Question Anyone else feel like the novel's these days are getting kinda boring?

hmm not really~
before pandemic this cat like to read slice of life type but everything change when fu coronachan~
these day just switch thing between cheesy romance and comedy, typical school romance comedy LN~ action theme story been boring since ages ago, no mood for intrigue stuff cuz conspiracy theory and hate china stuff on internet is plenty to laugh at~ oh btw this cat also read hentai or smut story just for... nothing interesting~

there some jp novel this cat mtl up to latest update then bored again~

 

I think they've always been kinda garbage, but back then it was new and exciting enough that I didn't notice the queezy taste and pungent odour of trash.

There are definitely trends of gross examples of creative bankruptcy, though. One person has an idea then BAM, several years of "HURR DURR I WAS KICKED OUT BUT ME AM AKCHUALLY SUPER STRONGK". Why do we need hundreds of those stories? IDK, we just do, OK?

A lot of people (like me) just have terrible taste and opinions.

 

You've just reached that maturity stage, i've been there for a while now and you should probably go through lesser known novels as there coould be some diamonds in the rough or really just choose novels that have 4-5 star ratings with an interesting description or tags on NU

 

Yea I always keeping picking up novels then read like 10/20 chapters then drop them. It's either im too bored of the same old storylines or I just can't find the right novels. Maybe both. I haven't read a really good novel in few months now...

 

I'm only immersed at one novel after a very long time but yeah it did hit me that I find it boring at some point back then. I'm more on non-fiction type but maybe if I engaged again with too many novels it might get on the same feeling of boredness or the point of not getting able to finish reading it.

 

I don’t think it’s a mentality thing or that novels are getting stale, I think it’s more like there are only so many good novels.

Let me explain my thoughts. Like everything else there are only a few novels that are great, some are good, the vast majority of them are average and some are just garbage. When you are a new reader there is a buildup of past novels and you can just read the good or great ones and skip everything else. People find these good novels through reviews, forums, suggestions, or top 50 lists. Eventually you will clear up this backlog of good/great novels and now have to filter through novels in real time meaning you have to read trash novels and eliminate them to eventually find a good/great one.

this happens in everything. Music for example, you find a genre of music you like and you go through the old songs that have built up popularity but for the newer songs you have to listen to it first. Same happens with anime, same happens with movies and tv shows, it happens with everything.

this also explains why older readers all run into this problem but newer readers don’t. Newer readers have all the classics to look forward to while us old timers have read them already.

 

While this theoretically can happen, I don't think that this explains the phenomenon cited in the OP. First and foremost, I find the idea that people want to read good quality books questionable. If it were the case then they would avoid reading bad books and that simply doesn't happen. I'll be the example in this case as I'll happily read books that I know are going to be bad. And it's likely that lots of other readers do the same thing; they just won't admit it.

Moreover, if readers are putting any effort into finding good books then why the hell would they be checking out Top 50 lists? To build on this, the reason why a lot of good Chinese books don't get translated is because few people are willing to read their genres. It's common sense to assume that people who read a lot of books would want to look for better quality but the evidence just does not support this idea.

 

good quality and bad quality i mention are all perspective. by good quality or high quality i mean the books you particularly like. you might read some "bad" books but ony certain ones because it has something that sparks your interest, you wont just read any bad book. i'll use anime as an example. i know a guy who likes production quality over everything else. the plot, characters, setting, none of that matters as long as the animation is good. to him a good anime would be something that looks amazing while to someone like me i prefer the story aspect more. we have different ideas about whats good but in the end there is only a small pool of them that we can watch before we run out.

as for top 50 lists, i mention kind of that's how people get some recommendations. when you are new to novels you look at top lists, forums, or if you know someone else who reads you ask them. the issue is after a while you've tried everything in the top 50 and nothing new replaces it so you are thus stuck looking for something else.

the lack of good books being translated because genre supports my idea. if less of that genre gets translated then there is a smaller pool of books to read meaning you will eventually read all the "good" ones and be stuck not able to find any more.

 

The thing is that this doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the book; not even in the way the reader perceives it. Instead, the overriding is comfort and how well the book appeals to that sense of comfort. This is reason why people will the same genres over and over again even if they constantly complain about said genre.

But the thing is that it should be obvious right away that the Top 50 lists are junk and that they're not a good way of finding quality books. Sure, it's an obvious first step for newer readers for finding new material, but you'd think that they'd stop using it after the first few misfirings. And I think it's insane to assume that just because the Top 50 is junk that there are no good books outside of this.

Not really. What it means is that readers don't care about quality and are unwilling to try out books just because they're good. I admit that discoverability can be a problem but I don't think that it's a significant one. Just check out the forums: there's a lot of complaint about the lack of good books, but how many people do you see looking for the kind of elements that lead to good books? Who out there is looking for good writing, or strong characterization, or evocative descriptions, or thought provoking themes, or anything like that?

 

You keep focusing on quality of good and keep trying to explain that when that was never my point. I used quality or good to express the books people actually read, I wasn’t trying to say the book actually have good qualities. When someone says they don’t have anything to read, it’s assumed they will read something good or something they like which is subjective, hence my use of quality or good when describing novels.

my main point has always been the amount of quality books being released hasn’t gone down but has stayed at the same rate or even increased. This is because when you start reading there is a backlog of things you can read but eventually you read it all and need to find something new. Think about it, when you started your novel journey it was most likely with a novel that was completed or had hundreds/thousands of chapters already translated right? Then you find others which are similarly completed or have hundreds/thousands of chapters and you keep doing this until you run out. You might pick up a new novel here and there but that isn’t the norm. This means you run out of things to read not because the books have gotten slower but because you read faster than they are being released and have run out of stored books to read.

