In June of 2022, a friend of mine decided to organize a book club for her friends. I hadn't read any books for a while, so I embraced this idea. Once a month, she chooses a book for everyone to read, then we meet up in a coffee shop and discuss it.

I decided to try and read some of those books in English. I discovered that it's kind of hard to get a hold of a good book in English where I live. When I go to the foreign language section in a bookstore, I feel like I see the same bunch of books again and again: Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Alice in Wonderland... I don't mean that those books are bad; I just don't see any variety. And if I want to get something specific, it's straight up impossible to get in a store. I have the option to order books online, but I find a lot of them expensive for something you're only going to read once. And another thing, a lot of those books are edited, abridged and adapted editions aimed at language learners. Even original, unabridged editions often have notes explaining uncommon words or phrases, and I find them distracting and pointless. They often provide translations for very common sayings that I already know, while leaving unusual phrases without any notes or explanations. As for digital books, I don't really like them. I even have an E-ink reader, but I always prefer a physical book. Still and all, out of twenty books, I bought and read six in English.

A few months ago, I joined a local library and started borrowing books. I didn't intend to find books in foreign languages; I wanted to borrow a specific book in my native language that we were reading for a book club. But, apparently, there's a whole section of books in foreign languages. I found that they have a collection of Terry Pratchett's books, and I've been wanting to read the Discworld novels forever. I went for the first one, The Colour of Magic, and the librarian even offered me a choice: there was a bilingual book, that had a page in English then the same page in Russian, and there was an authentic book, published by Corgi Books, printed and bound in Great Britain. I preferred the second one.

As for my reading experience, I found some of the books very easy to read; I knew most of the words I came across, and as far as those that I didn't know, I was still able to work out the general meaning of the sentence without them. After all, I tend to skim over long descriptions of places or characters even in my native language; I don't care if I miss an adjective here and there. Nevertheless, some of the other books made me feel like I don't know the language at all; a lot of times I'd either have to look words up in the dictionary, or skip the sentence if I felt that it wasn't important. Sometimes, after reading a book, I look up the general plot of the book online to see if I got everything right. Or I ask questions at our meetups, if it was one of the books for the book club.

The Colour of Magic fell into the second category. I look at it and think, What if I'm just pretending to know the language? Does that make me an impostor? Maybe the bilingual book was a good option after all? What the hell is "a gantry and pulley arrangement"? While I didn't want to turn my reading from entertainment into a learning process at first, I decided I had to get it right this time. I started to write out every word that I didn't know (I found fifteen new words in the first two pages alone)... And it takes so long. At that pace, I won't be able to finish the book before it's overdue.

But I found that process of learning new words somewhat rewarding. As I got further into the book, I noticed that the author uses the same words that seemed uncommon to me again and again. For example, the word hitherto, which I had never seen before, was used about three more times over seventy pages. And because I plan to keep reading books from the Discworld series, I hope that expanding my vocabulary with words used by this particular author will make the next ones easier for me to digest.