> "if you don't want to do something, do it anyway."

There's no way there isn't a world where this is the title of a best-selling self-help book.

In a manner not dissimilar to diet books, they're all unhelpful unless they're that special one that actually works for you personally. IMO if you're looking for places where good advice is collected in a single place, the real answer is seeking out other people rather than books.

Thanks for the clarification, but no, I understood it as you describe- imo it's just that so little billed as fantasy, etc., ever actually is. Regarding future trends, I think so many editors, authors, publishers are content enough in a period of relative stagnation to not even be looking for what's next.

You're right that it's kind of self-selecting where people buy what gets pushed, etc., but my point was that those other categories are too diluted to even be meaningfully distinguished in recent output. Saying "romance" outsold "romance with wizard stuff" and "romance but someone did a murder" doesn't feel like a very meaningful metric. I'm not saying it's nefarious, I'm saying it's mindless- it's admittedly the same pattern as other industries where any prominent success has companies shouting for their talent to "give us one of those" to diminishing returns instead of looking for the crest of the next wave. Even video games have it where genre titles are all but subsumed into triple-a mulch that does a bit of everything but not to any depth. Thanks for the link though, it's an interesting snippet.

Anything by Christophe Blain - I have his rare black and white editions as well as an oversized copy of quai d’orsay which is a bit like France’s illustrated answer to Yes Minister.

The industry as a whole pushes romance novels too - it's just that now they come in covers that from a distance could be mistaken for sword and sorcery, or sci-fi or mystery novels only for those exciting elements to just melt into the background a few pages in :) Imo the best way to get anything out of goodreads is to either browse the "similar to" of books you enjoyed, or just follow a few reviewers with similar taste. Anything more systematic seems to swirl into less specific recommendation pools very quickly.