Reading has been for centuries considered one of the most important activities that a person could do to cultivate one’s mind. Either in want of extensing one’s knowledge or simple for pleasure, the act of reading is seen all the time everywhere.
But what do we read? Only books? If you have a look around, you will realize that the majority of the people do not only read books but mainly they read online. Blogs, websites, texts in Instagram or in Facebook seem to be commonplace nowadays.
Either if we are the ones chooosing a book or if it has been picked up for us by those recommendation lists that seem to be so trendy today, if we are really enjoying the story or if we are immersed on the information we are reading about, we may surely feel complete, whole.
Yet, our reading experience may vary if the text is written in our mother tongue or in a foreign language. The former comes easier to us not only regarding the nature of the words themselves but also in relation to the intrisic meaning of the semantics of jokes or irony. Furthermore, the later is mostly regarded at lower levels of the L2 as a learning activity whereas as the level of the language increases, so does our pleasure in the reading experience of the L2.

However, does our choice of texts vary depending of the language they are written? My answer would definitively be no. If one likes novels, then people would read novels. And so with comics, graphic novels… Same happens with books in paper or ebooks. But….who doesn’t love the smell of library on a book, regardless the language in which it is written?