easyish french novels

[Anonymous No.22172699]

hi /lit/, i moved to france a year ago, have picked up enough to do my office job and survive, but still haven't managed to read a fucking book in french. i would rate myself at about b2, i can shit out half-decent business emails all day, but i don't know half the words i should. i tried getting some crappy "bestselling" detective shit and it was not good enough to make all the words i had to look up worth it so i dropped it halfway in

i tried reading du côté de chez swann, got about 50 pages in and loved the prose, but the vocab is a bit too much from time to time. anyone got any more modern recs to help tide me over the noob phase? i'm not going to specify any genres or anything, but i would prefer something semi-recent (1950s-current day) and not *super* dense lexically. just shill your favourites really as long as you're sure they won't break my teeth

i ordered a copy of l'étranger, so i'll be reading that in any case

[Anonymous No.22172708]

>>22172699
>39 leçons d'économie contemporaine
This is a cool book, written using dialogues, suitable for the layperson and filled with interesting shit. I'm not even into economics. I don't know if it is a bunch of weird shit or if those things are academic or anything. So yeah, but if you are just thinking about practicing French, it should be a decent read for starters.

[Anonymous No.22172709]

Gracq - Un balcon en forêt.

[Anonymous No.22172716]

>>22172709
Hacq

[Anonymous No.22172729]

>>22172699
I've heard from another anon that Mike Hollaback is about B2 level.

[Anonymous No.22172859]

>>22172699
Any Romain Gary you can put your hands on despite "Les racines du ciel", being complex in its narrative

[Anonymous No.22172908]

>>22172699
Djinn by Alain Robbe-Grillet perhaps. This one gets lexically harder as the chapters progress. If I'm honest though, something like Stendhal's Le Rouge et Noir or Charles Perrault's Contes et Fées might be good too. I find Stendhal's prose not very challenging, and Perrault's Contes et Fées are fairy tales. But something more recent? Maybe try Un Bien Fou by Eric Neuhoff. That one was a great read and easy to read.

[Anonymous No.22172916]

I'm working on my French as well and I found Candide to be an easy read (though I personally detested the book itself). I also return to Les Fleurs du Mal quite often though not a novel.
Piggybacking onto this thread a little bit to ask a question but hopefully it will be of use to OP as well: How difficult is Pascal's "Pensées" to read in the original?

[Anonymous No.22174329]

>>22172699
>but the vocab is a bit too much from time to time.
métempsycosed

[Anonymous No.22174361]

I'm probably A1 in French, having a vocab of 600-700 words at most (with no practice outputting) but I'm wondering if there are any historical novels that I could read which would teach me about french history and could also be easy reading?

[Anonymous No.22174560]

>>22174329
tmtc

[Anonymous No.22176009]

Question for my fellow French learning mecs: when you're reading in French do you stop at every word you don't know? How do you read if you don't know every word? Where do you draw the line for looking things up in a dictionary?

t. struggling learner

[Anonymous No.22176022]

>>22176009
No, just read the damn thing for a while, mark all the words that you don't know. Look them up, and read it again. You can do that in a per page basis or whatever. I tend to do it in a time frame of max 20 minutes and minimum 5 minutes. Depending on what you are reading do something like that.

[Anonymous No.22176213]

>>22176022
I feel like such a mid-wit when I've studied French for two years now and still struggle with a lot of literature. Do you often read the full English translation prior to reading the French?

[Anonymous No.22176223]

>>22176213
I still struggle but I don't read as much as I used to. No, I don't really read anything related, just the damn thing. Whenever I'm reading whatever, I usually don't compare translations, back when I started learning I would use those dual language editions, but that was it.
I think it requires some effort at the start, you have to be comfortable spending 30 minutes in a page, but in less than a month I'm sure that those will turn into 10 minutes, until you get down to 5 or whatever.