These should be relatively spoiler-free.

Okay, let's get this ball rolling. I have fourteen series that I'd like to write about before the end of the year...

I can't remember how My Neighbor Seki got on my radar, but I'm relatively sure it was via a review I read online. It sounded intriguing, but not so much that I actually wanted to buy it, so it went on my "vacation manga binge" list.

I started my vacation with six volumes of this series, and I got through all of them, although it took some effort. This is not a series to binge-read. Although it wasn't in 4-koma format, it read like a 4-koma series, and it just got so old. There were occasional new character introductions to spice things up, but not nearly enough to keep things fresh for six volumes read back-to-back. And so a couple volumes sat on a table, partway read, while I read other things for a while. But the damage had already been done, and I kind of dreaded making myself finish the volumes, even though I knew the series technically wasn't bad.

A funny story: at one point, I read most of volume 4, only to look over at my piles of manga and discover that I'd actually started reading the previous volume the night before and hadn't finished. Since almost nothing of importance happens in the individual volumes, I hadn't realized I'd skipped most of a volume.

I might request more of this series during my next vacation, but it occurs to me that it might actually be better to periodically get volumes via interlibrary loan instead. Long waiting periods between each volume would likely improve this series for me.