I would very much bet you're already aware of this, but it may make you nervous to take the plunge somehow, like there has to be a catch. I've used Libre Office instead of Word for years. And it's miraculously free, indeed, although it's good form to throw the Libre Office Foundation a few bucks now and again. The only way it's different than Word is that the first time you save a file, you have to "Save as" a .docx, (as opposed to their native .odt) but otherwise. I'm sure you could use the saved money to buy all those books in translation. (Or pay a carpenter to build more shelves.)
I would read The Stone of Laughter next, but when I found out Meryl Streep was the audiobook narrator of Ann Patchett's Tom Lake, that went to the top of my list. (After I finish Abraham Verghese's luminous The Covenant of Water - which reads like a book very well translated from Malayalam.)
I love The Bell Jar, but as I recall it's full of alarming food-- was the raw hamburger and raw egg combination actually a thing people ate??
I would very much bet you're already aware of this, but it may make you nervous to take the plunge somehow, like there has to be a catch. I've used Libre Office instead of Word for years. And it's miraculously free, indeed, although it's good form to throw the Libre Office Foundation a few bucks now and again. The only way it's different than Word is that the first time you save a file, you have to "Save as" a .docx, (as opposed to their native .odt) but otherwise. I'm sure you could use the saved money to buy all those books in translation. (Or pay a carpenter to build more shelves.)
I would read The Stone of Laughter next, but when I found out Meryl Streep was the audiobook narrator of Ann Patchett's Tom Lake, that went to the top of my list. (After I finish Abraham Verghese's luminous The Covenant of Water - which reads like a book very well translated from Malayalam.)