At about thirty, I spent a summer week in a holiday flat in Montpellier. On the shelf was a French crime novel someone had left behind, a worn paperback with a corner torn off the cover.
I read the first page on the last night, with a phone dictionary, and could not stop wondering who the dead man in chapter one was. The owners told me to take it. I read it a page a night, writing the new words in pencil in the margins, and it took me a year to find out who did it.
The next summer I came back to Montpellier, and this time I stayed. The paperback with the torn corner still lives on my shelf, and I still guess the culprit of every French crime novel by chapter three, usually wrongly.
For years a small reading circle of people learning French has met at my kitchen table. We read the same crime novel, a chapter a week, and talk about it only in French. Many of its members have been English speakers, and their typical mistakes fill pages of their own in my notebook.