reading

I just finished reading Flying Melon, the second book I've read in Japanese that was originally written in Japanese. The first book I read was a series of autobiographical essays, so it didn't really count. And it took me a lot longer to get through, because I hadn't been studying Japanese as long when I started reading it, and there was only the loose plot of the story of the author's life keeping me reading.

I haven't had as much time to read recently, not wanting to break up my Japanese learning with too much English, so this was the first novel I'd read in a long time. And it was really different from anything I'd read in an even longer time, probably because it was written under completely different circumstances from the books I usually read. It felt good to be carried along by the story again, a sensation I hadn't had in a while.

It was weird, because it felt at some points like I was going back to my elementary school self when I would read novels and not understand all the words in them. but I was carried along with the story enough to be able to guess what was going on and not use my dictionary while I was reading. I used to hate using my dictionary while I was reading in English, even though my teachers always told me to, because it was annoying to keep stopping the flow of the story. Besides, I never remembered the definitions if I just looked them up and kept reading anyway.

I remembered that the one way for me to really understand the definition of a word even through high school was studying a vocabulary list at school and then having those words come up in the books that I read. It's somehow gratifying to see that I've actually gotten to the point where this works for me in Japanese now. Even if I have gone back 10 or 15 years in my reading. In the end, I generally like the stuff in the young adult/youth section of my bookstore better anyway :D

And now, to go back to my stack of books that I started buying almost a year ago because I knew I'd want to read them at some point. I thought it was mostly wishful thinking at the time, but I think I can actually read them now ^^ Two books from a series that I have on audiobook, and three from the series by the author of Battery, who happens to be from Okayama, where I live. And a couple of Roald Dahl books translated into Japanese... and three volumes of the Nodame Cantabile manga that my friend lent me in October that I still haven't touched...

Even though I say I barely read anymore, somehow my room is still filled with books...