One of the primary goals of this site is to introduce you to great Japanese-language content, and two of my favorite things to recommend are manga and novels. As someone who has been voraciously consuming content for decades now, however, I can tell you writing recommendations is inherently problematic.

Beyond the challenge of determining the Japanese language level required (a deep topic for a future post), there are three massive, invisible factors that make giving a successful book recommendation incredibly difficult.

1. Everyone Has Their Own History

Perhaps even more than taste, personal history is the biggest complicating factor in making a good recommendation. Your personal history encompasses everything: what you have lived through, your current station in life, and, crucially, everything you have read up to this point.

For someone who hasn't read much, their bar for whether they find a particular work interesting, entertaining, or worthwhile will generally be lower. Everything is new and exciting; they don’t recognize tired clichés or stories that have been told and retold. As you read more, your bar naturally rises. It’s not that the basic story you enjoyed as a child of the hero saving the day and getting the girl is bad, but simply that after you’ve experienced that story enough times, it stops being interesting or stimulating.

The Problem of Palatability

Our personal experiences also deeply affect what we find interesting or palatable. For example, if you experienced bullying or harassment, you may find it difficult to read works that treat these subjects. I know someone who had bad experiences with violence, which made it hard for them to appreciate any work featuring shooting, combat, and the typical trappings of the action genre.

I can personally relate to this. A close friend, whose taste usually aligns perfectly with mine, highly recommended a horror novel. I was excited to read it, but I became extremely put off when I saw that the book featured the murdering of infants. While it was just a work of fiction, I simply did not feel comfortable continuing, having recently become a father. These deeply personal thresholds are impossible to predict, making the "perfect" recommendation a bit of a leap of faith.

2. Taste Is Subjective (But Also Earned)

Taste is something one develops over massive exposure to a wide range of works. By reading a wide range of authors and genres, you start to notice patterns, influences, themes, and tropes. It’s only possible to truly understand if an author has quality writing or originality if you have a sufficient amount of works to compare against.

Of course, reading a lot doesn't automatically grant you "good taste." What does it even mean to have good taste? While there is no definitive definition, I think it has something to do with being a reputable source of information when it comes to understanding what makes people feel. If you describe a work as horrifying and most people genuinely find it horrifying, you are in touch with people’s feelings. This means people can come to trust your opinion about when you say something is funny, touching, thrilling, or boring. It’s also about being able to recognize the difference between high-quality work and something superficial. People who don’t read much may be tricked into thinking a low-quality book is good, but those who have read widely often see through the shallow façade.

The Mismatch of Appreciation

Different readers may appreciate different things when it comes to reading, which can lead to major recommendation mismatches, particularly with highly praised works. Less experienced readers tend to focus primarily on a thrilling plot, whereas people who are deep into literature often prioritize the quality of the writing and psychological depth over the story itself.

A respected individual might recommend something for its brilliant writing, but when the average reader tries it, they just find it boring because the story wasn't immediately stimulating. The issue is that the average reader does not yet have the reading experience needed to fully appreciate the craft of the prose in and of itself, which can lead to a significant difference in perceived value between the critic and the casual reader. Even if you are a highly-read person, you may not get the same thing out of a book as a literary critic because you’re not looking for the same type of experience.

Ultimately, whether your taste aligns with mine or the critics' isn’t of such great consequence. If I highly recommend a book and you don’t like it, it just means our tastes don't align, and you won't take my future recommendations into account—which is exactly how you should navigate the literary world. Find someone who highly recommends something you like, and chances are you will like their next recommendation as well. You should also take negative reviews with a grain of salt – just because someone respected doesn’t like something doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t enjoy it.

3. The Burden of Setting Expectations

Even if I don’t mention specific plot points, simply talking about a book sets expectations that can profoundly affect your experience. I absolutely hate spoilers, so I will never read a full review until I have finished the book myself.

But even without explicit spoilers, a review can prime you for your reading experience. If I tell you a book has "great writing," you may simply take my word for it and feel like you're reading something special, even if the prose doesn't personally resonate with you. The same goes for if I say a book is scary, touching, or exciting—you may be primed to feel these emotions even if you would not have experienced them had you read it as a naive reader.

Balancing Old Versus New

Another challenge is balancing recommendations of timeless classics against the latest bestsellers. Reading a book that is currently generating buzz has an advantage: it’s easier to strike up a conversation and relate with people about something new than something obscure from 40 years ago. That buzz also often reflects something relevant to the current state of the world (like a novel about a fictional pandemic selling well during the COVID-19 pandemic). It may be hard to understand five or ten years later why certain books were such hot-sellers, once you’ve taken them out of the social and temporal context they were released in.

Personally, I consciously break the trend of simply recommending the classics or the latest new hits. Sometimes I recommend totally random books that nobody has heard of on purpose. I know people might think I’m crazy, wondering how I can recommend an obscure book when there are so many masterpieces I haven’t yet covered. But reading these random recommendations can give you a better idea of the literary lay of the land, introduce you to different themes and eras, and may lead you to some other work that you end up loving. I personally love the experience of finding a hidden gem; it somehow feels like gaining a key to a secret world when you’re reading a book that nobody has ever heard of.

Conclusion

In the end, there is no magic formula, and there is no simple answer about the best way to give book recommendations. I hope that all readers keep in mind the difficult challenges that come with making these suggestions.

It isn't easy giving good book recommendations, and we acknowledge this. We do our best to provide you with the best content recommendations, because I know how much great recommendations have meant to my own journey as a reader, and I wouldn’t have found so many amazing titles if it weren’t for the great suggestions I received along the way.