One comic I’d like to add to the list, my favorite: Achille Talon. It’s not so well known because it’s untranslatable (but it has been attempted). It is not easy, quite the opposite, but those who are up to challenge should give it a go! Knowledge of Greek and Latin is certainly helpful when reading Achille Talon, which you mght call the Thucydides of French comics. It’s very wordy and very funny. Avoid albums made after about 1980. About half of the albums are collections of gags, but I prefer the longer stories; my favorite albums are maybe Le Roi des Zotres and Le Grain de la folie.
“any suggestions for readable Italian novels?”
La noia by Alberto Moravia. I read this to learn Italian. Well-written, not too hard or too long, compelling story.
Not novels, but Se questo è un uomo and La tregua by Primo Levi. An account of his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz and as a refugee in Eastern Europe after liberation. Again, not too difficult and very well-written; neither is too long, but read them both because they complement one another.
Hylander have you read any of the Montalbano books by Andrea Camilleri? I am addicted to the TV series.
No, I’ve not read them. In fact, I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t read anything in Italian for a decade or so. At 70, I’m desperately trying to hold onto French and Russian, in addition to Latin and Greek.
Thanks. Nothing to be ashamed of there! I regret that my russian, which I learnt long ago only at O level when it was thought appropriate for masters to greet their charges with a hearty Здравствуйте товарищи in the morning, is probably beyond recall.
I looked at the first few pages of a Camilleri and it looked like it was peppered with sicilian (or neapolitan?) dialect. I may make an effort if I can pick up a cheap copy when I am in Italy next week.
For Italian, If you’re at all interested in 20th-century Italy I’d recommend Cesare Pavese. Anything by him is worth reading, but if you read only one of his novels, let it be La luna ed i falò. It’s a wonderful work. Camilleri is entertaining and easy. You don’t need Sicilian to get the dialect words and phrases. For superior but somewhat older gialli, try Leonardo Sciascia, another Sicilian. He’s more political and plots beautifully (almost as well as Raymond Chandler). Mind you, all these writers are better if you’ve lived in Italy, as I did for a few years. My current bedtime reading (following on Kazuo Ishiguro’s strangely appealing Buried Giant) is Moravia’s La Ciociara, set in the 2nd world war but hardly a war novel. Very readable, humane, as Moravia always is, and good for my Italian vocabulary.
In French, I have to admit I found Patrick Modiano difficult. I’d never heard of him before he won the Nobel. I tried La Place de l’Étoile (geddit?), but didn’t manage to get through it. Houellebecq I can’t stand. Flaubert, a great writer, is more my cup of tea. Come to think of it, I really haven’t read much French literature much more recent than Sartre and Camus and the rest of that crowd. Even L’élégance du hérisson I read in translation—overrated, I thought. I expect I’d read more if I knew what to read. So I too would welcome recommendations. On a series of train journeys in France I read Les Misérables, not exactly cutting edge but it kept me within the language and went fast (just as well, given its insane length).
For Russian, I recommend—but no, I don’t read a word of Russian. 
Giovannino Guareschi describes an Italy that is no more, a much better one though. His satire will never fade away.
Thanks for all the suggestions for reading Italian. I started reading Primo Levi, whom I already read once long ago in translation.
@mwh: detectives and French, you must know Maigret by Simenon, right? Simenon’s more ‘serious’ novels (Lettres à mon juge, La veuve couderc, L’homme qui regardait passer les trains, L’évadé) are less well known but very good.
This is turning more into a “books I liked in other languages than English” thread, but I suppose it doesn’t matter, as long as we try to indicate how easy or difficult each text is for the learner…
Anyway, French books. I haven’t read too many very recent ones either. I agree L’Élégance du hérisson is overrated. But not as overrated as Le Clézio, whose Le Chercheur d’or I found so boring I couldn’t finish it. Endless and pointless “poetic” descriptions of how big the sea is, or something like that, I don’t remember so well as this was well before he got his Nobel prize in 2008. I couldn’t stand it. Haven’t tried anything else by him.
A pretty recent, and not too difficult, book is Anna Gavalda’s Je voudrais que quelqu’un m’attende quelque part – a short collection of short stories. The title says everything. It’s the sort of thing on the ironies of life especially women like to read (I don’t mean to pass judgement, I just say this as a matter of fact), but I too enjoyed it despite being of the opposite sex. For someone who is not entirely tired of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt, the banality of evil etc., I’d recommend Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes. The book is too long but not uninteresting if you don’t find a book on state murder too grim (I suppose this is the sort of book men like to read, on war and killings…). Plus the title is a reference to Aiskhylos.
I’d definitely and most emphatically recommend two somewhat older “modern classics”: 1) Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours. A fantastic love story set in an absurd parallel reality that starts as a comedy and turns into a tragedy. I can’t describe this any better, but everyone should read this short book. Much better than the recent movie adaptation. It’s not very difficult, but maybe not the first or second book to read in French. Some acquaintance with Sartre is recommended but not compulsory, as an important side character is called Jean-Sol Partre! 2) Albert Cohen’s La Belle du Seigneur. A very long book, but worth every minute spent reading it. This too is supposedly a love story, but as all truly good books it’s really about Everything. Not the easiest book in French there is, but not extremely difficult either. One thing I remember about it is that it’s one of the few books I’ve read where the “stream of consciousness” device (passages without any punctuation) is used (but not overused) in a way that seemed perfectly natural to me. Although Cohen (sparingly) uses some modern devices, I think this book would appeal more to someone who likes Flaubert than someone who likes James Joyce, not to talk about Houellebecq. Personally, I like diversity.
I agree with Bart suggestion of Gide’s Symphonie pastorale: short and not too difficult.
Add me to the Houellebecq and Giovannino Guareschi fan clubs (each of whom I have only read in translation).
How useful do you find looking up words versus skipping? In German I often content myself with getting the main import of a statement, and try to limit myself to looking up two or three words per page (or fewer). And I try to choose texts that let me do that.
Is that really reading, though, or is it just skimming? Admittedly I sometimes gauge the difficulty of a work by opening it at random and seeing how much is intelligible in any given sentence without looking words up, but it’s at the very best an unreliable method, and whenever I’m actively reading a text I have a dictionary or lexicon handy. More-difficult-looking sentences often make perfect sense when you know all the words (and context, of course, but you’ve got that covered).
It’s skimming if I don’t understand, reading if I do, I suppose. I don’t have the patience to skim. I doubt I have ever looked up even 1% of the German words that I know. If I find myself having to look up every word in a sentence, I ditch that book and choose something easier.
Greek and Latin enthusiasts seem generally to fall into the camp of “look up, annotate, and memorize every unknown word and construction” but I agree, jeidsath, that sometimes it’s best to just get on with the reading. If I get tripped up here and there, so be it. If it’s something you need to know, you’ll probably encounter it again soon and then you’ll look it up. I now take the same approach with my Latin reading, but that’s because I don’t have the patience or time these days to toil over a few sentences or paragraphs.
This may depend on whether you’re reading something to learn the language or because you are absorbed in the story and want to know what happens next.
I read all of the Harry Potter books for the first time in Spanish. Say what you will about them, but these books had me hooked and allowed me to demolish thousands of pages of Spanish without feeling like I was “studying.” I’d of course look up words when necessary, but I’d try not to let that sidetrack my enjoyment. I did the same thing with the Lord of the Rings series (which, by the way, contain much more elevated Spanish vocabulary than Harry Potter).
The benefit of reading something in translation is that you can reread books that you know you already enjoy; and since you’re already familiar with them, you can pick up a lot more vocabulary from context.