First completed book of 2026! I am working my way through a 900+ page volume of Chips Channon’s diaries, which I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about, but I’m not done reading that yet. In the meantime, I continue my exploration of the current manga scene as per usual.
You Can’t Live All on Your Own is a josei manga series, so it is aimed at women in their 20s. The series follows four women who live together and their disparate romantic and work lives. It’s a slice of life work that really gets across the day to day challenges and struggles of young women at a transitional point in their lives. Some want to settle down and get married, some want to further their careers, and some are unsure what they want and what the best path is. All four characters are fully fleshed out and alive, and you grow to care about all of them and want the best for them.
I was legitimately sad to realize that this was the last volume in the series, as it didn’t say so on the back cover and I was hoping that we might get a fourth volume. However, everyone’s story arcs are wrapped up well here and I liked that not every woman ends up in a romantic relationship. I also enjoyed one character’s arc that led to her living with a man in a non-romantic relationship, which gave me a sense of relief of being shown a non-compulsory heterosexuality compliant situation. There’s a lot of discussion in this volume about what one might want out of a relationship and how to make decisions about what will work best for your personal life, and these discussions are genuinely moving.
I’m happy to be back for CBR! My goal this year is to really try to review as many books as possible that I read, with a pie in the sky kind of goal of a double cannonball. We shall see, as I am also finishing grad school this August and then re-entering the work force, so I’m sure those will be distracting factors. But I just started writing fiction again thanks to CBR giving me my first wobbly steps back to writing for fun a few years ago, and have been able to keep up with that while doing things, so I feel like I will hopefully be able to buckle down and follow through here. Fingers crossed! And happy 2026 to everyone ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡
