Ascendance of a Bookworm is one of the more interesting isekai anime series I’ve seen in recent times. It seems since Overlord (my beginning reference point for the genre). There have been an abundance of isekai springing up, and not a lot of them have much to really offer outside of superficial differences. That is not to say these aren’t fun, many of them are, they just feel very same-y after a while. That is why I was absolutely surprised by my reaction to Ascendance of a Bookworm.
The show follows Main, the “bookworm” of the title. In her other life, she has died by being crushed by her beloved books. Her dying wish is to be reborn as someone who loves books as much as she did in this life. Well, that is exactly what happens, but not in the circumstances that she could have hoped for. She awakens in a world totally different than the one she died in. She is a poor peasant in a medieval world, where books are objects that only are accessible to nobility. The people who surround her in this world only know numbers and symbols for prices and geographic purposes. This sets her on a mission, to create her own books by using papyrus as a starting point. She is set back by a health problem called the Devouring which causes her great fevers when she is stressed.
The series is 26 episodes long, and has a few sections as we follow Main on her journey to create her books. The show is quite slow paced, but the great thing about that is it gives us on opportunity to get to know the characters and the world they live in with much greater detail than most shows of this type. This makes Main’s journey even more compelling, and until the end it does not feel like a foregone conclusion. The animation here is quite solid, and really fits the overall tone of the show.
Sentai Filmworks presents Ascendance of the Bookworm in a splendid 1080p AVC encoded transfer that has great color reproduction and detail. Audio is handled by 2 DTS-HD MA 2.0 audio tracks in English and Japanese, these both come through clear and crisp. Extras include a clean opening and closing and Japanese promos. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.