A Late-Start Tamer’s Laid-Back Life: Volume 9 - The beach episode. With dinosaurs. There’s not much to say about the series. It doesn’t derive from its formula. The author also seems to run out of ideas since a good chunk of the book is just forum posts about “Well, it’s Silver-Haired…”.

Soup Forest: The Story of the Woman Who Speaks with Animals and the Former Mercenary Vol.1 - first off: thoroughly disappointed that this is the name of MC’s restaurant and not a literall forrest of soup. “Letdown" is putting it mild. Secondly, incredible first volume. For me it’s certainly the best first volume in recent years. It looks like there is a setup for another volume but I’m not sure if it needs one. I think it would work beautifully as a stand alone light novel, but I’ll certianly get the next one. Thirdly (is that a word?), as for what this LN is about: I’ll just quote the author’s afterword since it’s the greatest sales pitch I could give:

I started writing Soup Forest after seeing news of war every single day. The COVID pandemic had already left me exhausted from not being able to see others, and then war started. It made me feel like I was going to be crushed by dark emotions and with nowhere to express them. “It’s exactly times like this when I want to read something that soothes the soul,” I thought. “I want a story about a kind person, sharing kind emotions with someone, going around to all sorts of people in various settings, like spreading a wave of kindness and compassion,” I mused. “I’ll write a story about a good person living a simple life, a woman who can hear the hearts of animals and humans. I want to show the small, treasured moments in her normal life,” I pondered. And it was from that desire that Soup Forest was born.

I’ll give it a strong 8/10 (10/10 if you’re craving comfy)

Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything With Low-Level Spells Vol. 2 - So my daughter and I watched the first episode of the anime and after ranting about it for way longer than a simple anime warrants, she dared me to continue reading the light novels. So here we are, let’s see how far I can go. I’m not even going to write down detaled impression. It’s terrible in every possible way and I don’t see any redeeming qualities at all. 1/10

Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything With Low-Level Spells Vol. 3 - Great now they have a little elf girl in their party and the first opportunity they have a full page illustration of her naked. There really is no expectation low enough to hold this series to.

Babel - A Girl Embarks on a Journey of Words vol 1 -
This felt like a collection of short stories with the same protagonist. The third chapter was OK. Others not so much. This felt like an author didn’t know what they want to write. They tried to write a philosophical debate between worlds, and it would make sense for the whole MC backstory but it fell short in execution. It felt more like teacher - student but with parroting popular ideas.
4/10