The first book you read in a foreign language is a pretty weird experience. You don’t understand the title, dictionnaries and Gtranslate can’t help you (seriously, this is the title : https://translate.google.com/?sl=fi&tl=en&text=liian%20paksu%20perhoseksi&op=translate), you average two painful pages a day, but you have to, it’s time: it’s been almost two years you’ve been learning this weird language, and you know that painful read (even though the book has been dumbed down to your level) is now the best way to reach competency.

This one comes out of the “Easy books” section, it has pictures and a summary I could somewhat understand. Twenty pages in, one revelation: Kaisu, the main character’s name, is a woman’s name, not a man’s name. I still don’t know when the story takes place, I’m guessing Pre-War, given what I understand from the story, but the pictures suggest the 1970s - a big girl comes to work for a general store in a small village, and she and the small owner of the store fall in love (this is from the summary, everything else is still obscure).

More interesting than the story itself: all the false starts and falsified hypotheses the incompetent reader builds and abandons on the way. There were many books in this one, and despite the not always pleasant experience, I enjoyed witnessing what my imagination would build upon these unknown words.