Your favorite and least favorite types of books and why! 📚

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I knew I could rely on you with respect to interesting book suggestions :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: Thanks!

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There are so many Korean essay books!!

I have to admit I laughed when I read this because I agree. :rofl:

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I really only got into yuri because it tends to be easy, language-wise. It wasn’t a thing I was avoiding, by any stretch, but I didn’t know where to get started either.

There are a lot of people here way better versed than me (and @暁のルナ is definitely one of them!), but in the plus side, a lot of the things I’ve read and enjoyed are quite easy.

I hate that I’ve started noticing this even in Japanese. It was so nice for a while when it was such a struggle to just get through a book that how it was written wasn’t even a thing I noticed… I’m slowly learning cliched turns of phrases now and I’m not ok with it :joy:

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Natively & a lot of yuri being easy language is literally responsible for me getting into yuri (thank you @brandon)

As an aside, the BL titles on my (eventual) radar for now are:

If anyone has titles they’d recommend based on yuri stuff I mentioned, I’m all ears. Bonus for historically significant works, esp if shoujo. (I know there’s a whole book club for this, I will peruse sometime in the (not near) future)

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This is a fun thread!
I will put in my 2 cents.

Favorites

  • Human drama - (ideally more on the side of weirdness over soppiness)
    Yoshimoto Banana, Natusko Imamura, Kaori Ekuni
  • Good Writing - stealing yours @nikoru :sweat_smile:, but I’ve really enjoyed most award winning books (akutagawa etc.) , and I would love to get to a point with my Japanese where I could read the classics of the 20th century.
  • Mystery/Thriller/Horror -(ideally not taking itself too seriously, rather than anything too heavy)
  • Travel / Food non-fiction - I like both of these things in general lol. But it’s nice seeing someone else’s wonder at the world

Dislikes

  • Self help/life advice non fiction (or veiled fiction)
  • Violence / Misery / anything overly dark - I’m reading to relax, I don’t want to be put through anything gruesome
  • High schoolers being high schoolers - kinda fine if it’s only a part of the plot, but being entirely schoolyard gossip I can skip

Somewhat on the fence

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If you want to dabble in Japanese sci-fi but don’t want heavy jargon may I suggest 消滅 VANISHING POINT 上 | L31 ?

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Yay of course suggestions always appreciated!
I’ve added to my wishlist, so I will! That said my wishlist grows much faster than my read books pile, so who knows when :grin:

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So many good suggestions in this thread! I’ve wishlisted at least 5 so far! But you’re also spot on about how must faster the wishlist fills up than read books :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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Well, I always have to recommend FLESH & BLOOD 1 | L35. :thinking: Also 幻惑の鼓動 1 | L29, maybe 仁獣芳烈伝 | L26 … And that’s it? Like I’ve read BL that I’ve enjoyed, but not much that I would recommend. :\ (There’s a few others, but they’re pretty SOL.)

I do definitely recommend this; I think you’d like the works there.

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My entire BL catalog :sweat_smile::sweat_smile:

I’m a bit hesitant to recommend 天使禁猟区 1 | L28, and it’s not BL (although back in the 90s you took whatever crumbs you could get), but it’s a fairly well known shojo and the art is :sparkles:GORGEOUS :sparkles:, and at least in the online circles I was in, it was recommended with a lot of the other, actual BL works. I feel like it might be a little less 90s BL which is its own messy. :sweat_smile:

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Just to temper your expectations I guess, but this is a series I added to Natively just for the sake of adding it to my list of vintage manga with beautiful covers. No clue what it’s about or to what extent those elements come up, I just copy-pasted the tags list over from Anilist when I added it. (If you’re planning on reading it specifically because of the tags)

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I find the discussion of why people like reading either BL or yuri interesting, but it’s all completely over my head I think. To me romance is romance is romance, and I can’t really imagine how the genders involved could make enough of a difference that someone would state a preference for only BL/yuri and not just romance in general :sweat_smile: This is from someone who could take romance or leave it though, so maybe I’m just not familiar enough with the niches of the genre.

