/lit/ - Literature

This is one of the first books I bought when I started learning Japanese.
Believe it or not, despite the cover and title it is actually a science fiction action thriller about a hacker trying to take down a human trafficking organization.
It's quite good and I'm happy to have read it when I was starting out because it's a real page turner. The night I finally finished it I stayed up until about 2 AM because I just couldn't put it down.

This was the first light novel I finished when I was learning Japanese. It's a personal favorite of mine.

>320 pages
Hardly a difficult book in any objective sense, it's written at a high school reading level, but it's the first novel I read cover to cover in a foreign language. In that sense, it's the biggest challenge I've overcome so far as a reader.

I have reached the point where I almost exclusively read books in Japanese.
I don't know why but I feel a deep, constant compulsion to read books about people falling deep in love and finding happiness. Japan is so incredibly good at writing stories like that.
I read a beautiful confession scene in a visual novel last week. A typical visual novel can easily be over 50 hours long so by the time you get to a confession scene the book has spent something like ten hours exploring the love interest. You know everything about her; her dreams, her fears, that cute noise she makes when she sneezes. Seeing a wonderful person I know that well blush and smile and hold back warm tears as she accepts and exchanges first kisses with the protagonist is magical. It's like a beautiful wedding trapped in a book.
I understand that a literary diet of nothing but romance novels is the equivalent of a regular diet of nothing but ice cream. But I think that literature has more to do with the way you read and less to do with which book. I've found a surprising amount of intellectual pleasure in examining every decision the author makes and trying to determine why they made it, breaking down romances into little bits and pieces to figure out how they work. It's amazing how if you use technique X with Y tone after you established Z 100 pages ago loves swells from the human heart and you create a happy memory that lasts a lifetime. The world is so naturally cold and uncaring, but it turns out if you do the right things in the right order you can essentially put happiness in a bottle and sell it for 630円(税別). I've spent the last six years of my life reverse engineering the formula and it's the most fun thing I've ever done.