Reading a book in Japanese

Despite my last post about how difficult it is to get to a level where you can read a book in Japanese, I've been going for it lately. I've been reading a book written by a Japanese lady who went to China to teach Japanese for a year. It is an account of her time there. This book is good for me because the subject matter is both familiar and interesting to me: I have travelled abroad to teach, and I'm interested in China and have visited on a few occasions.

I'm finding that I'm able to understand around 90% of the book most of the time. The odd word or two I don't understand, but from context it's often quite easy to imagine what it could be. On occasions there are passages which are more difficult, and my understanding becomes a bit more clouded, but I find it's best just to plough through these sections and wait for the clouds to clear, rather than diving to the dictionary every time, which can be distracting and frustrating.

Anyway, hopefully the more I read, the easier and less cloudy it will become.