Spice & Wolf volume 23 read:

The second half of this book was also okay.  At first it was a boring mystery story, what every author turns to when they don't wish to advance the plot (the detectives' situation is always the same before and after the mystery is solved, so you can do infinity mysteries and never reach a conclusion.)  But then it became a sort of philosophical treatise on how it wasn't so bad to feel sad, and staying constantly happy wasn't actually what humans should do with their time.  Stoicism wrapped in romance.

The artwork of Myuri hugging Cole or Holo wielding a giant spoon may have actually been the highlights of the book.

I wish books like this weren't written.  It reminds me of the constant new Xanth books.  If a series has nothing important to say, don't waste the fan's time by getting them to read it.  There's a sort of implicit promise made by an author releasing another volume of a story -- that it's about as good as the previous volumes, and that it had to be released because there was still something important about the story that hadn't been covered yet.  I can't say either implicit promise was met by this volume, or any Xanth volume in ages.

I'm not sure if I read Lucky Star volume 9 long ago, but in any event I read it for the first time or again today.  I thought there was also a volume 10, but given that the new translated chapter was numbered the very next after the end of volume 9, maybe there wasn't.  In which case all of Lucky Star has now been translated.  The good news is it's still good, unlike Xanth, and it's still going, coming off of a long hiatus and serializing again.  I have no problem with new Lucky Star.

'Aliya sometimes hides her feelings in Russian' is a much better manga than Lucky Star, but it was originally a light novel so it doesn't qualify for my manga hall of fame.  There's also the problem that only a few chapters of the manga have come out yet.  It's a very popular newcomer and for good reason, I hope it gets an anime soon.  Trust Japan to come out with a new pro-Russian artistic masterpiece right when anti-Russian sentiment is at its apex.  Japan is so great.