>>2,3
Nice haul. I just finished Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto in Japanese. I'm not sure I would've paid it much attention in English, as it's not my usual type of novel and can be read in a sitting and then easily forgotten, but the experience of reading it in a language I hardly know was enlightening. When you're stumbling over every sentence, when each small bit of understanding must be wrested from the dictionary, you have a lot more time to inhabit the prose and figure out what the author intended by each word. The emotional impact was probably dented by such a 凸凹 manner of reading, but I feel like I achieved a deeper and more subtle understanding of it nonetheless.