 

Yeah, this doesn't match my webnovel reading experience at all. I started off reading the big Japanese webnovels but I found that the writing in them sucks so I mostly switched to Chinese writers. Japanese webnovels don't tend to get finished whereas the Chinese ones do so my experience is pretty much the opposite. There's also no shortage of good Chinese webnovels out there, even if you define good as what's suitable for my tastes.

Nowadays, the only time I read unfinished novels is in the form of Japanese webnovels, which are largely throwaway, and Chinese writers I like well enough that I'll put up with unfinished books. In fact, my reading list has only expanded as I've found really good writers to stick with. Right now i have more books than ever to read; to the point that I don't bother with Korean novels because there are already too many books out there for me. Hell, I started reading webnovels in earnest in 2017, and there are still 20 books I added that year that I still haven't gotten to yet!

 

I usually just find something from Webnovel's trial read section and read it. It's a trashy way to get cheap entertainment, but some of the plotlines are super interesting which makes me come back. I think eventually webnovels as a whole will move on from the whole face-slapping, harem-making cliches we're used to and move to another, probably equally as annoying cliche set. I have noticed that the random novel I find on Qidian seems to have a more coherent plot than I would expect from a.. random novel on Qidian, so that's good.

 

This is something i can completely relate to. It just doesn't give me that much excitement that i got when i read them first time. Now they basically look like copy paste stuff to me. Everytime I see new novel in the update list and read its description i am like "Here we go again".
Heck I've even made a list of cliches one can encounter while reading chinese and korean novels.
So my answer to this turn to thr dark side my friend. Into the abyss of machine translations and see if you can find anything you like there.

 

Gotta tend to agree with the novelty arguments. I'm mostly there myself.

Just for a more English-centric example - LitRPGs. Loved the idea the first time I saw it. I've read a fair number of them. I have substantial criticisms of all of them. Now the novelty of the thing doesn't really suffice. I might start reading one, and then I see a few things it does that are not going to work well... and I just drop it. Even the novel I thought had finally solved the genre - He Who Fights With Monsters - ended up having some major flaws in their implementation. It just wasn't immediately apparent.

So now I don't really read litrpgs anymore, where once I was actively keeping up with several and pretty excited to find more. The novels haven't gotten worse, I've just gotten wiser. Despite it seeming like every damn novel on RR these days is a litrpg, realistically it's still a very new genre without much knowledge around it. It presents some unique and particularly difficult challenges too, and the whole litrpg bit basically impacts every part of a story, so a problem can be pretty fatal.

It's also generally more difficult to put up with the same issues over time. I've read a fair number of cultivation novels too. I like the overall concept, but the implementations are all so similar. They all have the same problems and same things I don't like. I could ignore it the first time or ten, but at this point I've put up with those same damn problems so many times that I just don't have the patience to do it again. The problems aren't worse, they just bug me more now that I've seen them so many times. The good bits are also the same, and they just don't provide the same amount of dopamine anymore.

 

You just lost your initial enthusiasm about it.
At one point I was very into watching anime and then I transitioned to reading solely mangas then finally into reading novels. When you're at this state only a really good fiction would hype you up or you jump into another hobby that would interest you.

 

They are the same. You've just gotten used to them. A break might do you good, or you need to search novels better.

 

I've been MTL'ing for 5 years now. No trouble finding stuff to read

 

I have been reading for some time now, and there are some occasional diamonds in the ashes.

 

I've been feeling the blues as well. While it might be due to shitty novels, lately I can't feel that "spark" that made me binge read novels anymore. I've been trying to read Grimgar because I loved the anime so much, but I can't stand reading more than 10 pages at once, even though the novel isn't really that bad. The last one I've "read" was -If it's for my Daughter, I'd Even Defeat a Demon Lord -, and man, I couldn't stand it, just skimmed 70% of the novel's content.

Maybe we're getting more strict about what we read or maybe we're just getting overloaded. Don't know about you, but neither novels nor anything else seems to bring me much joy lately. It might be just a symptom of something bigger. But if your problem is the quality of the novels, I suggest surfing through the tags and recommended novels that show on your favorite novel's profile. That's how I found out about Release That Witch (great novel until about chapter 800+, when it goes to crap), Otherworld Nation Founding Chronicle and Santairikuu Eiyuuki.

 

I think reading same things over and over again like for example in Xuanhuan genre you will find so many cliched starts and plots/arcs name anything in any element you can find it .

I personally think that authors(trash writers) in webnovels just write stories/chapters to show they are writing without any real inspiration and the story gets repeated over and over again which they just change the name and write it.

I think some novels which I really would ask everyone to read would be : -

Dragon Marked God ( cliche but like it )

Nine Star Hegemony Body Art ( just feels good to read )

God Of Cooking ( every author should learn character development and introduction from the author and story )

Duke Pendragon ( one of my favorite korean written books )

I'm the King of Technology 9 just got love the way the MC shows action and his plans are overall development )

The Oracle Paths ( this is just too awesome it's like a novel which gets new flavors and is good try it out but be patient to read the first fe chapters )

The Surgeon's Studio ( just like the effort done by author into research of the novel to write it )

King of Gods ( till 1000 chapters the story is original and exciting to read )

Supremacy Games ( Beginning is good and its a good story to be honest )