i enjoyed it but it felt a bit anaemic. I assume this is a result of having to re write so much of it.

This is a great suggestion for someone who’s new to reading books in English for sure.

I mean Pratchett is generally a great suggestion, but reading OP I get a feeling Hemingway might be a bit too much for someone still having trouble with vocabulary.

I’d recommend Guards! Guards! or Small Gods by Pratchett.

Here first and foremost because a reference to Animorphs caught me off guard and made me smile. Beautiful.

I think you put the concept of not looking up every word very well. I think as adults we forget just how difficult learning feels in general because we're so used to knowing so much about our world.

100% agree. I've found more success with reading books in foreign languages and my native language when I don't hyperfocus on looking up or understanding every word. I expanded my reading comprehension and ability very quickly as a child by letting myself figure things out with context clues and not understanding 100% of what I read.

It can also be good for the brain to have to work at understanding - the crutch of looking something up immediately can make it easier to forget what you've already looked up, compared to struggling with something and turning it over, which can make it easier to recognize, remember, or elaborate on your contextual understanding the next time you encounter it.

(This is an aspect of effective studying - making your brain work to recreate and recall something, like in working to remember the subject of a lecture, is more effective than just giving your brain the answer, like in re-reading notes.)

Alastair Heim and Aristides Ruiz can burn in hell. A "sequel" book to How the Grinch Stole Christmas?? I spit on Random House's cash-grabbing sacrilege.

I think people did riot over “The Colorado Kid”.

Suess's book still sell really well, they're great for helping kids learn to read

There's nothing wrong with having copies of your book in both languages--try reading them in tandem. Also, think about this as a different kind of reading until you get proficient. It's more fun if you take plenty of time, read passages out loud, make flashcards, etc. Popular fiction includes quite a lot of vernacular and slang that you might not find easily in language instruction materials. When you layer on the author's style and use of literary devices, that's quite a lot of complexity to understand in one read-through. Good for you, OP for branching out in a new language!!

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Terry Pratchett has a good vocabulary and is gripping to read.

I was actually chatting with someone who was formerly an editor at one of the big 5, and they said that most up and coming authors won’t actually get an editor anymore unless they pay for their own freelance editor. They also mentioned that even if an author does get an editor, the editor will at best give the manuscript one read through.

Se estiveres apenas habituado ao PT-BR, vai haver uma diferença imensa nas formas falada e escrita, já que a variante brasileira do português informal é bastante distante da gramática prescritiva ensinada na escola.

Também concordo que o italiano é super fácil de ler para mim!

If you read a lot of mysteries you realize that a good writer can make almost any solution work in any murder. It's completely arbitrary, really. So I read them to enjoy the characters and the tone and the feel of the work (for lack of a better term) not to see whodunit.

Check out "The Poisoned Chocolates Case" by Anthony Berkeley for the ultimate example of this.

You should actually check out some short Mystery Stories instead of mystery books.

I’m a huge mystery reader — but I would be absolutely angry if I spent time reading a long form mystery only to have the author not reveal who it was.

Personally I love Agatha’s murderers, they’re all characters and stereotypes on their own with vile murderous twists that make them so interesting. I personally love the murderer of ATTWN.

However, in short mystery works, I’ve found it much easier to accept the “Author didn’t reveal it” because in short form I’m much more inclined to see the entire puzzle laid out in under 50 pages. I’m much more likely to enjoy a “no reveal” that way.

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I love the pulpy art from that era. It was incredibly expressive and you knew exactly what kind of book you were signing up to read.

I think most mystery readers would riot if the mystery weren’t solved. For that you need to be a lit writer and she wasn’t; she was a genre writer.

That one is fun, though I would say that Grinch Night is the superior Grinch sequel

I quite enjoyed the grinch meets the cat in the hat, but I also watched that when I was a kid, so maybe it’s not that great.

Yes, it is and was the reason I picked it up and read it to get the bigger story of how the museum came to be. Great story.

Who is even writing this

I would figure out what your reading level in English is and aim there or a little higher. Schools here use lexile levels, you could test yourself and aim for that level and stretch just above it.

Or, If you want to practice reading books at a higher level, choose something that you’re really familiar with in Portuguese (or another language you’re very competent in). If your spoken English is good, and your written English is as good as it is here, I think it will only take you a short time to be reading the type of books you are interested in.

You could also pick up a literary guide to the novel and read that alongside to get a better understanding as you go along.

I 100% agree with you

Like others have said, start with something simple. First books I read were the Harry Potter books and those were fairly easy to read. I'd you dont care about those then there plenty of other books that are very easy to read. Thank you can move slowly towards the classics. Check for word meanings online and keep your own dictionary. Also take it slow. You don't have to read the book in a week. Take a month if you need to. Start reading while taking notes and then mabye read the whole section again so you can enjoy it. Lastly, keep reading. Comments on YouTube, reddit, small articles on stupid thing, whatever it is. Don't stop doing it and soon you'll get good enough to read classics. Remember, it's a journey and not something that you'll achieve in a fortnight.

I'm trying to do this right now, in German. I grab my phone to look up words that are unfamiliar or that I just cannot remember. It's been 30 years since I took a German class. I found an ebook of Treasure Island translated into simplified German (man, if this is simplified, I definitely could not read something that was not). It's extremely slow going. I'm doing well if I can read and understand three pages at a time. But I feel really badass when I do read and understand whole passages!

I read The Sun Also Rises in high school and hated it. If you want to read something good but more accessible, Slaughterhouse Five is written in pretty simple prose and is a great, great book. If you don't object to reading something translated into English, Haruki Murakami writes in a very bare-bones style, but his books are amazing.