Familiar Diversions
I'm a librarian who loves anime, manga, and reading a wide variety of genres.
Currently reading
Reading progress update: I've read 103 out of 374 pages.
The premise is great, the execution much less so. A Japanese guy named Kazuya Souma is summoned to another world to be a hero. However, he's not really a demon-slaying kind of guy, and the summoning didn't specifically ask for someone who could slay the demon lord, so he decides that his heroism will involve improving the country's economy. He uses his new magical ability to get paperwork done at a faster rate, and he puts out a call for people with abilities that might be able to help the country.
I just finished the section in which he evaluated the five most gifted individuals, and I'm not all that impressed. Apparently the absolute most important person in the bunch is a guy named Poncho Panacotta, who went broke pursuing his desire to eat anything and everything that could possibly be eaten. In a country that is currently in the midst of a food shortage. The author just spent several pages emphasizing how wonderful it was that Souma recognized Poncho's importance, but readers still don't know why he'll turn out to be so vital. All I can think is that maybe he'll have knowledge of a particular source of food that most folks in the country don't know about. But I feel like this would work a lot better if Poncho were a talented chef rather than a self-admitted glutton.
Souma's a hard worker, sure, but he doesn't strike me as particularly amazing. Instead, it's more like this country was so badly managed that even Souma's basic knowledge about how things might be improved (selling all the things in the royal vault that have purely monetary value, gradually switching from growing cotton to growing more food crops, improving the health of the country's forests with periodic thinning, etc.) is seen as revolutionary.
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