I would like to read less crap books and more good books.
Unfortunately, my idea of “crap book” and “good book” are not universal. I have basically only heard good things about Unnamed Memory I 青き月の魔女と呪われし王 | L33 - on Amazon it has a 4.6/5 rating, and it gets recommended all the time on r/LightNovels. I thought it was terrible.
So generally I don’t pay too much attention to star ratings or recommendations and go off the blurb, or sometimes just the cover art. Publishing imprint or date can help narrow things down as well - some modern light novel publishers in particular have zero standards, while I’m happier to take a punt on old 富士見ファンタジア文庫 books, or anything from ハヤカワ文庫JA, or imprints that call themselves ライト文芸 generally aren’t just pumping out narou slop.
But still, hit-rate is spotty and I have not enjoyed plenty of those too. A premise can be really strong, the publisher reputable, the reviews good, and it still falls flat.
So, I dunno - does anyone have any good heuristics or strategies for how they pick what to read? Or happen to just share my exact taste to I can steal your homework?
I tell ChatGPT what I’ve liked and why I liked it, and it gives me recommendations. After everything I read, I feed it my impressions, and it gets a better idea of what I like. At this point I’ve done it for a while and I get pretty good suggestions from it.
I will usually go off of reviews or look at something for it’s language learning content (Will this net me vocab in a particular genre? Is the prose flowery and will it help me understand more complex sentences? Etc).
If I’ve liked the anime or manga, I’ve usually added the light novel to my list. I also look at blurbs and read those. I look at older stories as well or things I think I will enjoy (does it centre around dragons, yokai, samurai etc) and have bought some older folktales and classics (吾輩は猫である、坊っちゃん).
If you find an author you like, trying their other books can also be a good shout (I like 乙一’s writing style so have a few different books from him).
My approach is kind of haphazard but I’m still at the stage where almost everything has some language learning content even if the story isn’t that great so I’m still getting something from it regardless, I just treat it as a learning experience or study instead of purely enjoyment.
Not sticking to one genre/type of book. My brain enjoys variety. I even take breaks from LN series I really like for sometimes months.
Personally, I think I have statistically a better chance finding a good book that is not a LN than vice-versa. As you say: There is just so much slop being pushed out. Oh, this one isekai series was popular, let’s put out 100 similar ones. Imo, people who can sit through 20+ volumes of a series have a much higher tolerance for BS than your average fiction reader, so reviews always feel a bit… too positive?
Honestly I kinda get what you mean because for me most of the time the series that are universally loved are just so boring to me and even if I don’t know that they’re popular before reading them I usually hate them so I guess you definitely shouldn’t listen to what series people are raving on about.
But also it’s really hard for me to give you any kind of advice with this. Before starting a new series I’d recommend you read the preview on Booklive for example and then decide if you want to buy it. Or maybe you especially like series from a certain era? Because for example I love LN series from the 90s and early - mid 2000s. So I often buy those, there definitely are new series I enjoy too, though.
The question is: what exactly do you want to read? What does a story need so you’re gonna enjoy it? And also what are examples of series you like?
Also since I buy physical books I just recently found this but when you tap on a series you like on Bookwalker, it’ll show you lots of similar series and series that people who bought this one also bought
I have the same problem even reading books in English - if it’s popular or award-winning, that pretty much guarantees I’ll find it terrible.
I think this is probably the most reliable method: find someone who shares your taste and use them as a filter.
On a book tracking site (natively, bookmeter, goodreads…) have a look at reviews of books you’ve read (good and bad) and find people who share the same sentiments as you (the specific reasons you did or didn’t enjoy). Go to their profile and look for other books you’ve both read to check how aligned your tastes are. When you find someone who has the same taste as you, follow them and try reading other books they’ve loved.
This method does take a bit of time and effort, but I think it’s worth it if you’re able to find a selection of other readers you trust for recommendations.
I don’t read Light Novels for the most part, and thus it’s very rare for me to read series. I‘m more into good quality writing, and at the same time I read almost any genre.
For finding such books, I often look at literary prizes (for pure literature, the Akutagawa prize is the most renowned, but the winners can be very hard to read; for entertainment literature the Naoki prize is most well-known, but of course there are lots of other prizes, many of them focusing on one genre).
Other than that, I try to find recommendations on the web or try to participate in literature book clubs, here in the forums or elsewhere.
Ah, the universal struggle. I’ve been at it for decades now in various languages and it never really gets easier. Here’s a slice of my system; some stuff you’ve already mentioned, some stuff I hope is helpful:
Echoing @9Sora2, step one towards learning to meaningfully identify stuff I might like (or I’m willing to take a risk on) is being able to say, in real, specific words, what I like in a book and what I’m looking for. Too often I’ve seen people ask for recs and then be incredibly vague about what they’re looking for, and so they get every general recommendation under the sun. (I wouldn’t peg you as having this issue for what it’s worth Aik, your reviews are always very clear about what you liked, didn’t like, and were looking for).
I generally ignore mid- to high ratings when looking for people’s thoughts for books and instead focus on their reviews. (Low ratings I still read reviews for out of a morbid sense of curiosity.)
On a similar note, learning how to read a book blurb has helped me in narrowing down if I may enjoy the book. Publisher didn’t include a blurb because they’re too busy giving space to one-liners from famous person/author? Pass, out of spite, unless I was going to pick up the book anyway. Publisher gives an extremely generic blurb that ends up telling me nothing about the book, and/or only uses extremely hackneyed language to describe it? 50/50, blurb is still basically useless. Publisher prints a well-written, specific blurb that actually seems to be trying to highlight what makes the book interesting? Then I take notice. This system is mostly for English, granted; I’m still trying to find the right balance in Japanese. The book blurbs I’ve read from them are so different from English blurbs that I’m not sure if I’ll need a new system for them or not yet.
