About This Site

What this is

The Hiroki Azuma Bookshelf (book.themodel.be) is a book guide for people who have stalled on theory books before. This English edition selects five titles currently available on amazon.com and presents them in a reading order that won't defeat you. A fuller Japanese edition is also maintained — it covers titles not yet translated into English — along with a sister shop, The Nietzsche Bookshelf.

The editorial room runs a series of single-thinker bookshelves and reads the primary texts first-hand. Every review and reading-order recommendation on this site rests on that reading and on explicit bibliographic checking.

How books are chosen and rated

• Judgements about the works themselves rest on the editorial room's first-hand reading. Star ratings are our own; no Amazon customer reviews are reproduced.
• This is a page about a living author. Reviews are limited to commentary on the published works and the author's public record; we do not stray beyond that.
• We are honest about what is and is not available in English. Only four of Azuma's own books are translated. Where the Japanese shelf recommends a book with no English edition — The Power of Correction (訂正する力), Weak Ties (弱いつながり) — we say so rather than pretend it is an option.
• Book #5, Beautiful Fighting Girl, is by Tamaki Saitō, not Azuma. It is a related otaku-studies classic that carries a commentary essay by Azuma, and it is labeled a companion pick throughout, never presented as his work.
• Where a book is a work of criticism, a bridge title, or a companion by another author, the review says exactly what it is and what role it can honestly play.
• All descriptions are written by us; no publisher copy is reproduced. Where a key phrase from a text appears, it is our own editorial gloss of the original with the source noted, not a reproduction of the translation under review.
• Cover images are jacket-style images of our own design and differ from the actual covers.
• Prices and availability change, so we do not print them; always check the Amazon product page.

Amazon link disclosure

As an Amazon Associate, this site (The Hiroki Azuma Bookshelf) may earn from qualifying purchases.

Book links on this edition go to product pages on Amazon (amazon.com). If a purchase is made through them, this site may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Commissions never influence the ratings — recommending books you will actually finish, rather than books that merely sell, is in the end what serves readers best.

Privacy policy

This is a static site; no personal information is collected server-side. The browser's localStorage is used solely to count link clicks (to improve the ranking's accuracy); that data stays in your browser and is never transmitted. Once you follow a link to Amazon, Amazon.com's privacy policy applies.

Contact

For corrections and inquiries, please use the contact address on our sister site soqdoq.com.