Book: 齋藤孝のイッキによめる！名作選 小学1年生
My first book of the challenge: 齋藤孝のイッキによめる！名作選 小学1年生. This is a set of short stories meant for Japanese first graders who are generally 6-7 years old. A mixed bag for me – of the nine stories, I got seven (including one I understood rather well), struggled with one (うそつきブハイド) and really didn’t understand the last one (くもの糸).
Overall, I found this much harder than manga (which I’ve read a lot of, including manga for older children). Think the problem is description and verb conjugation. As this book is for first graders, there’s a limited amount of kanji used – this makes it more difficult to figure out the word boundaries and kanji can be a useful key to meaning. I liked the way this book was set up though, with the stories followed by questions and summaries/discussions of the stories – that certainly helped with understanding. There’s also an in-text gloss of some of the more difficult words, though on at least one occasion, I could understand the word but not the description of it!
I’m going to revisit this one at least twice to gauge my progress, but am going back to manga for my next book!
HTLAL Super Challenge - Japanese 
Congratulations on finishing your first book! Have you tried using a dictionary at all to help penetrate the difficult stories or are you taking a pure tadoku approach? I’m taking a guess that the くもの糸 is a version of the short story by 芥川龍之介? If you have any of the Japanese Graded Readers series, this story is included in level 3 vol 1 in a simplified version.
I’m going for the tadoku approach for now. Mostly I read in places were I can’t easily use a dictionary, and I think it’s worth trying to get the general gist of something at this level.
くもの糸 is by 芥川龍之介. I’ve got some of the graded readers, and was planning on getting more, so I’ll keep a look out for it. Thanks for the hint!