きまぐれロボット

きまぐれロボット is a collection of 27 ultra short comical sci-fi stories by Hoshi Shinichi, a highly influential science fiction author active from the 50s through the 80s, whose stories remain popular even today.

I think this book is close to ideal for language learning purposes. The author has a simple writing style, not at all literary or flowery, and he tends to reuse the same common words instead of lots of synonyms. Each story is very short (only 4 pages), so you if you can get through one per day, you'll be done in less than a month. Since each story is self-contained, if you're really struggling with one you can simply skip it and move on to the next without losing out on anything. The 角川つばさ文庫 edition has full furigana, but even if you have an edition without furigana I don't think the kanji would be particularly difficult.

I won't claim the stories are riveting — many of them are basically jokes that have a long build up to a punch line, or Aesop-like fables with a satirical twist at the end. Still, they're not written in a patronizing or "kiddy" way, so I think even adults can enjoy them; I'd certainly rather read stuff like this than the vapid conversations that pass for reading practice in a textbook. My favorites would probably be the title story きまぐれロボット and 金色の海草 because I enjoyed the funny twists at the end.

In a nutshell, if you're roughly upper N4/lower N3, past graded readers but unwilling to read Magic Tree House, and everything else is too difficult, then this book is a good place to start learning from native material.