When Robin announced the fourth round of the Multilingual Bookclub, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to read. Earlier that day I'd just started reading a new book, Maxwell's Demon by Steven Hall, so I thought that maybe I could finish it during the bookclub. That gave me some time to make up my mind on what I wanted to read.

I usually have a bunch of books on my mental reading list, but at the beginning of this week, I still couldn't think of anything I'd fancy reading. Since this round is all about extensive reading, or "just normal reading", as some people like to phrase it, I thought I might read a German novel. Usually, the only kinds of texts I've read in German the last few years (apart from Journaly posts) were academic papers and newspaper articles. So, a novel in German by a German author would've been a welcome change. I came across a really interesting (short) novel that peaked my interest.

However, after I finished the last 150 pages of Maxwell's Demon, I felt like reading something in another foreign language. Long story short, I downloaded In altre parole by Jhumpa Lahiri on my Kindle and read about 25 % of it (it's only 73 pages long). In this book, Lahiri tells the story of her relationship with the Italian language and how she learned it over the course of almost two decades. She wrote the book in Italian and it's a comfortable read for me. The vocabulary and sentence structures are just complex enough to make it an interesting read. For anyone looking for a first novel in Italian, this could be a perfect choice.

It seemed like I finally got on track for the Bookclub. Until I got hold on a copy of Dan Brown's Inferno yesterday - in Catalan. I was curious how much I'd understand and ended up reading a good chunk of it. It sparked hope in me that maybe, just maybe, I could finally manage reading my first complete novel in Catalan. We'll see what happens next. This round started off without a proper plan and ended up a bit chaotic after the first week already.