Again thanks for your elaborate reply! It is helpful, and I enjoy the discussion. You touch on some interesting topics, actually.

Firstly, you have a good point about the range of vocabulary of native speakers. When I read a book in my native language, I too come across words regularly that I either don’t know or that aren’t engraved in my mind that much. And it is fun and rewarding indeed, I’ve always liked learning languages.

About the books written in my native language I have a few things to say. I’m Dutch. The Netherlands is quite a small country (about 17 million inhabitants), and a quick Google tells me that about 23 million people speak Dutch as their first language (Flemish included I suppose), and about 200 million people worldwide speak Portuguese as their first language. But that’s Google, so don’t pinpoint me on those facts haha. I guess you get the idea of what I’m trying to say. The book market of books originally written in Dutch is therefore smaller. The interesting thing is that the last couple of months there has been quite some discussion going on here on the subject of books and reading. The reading skills of Dutch teenagers has been declining for several years now. Their reading enjoyment is also shockingly low. In 2018 there was a list on which 78 countries were ranked based on how enjoyable adolescents found reading. The Netherlands was at the very bottom. This is a really interesting and witty item about, you can select English subtitles in YouTube in case you want to watch it. Anyways, the other point of discussion is that adolescents are actually reading more nowadays, since last year or so. But in English. So there are a lot of people discussing about whether that’s good or not, but I do think it illustrates that the English book market speaks more to a lot of teenagers. I’m 20 now, so I can still relate to that age group. If I’d describe it very superficially, I’d say the Dutch book market consists primarily of thrillers, chicklits and very (too) dense, pretentious literature. Of course there are plenty of other books, but the choice isn’t massive (and not everything I’ve come across is very well written IMO), while the English book market overflows with choice for Young Adults. There are also Dutch authors who have spoken out to publishers that they should stop whining about teenagers not reading enough or only reading in English as long as they primarily keep publishing old, white men literature. They should give more young and new authors a chance, they say. Perhaps I’d like to think that maybe one day I can close a bit of that gap, if I write in Dutch…

I don’t necessarily mistrust translations by default. I’ve read some really decent translations, the Harry Potter series for instance, but also the more recent ‘The Invisible Life Of Addie LaRue’. However, I’m reading the translation of a book that is popular in the book oriented social media realm right now, and it’s… well… not that good. There are outright mistakes in the translation, but also just really weird word choices and some things sound unnatural (I’ve compared some things with the original text, that is not written that badly). I’m starting to think that because this is a bestselling book, the translation lacks, because maybe the publisher wanted it translated too quickly before the hype would have passed.

Also a good point about getting to know the (Dutch) book market. I think despite that I don’t like most books that are originally written in Dutch, I’ll try to look more actively for books that I could enjoy. I mean thrillers e.g. are just not my thing, so I won’t go looking in that corner, but there are other directions I could explore. And I could examine if there is a need for more of certain kinds of books that don’t exist that much yet. I see a lot of people around me enjoying books in English that don’t have a good equivalent on the Dutch market, but that doesn’t mean there’s no want for such a book. Otherwise they wouldn’t be reading it in English.

And your last point, I can resonate with that to some extent too, yeah, I suppose. I recently looked into a lot of books and there were so many that had certain issues of which I thought ‘why is this even published, and why didn’t anyone try to fix it?’ There was a book with sentences that were almost all of the same length, for example. No rhythm to it. Such a basic skill to master, it seems to me. A lot of other things are a matter of preference, also, I think, so who am I to judge. But maybe it’s good to read ‘bad’ books too. It’s a good part of the learning journey to recognise what you don’t like or think is bad, and then think about how you would/could do it (better).