Learning that I’m okay DNF’ing a book has helped in my general book turnover, thereby getting me to better books quicker. This can potentially backfire, as sometimes you just need to give a book time, but I feel like I’ve gotten better over the years at determining what’s making me want to put the book down: if it’s because it’s slow, or not in my preferred genre, then I usually make an effort to keep going. If it’s because the writing is poor or I hate the characters, I know that that’s not usually improved in past experience, so I’m okay dropping.
Joining book clubs, both to widen my own range of what I enjoy by forcing myself to read stuff I wouldn’t normally pick up, and finding stuff I really didn’t like so I can analyze why I didn’t like it and have better data in the future in avoiding similar stuff. This bullet is basically “read more”, but it’s that specific addition of forcing me to read what I normally wouldn’t that’s the ticket.
And ultimately…
This has given me the highest success rate out of anything by far. Find people with taste in books you trust (and potentially taste you don’t so you know to give the side-eye to those books) and wishlist whatever they’re reading that looks interesting. You’ll still get books that don’t agree with you, but you hopefully should have a higher success rate of finding ones that do.
What do you do if you’re not sure who might share your preferences in books? Best case for that is to go into their posting history imo; if they like a genre you do it’s usually pretty easy to see if what they’re looking for in a book is similar to what you’re looking for. If your genres don’t necessarily match, but maybe you’re trying to branch out, maybe take a look at the range of books they’ve read and read through the reviews they’ve written to see what information you can pull out of those. Honestly, just trying to get a sense of everything they’ve written in general about books helps; if you’re on the forum semi-frequently and check out the majority of threads you’re probably fine.
(Sorry, I’m posting on mobile so this post is probably just a giant blob.)
That’s what comes up off the top of my head; I think the advice should be general enough to use. I’m usually fairly tolerant in regards to books; while I would prefer a good book, I’m also usually pretty happy with an okay one.
The strategy I rely on most is “pick books by authors whose stuff I have enjoyed in the past”. I also sometimes take a punt on new authors in genres I like (crime, historical) based on recommendations, book awards, seeing the author mentioned somewhere, or just random chance.
Personally I tend to go for standalone novels rather than light novel series, because I feel that a lot of LNs are trying to set up characters and relationship dynamics that they can then riff on for fifteen volumes without ever going anywhere much. Some LNs do read more like the author knew where they wanted to go in the series arc and wasn’t just in “write new volumes until sales figures fall off” mode, but the LN publishing business model means the odds are not good.
Yeah, I’ve used Claude to do the searching for books that are like some other book or vibe - though, I don’t think it has enough information to actually tell if I will like it, only that from other people’s impressions it might fit. Would be a killer application for LLMs though to pre-read books for you and tell you whether it’s something you would like or not based on your taste.
Yeah - this is an obvious one, but also I find it surprisingly unreliable. I guess it’s unrealistic to expect an author to only put out only fantastic books though.
My hit-rate for non-LN adult-aimed fiction is pretty bad (depending on what we’re counting as or as not an LN, I guess..). But yeah - the audience for LNs now is the same people who were happy to read long, meandering webnovels of questionable overall quality, so hard to take positive reviews at face value.
Older LNs from before the webnovel boom are generally a much safer bet - though it’s still pulp fiction so quality can be spotty and it’s much harder to get reviews at all…
Eeh - I mean, I don’t have any trouble finding books that have the things I want in them. I have literal stacks of books to read - plenty of science fiction with interesting-sounding premises, and plenty of those 90s/early 00s light novels. The thing that’s missing tends to be thematic - if the author doesn’t land the themes, or the themes are a jumbled mess, or the whole story just doesn’t go anywhere and doesn’t pay off.
Yea - I stopped maintaining my Bookmeter account after migrating here, but maybe I should spend more time over there. The 相性 feature was pretty handy, though without star ratings to weight it not necessarily very accurate.
I probably should have a go through the Seiun Award winners…
Yeah, I’m really bad at this. Probably dropping books faster would be the best way to still go about taking a chance on random things while not getting bogged down, but I suffer from optimism and tend to believe that books are building towards some big payoff.
I try and avoid long series now because realistically I’ll never finish them given how many books I read a year, and am increasingly impatient with authors that don’t respect my time.
I’m currently reading コンビニ人間, it’s my second novel in Japanese so far and my first novel was また、同じ夢を見ていた. I asked ChatGPT to give me some recommendations on novels similar to 同じ夢 and I gave some simple guidelines, such as “no drama, slice of life preferred”, etc. I explained my experience with 同じ夢, what I struggled with, and what I particularly enjoyed, and it gave me a couple of recommendations and why I would enjoy each one of them. I went with コンビニ人間 and it has been everything ChatGPT said it would be and I’m enjoying it a lot.
I think I always have something on my wishlist, so I never run into the problem of running out of things, more like the other way around. I also do have some trusted authors that I’m leaving it for to surprise me (manga mainly, novels can still be hit or miss).
Now where I hear of stuff that I wishlist is mainly social media like Twitter where I either see manga excerpt or user review highlighting interesting premise. Then general stuff recommended for certain genres like BL, as well as genre awards and stuff.
And I have the one or other user here that has formidable taste that I keep stalking lmao.
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Imo, people who can sit through 20+ volumes of a series have a much higher tolerance for BS than your average fiction reader, so reviews always feel a bit… too positive?
so I guess you definitely shouldn’t listen to what series people are raving on about.
