The Pleasures of Reading

In order to improve my French, I've been reading in French exclusively since January. It does help--reading in French gets it into your head more, and my vocabulary improves with the reading, as does my grammar (I hope). However, reading in another language is TOUGH! I am used to burning through books, but now, lost in a sea of new words, I find it difficult to find books that both interest me and that I can understand. In some ways I am reminded of being an overzealous child who wanted like nothing to read books too far advanced for my reading skills. I've read a few from Le petit Nicolas series which were written in the fifties and sixties, I think, and are intended for nine-year-old boys and come with plenty of explanatory pictures. They're great fun to read, and it feels satisfying to read one, because I can finish it in a few days. Other books, however, take a great deal longer. I plowed through Rene Remond's history of the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, but it was slow going. In English I think I would have enjoyed it much more, and understood a lot more; I enjoyed it all the same, it's just it took a lot of work to read it.

I finished Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours this morning, a book by Jules Verne for those that don't know. It was somewhat incredulous to read--written at a time when long-distance travel was a novelty, I'm fairly certain he wrote it from an encylcopedia and a map of the world rather than his own experiences. And the attitudes! At the same time, I found the main character, an English gentleman doing the tour of the world in eighty days on a wager, rather paralleling a lot of travellers today. he had no interest in the areas he was travelling through, only in playing whist to while away the long hours on the train. But drop into a hostel anywhere in the world, and you'll find tourists more bent on drinking or seeing the sights listed in their copy of Lonley Planet than interacting in any meaningful way with the people that live there.

At any rate, I'm determined to soldier on in my French reperatoire, and hopefully one day the pleasure of reading will find me in French as it has in English.