Hi! I’m currently at a level where I’m rather comfortable reading games like Persona, Fire Emblem(Three Houses specifically) and some manga like One Piece and Chainsaw Man. I obviously still make occasional vocab or grammar stops but is not frequent enough to be a hindrance anymore. Since these are dialogue heavy and don’t contain a lot of descriptions, and I also get help from visual context, I’d like to exercise my reading comprehension more with actual books.
Are there any native books you would recommend to start?
3 comments
鏡の孤城、probably a bit easier than a “Konbini Ningen”, which is always recommended here. It’s a young adult book, but I found it to be pretty interesting and thoughtful
Seems like you already have aquired a solid enough reading comprehension to pick rather freely among native level material. I’ve read some books this year that I think could fit:
* 君の膵臓をたべたい: love story, dealing with terminal illness, tearjerker
* かがみの孤城: real-life struggles and magical realism as escapism
* コーヒーが冷めないうちに: 4 loosely connected stories set in a time travel café
* また、同じ夢を見ていた: discussions about finding happiness, child protagonist
These are all novels aimed at all ages but don’t have furigana. If you’d like to start with furigana books, I collected some [here](https://dokushoclub.com/2022/05/15/books-with-furigana/). Also [natively’s book ratings](https://learnnatively.com/) could be just what you’re looking for.
I haven’t read that many books yet, but recently been going through a light novel series called “本好きの下克上” (or “Ascendance of a Bookworm” in English) and have been enjoying it quite a bit.
It’s a fairly easy read, I think the author wrote the series with the intention of it being accessible to younger audiences.
Sentence structures are fairly straightforward, the use of rarer vocabulary is kept to a minimum and usually serves a purpose to the story, and they tend to get repeated quite a bit.
Story wise, the best way I can think to describe it is as a mix of Spice and Wolf and Dr. Stone.