do you have any problem of reading english novel ?

hyperborean

I've just finished Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. The plot is ingeniously devised, but the part concerning cryptography is a little obsolete. None the less, it is still a good novel to recommend.
In my humble opinion, there are, for us non-native English speakers, mainly two obstacles lying on the road to fully appreciating an English novel: everyday words and phrases, and foreign culture. I seldom resort to a dictionary when reading those more serious works, such as textbooks, philosophical monographs etc., but I have to admit there are still many words I don't recognize in a normal English novel, which frequently show up in oral and informal English and most of which are less than six letters long. These little guys are more difficult to memorize than those big words due to their lack of internal structure. As for the second obstacle, it takes us more than reading many novels to conquer. Take Digital Fortress for an instance, the male protagonist had a mission to accomplish in Spain, where I encountered as a reader a lot of cultural issues of the Roman Catholic. I don't think reading another book from Dan Brown would possibly unsettle these confusions for me. In order to understand the Western culture, we have to read more.