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Funny to see Karl May mentioned here. I met a German traveller on the 4 day 4 night train journey from Teheran to Istanbul in 1972 who told me about him and had wanted to read him ever since. Now that I have found him in ebook format maybe I can finally do it.
When I first arrived in France, I started reading all the Arsene Lupin (a gentleman thief who is the perfect anti-Sherlock Holmes) books I could get my hands on. It is in an antiquated style but still helped me with my French vocabulary stock. I hardly read books in French nowadays.
These days, I read mostly non-fiction in English. That is 80% of my reading.
For fiction, I love the detective stories set in samurai Edo by the Japanese author Ikenami Shotaro 池波正太郎。I have read all 16 volumes of his Kenkaku shobai 剣客商売series, and the 7 volume Fujieda Baian 藤枝梅安 hit man series. I am now on volume 6 of his 24 volume Onihei hankacho 鬼平犯科帳 series。
I don't read very much in Chinese anymore but I used to enjoy Sanxia wuyi 三侠五义 and its sequels. They are adventure stories like the Three musketeers with ninja like characters and lots of kung fu action.
Kumabjorn mentioned: "That sounds interesting. Could you provide some examples? The reason being that 漢字 is Chinese incorporated into Japanese. Seems to me they would just imoprt back old Chinese expressions, or are they using characters to express words like kimoi キモい and ikumen イクメン?"
These are words written in kanji created by the Japanese and reimported into Chinese. Words like bento 弁当 (meaning lunch box) or 大幅 pronounced oohaba in Japanese but now used in Chinese and pronounced dafu (meaning large scale). A bit like the way "au paire" has been reimported into French from the English.
Talking of linguistic coincidences of words sounding and meaning the same in Finnish and Japanese. How about this. The common word in modern Turkish for foreigner is Yabanci (i without the dot) with yaban meaning wild or savage. In Japanese Yaban 野蛮 is a Chinese borrowing and means the same thing. How about that.
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