Odin89 Wrote:The 三毛猫ホームズシリーズ by 赤川次郎 are probably among the easiest novels you will find.

They are pretty relatively easy. It's also a long-standing series (40+ novels, I think), and available as ebooks off of amazon.co.jp. Sometimes they even go on sale. I bought the 4th one for like ￥420 (I'm currently reading the 3rd one).

I dunno about them being "N3" level though. *hasn't taken the JLPT*

afterglowefx Wrote:Call me a sucker for efficiency, but it seems to me that instead of spending months struggling through novels one could simply slam vocabulary in Anki (or whatever) instead. You could finish Core6k in that time and greatly expand both the range of available books and the speed at which you could read them.

It's definitely possible to do both. I started Core6k around Dec 2012 and am now ~1.5k away from finishing Core10k. I also read around 10 books in that time frame, even though I slacked off a lot and took a break for months to go traveling overseas. =/

anritsi Wrote:It's definitely possible to do both. I started Core6k around Dec 2012 and am now ~1.5k away from finishing Core10k. I also read around 10 books in that time frame, even though I slacked off a lot and took a break for months to go traveling overseas. =/

I suppose I'll give it a try once I get more free time. Having just finished RTK three weeks ago, Core2k 5 weeks ago, and trying to smash through the last 500 old sentences in my 4000-odd sentence deck my review load is still pretty intense at the moment. I also just started Core6k @ 100 cards/day, on top of all that. Once The sentence deck and RTK get repped down to something reasonable I should have a bit more time.

I'd hardly call a break for travel "slacking off"--Japanese should definitely take a backseat to seeing the world.

I've reached N3 level too, more and less.

I started reading my first novel when I was at 2000 words of Core 2k, now I'm at 4000+ and I've just finished the first part.
The novel is Norwegian Wood by Murakami Haruki. The language is pretty simple and I could follow the story without looking up anything even at my poor Japanese level.
Just be sure to have done RTK before, to understand all the Kanji (there are few difficult ones in there, too).

I like this thread.

Murakami Haruki is a good idea. I prefer Murakami Ryuu (read both of them in French) but the former should fit my purpose more.

Anyway thanks everyone for the recommendations, I'll let you know how it goes (as soon as I have money to buy the books).

I found this author of philosophy books and I think their very good and suitable for an N3 (sometimes N3/N2) learner.

His name is 土屋賢二, the books I have bought so far are
あたらしい哲学入門―なぜ人間は八本足か (which I haven't finished yet, but I like it)
われ大いに笑う、ゆえにわれ笑う (actually a sequel of a more famous book, pretty funny)