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I am willing to try most things, even if it doesn’t fall into what I usually read. That being said however, I definitely have some preferences:

Favorites

  • Mystery/thriller, whether it’s a traditional murder mystery or a wildly different setting. As an example, El cuco de cristal | L31, but I also love a good Agatha Christie book.
  • Unreliable narrator, which often overlaps with terrible people doing terrible things. These are often harder to find but wow are they satisfying to read, I love that moment where I start to doubt everything. I really enjoyed 보라색 치마를 입은 여자 | L27 / むらさきのスカートの女 | L27 .
  • Time travel/manipulation, time loops even more so. Mother of learning is maybe my favorite book currently, and this trope as a whole has a lot of potential. It’s part of why I enjoyed 세계를 건너 너에게 갈게 | L23 so much, it’s time manipulation at its core.
  • Fantasy/magical elements in a contemporary world, think 나 혼자만 레벨업 | L26 or 12시간 뒤 1권 | L26??
  • Short stories, there’s something about being able to learn about a new topic in a short amount of time that I just love. I don’t always love every single one, but that’s never a big deal, that’s the point of short stories, they’re a fast read!

Honorable mentions

  • Literary fiction is most of what I read these days in French, by pure ease of access, but I’ve come to like them a lot. It’s not something I’d necessarily pick up in a store, but if it’s there, I’ll read it.
  • Fantasy is what I used to read the most as a child/teen, and while I do read some now, it’s mostly rereading old series I know I love, as I’m too picky on the world building otherwise :sweat_smile:
  • Light novels/webtoons in a medical setting, which is very specific but I can read this for days, it’s always interesting because I’m learning so many things. I’ve just started reading 만화 중증외상센터 : 골든아워 1 | L24?? for example.

Dislikes

  • Straight romance, if romance is most of the plot and there’s nothing else happening, I’m out. I have a bit more tolerance for queer romance, but still.
  • Major character being sick and bedbound for most of the book, as much as I enjoy representation and disabled characters, if it feels like a retelling of my life, I’d rather read something else.
  • Animal suffering, I can stomach a little, but if it’s a major plot point, or if a cat dies, I’d rather be reading something else.
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Speaking for myself, there are a lot of really uncomfortable tropes in hetero romance. They certainly are not in all of it, and BL/Yuri has plenty of their own tropes, some of which I absolutely run from. But on average, a BL or yuri work avoids more tropes that I will not read than a het romance does.

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F&B actually sounds interesting and I may put that on my list to read in the nearer future. 幻惑の鼓動 looks maybe ok? The あらすじ made it sound like eventual incest (fine either way, but am I misunderstanding?). I’ll pass on 仁獣芳烈伝

Added to my list immediately!! From the review, that sounds fantastic on multiple levels. (Tho will probably be annoying to actually read)

I’m probably down for some of the “wouldn’t recommend” stuff, depending on the details (feel free to PM)

It was on my list for “vintage yuri” reasons already anyway. Thx for mentioning tho

Leaving aside that some people just want to read things that match with their own IRL preferences… different genres and demographics have different histories, tropes, and artistic & storytelling conventions. Not to say that everything in a genre will conform to that (thankfully), but it gives you an idea of what you’re likely to get (for better and worse). So it’s not that the genders necessarily make the difference, but that they tend to correlate with things that do.

Despite overwhelmingly reading yuri, my favorite romance manga (暁のヨナ、赤髪の白雪姫、アオのハコ) are all (coincidentally) straight shoujo-style slow burns. Otoh there are very few yuri series that are even long enough that I could call them a slow burn. Edit: アオのハコ is a great example of not conforming, as it’s a shounen

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It’s set up like that, but I can confirm no incest.

Excellent, excellent. I know there’s a small group here (@soggyboy, @taiyousea, and one or two others) who were interested in reading later this year as well.

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Boring. If they’re gonna set it up, then they should actually deliver (or at least substantially deal with it). Thx for confirming

Y’all interested in a book club?

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There’s plenty of other suitors, haha. One guy in particular is basically a ghoul that can survive only if he consumes protagonist, and they go through quite a few issues there, haha.

I’ll let them speak for themselves, but I’ve always got time for F&B. o7

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I’d need to have at least a month’s notice to get through a decent chunk of a jpdb deck, but I’m otherwise down :joy:

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My own experience is that there does seem to be a slight nuance in dynamic between partners in the different sub-genres but unsure if that’s just because of the authors preferences or because of some other unknown to me parameter. To me, BL and GL do seem to be quite different stories than het romance stories (I have not yet read any trans romance stories just because I haven’t stumbled across any yet).

I am no expert on the romance genre though as it is one I seem to stumble upon occasionally with no real intention to do so, not that I’m averse to reading them if the stories are decent enough.

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I read that series in French more than 20 years ago and I have to agree with @shitsurei that it’s hard to recommend (as mentioned also in the review Content warnings: Incest) but I did enjoy it a lot. It certainly is a classic, too. I want to read it in Japanese one day™.

How about 放浪息子 1 | L25? It’s technically not focusing on the romance part, but it’s certainly included.

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