6 days (7 including today) left to go! I’m really quite excited, but I know I can’t go ‘hard-core’ like I would prefer to.
I had a look at Harry Potter the other night after a post in my forum log suggested it may not be as hard as I would think. While it took me a good 5 minutes to decode the first sentence with the help of my dictionary, I succeeded. I know that I could make it through the book this way if need be, but I’m hoping by the time I get to Harry Potter I have less reliance on the dictionary.
To do my close reading, I photocopied the first page of the book, with one half of the page blank. I then used the french I know and the dictionary to translate, writing it out as I went. I found that this helped me to remember both the meaning of the words and what the sentence was. If I had continued on the page, I would still be able to look over what I had previously read without having to get out the dictionary again.
In other news, my package with Assimil shipped a few hours ago. Now I only have a 10-15 day wait! Yay!
And back to the waiting I go.
regarder et à lire 
I don’t know if this will work for you, but what I’ve discovered is that when you actively try to understand the meaning of the sentence, the less you’ll understand. So basically just read without caring to much about the actual meaning of words… but that works for me, I’m not sure if it’ll work for you, though.
Oh I definitely agree! I’ve been reading a simple reader on my kindle and have found that I read much better with that because there are few words I don’t know, and those that I don’t know are simple enough to gleam based on the context. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough French to do this with Harry Potter, so I’m focussing on the easier books for now and will move onto Harry later. Of course, I’m going to slowly work through the beginning of the book while reading my easier books properly, just so I can see my improvement as I go. Plus it’s a great challenge.