Seeking Beginner Reading Materials!

[Tsukemono San]

Preferably free or cheap materials, cause I don't have a lot of extra cash. I've heard that Japanese is witten differently than its spoken sometimes, and I would like something that's written closer to how native speakers usually use it! I've been teaching myself for about a year and a half, and I just finished learning all the second grade kanji.

Before you roll your eyes let me explain; I both read and write with hirigana pretty well now, and for every Kanji learned I also learn five useful compounds, the pronunciation of each by a native speaker (I have my own imperfect system of notation for marking pronunciation on paper--its usually enough to remind me of how I've heard it spoken--is there an official system for noting tone and emphasis maybe?) And also the different readings, stroke order, etc. Im a painter, and I like to write as I review rather than just looking them over, so I'm pretty familliar with a couple hundred Kanji I haven't fully learned yet, in addition to some commonly used kanji.

I'd like to find a book or website, preferably fiction or biographical rather than news, that's strait forward but also somewhat challenging for a beginning reader. Vocabulary is decidedly my strong point and my grammar sucks by comparison, being dyslexic might have something to do with that, but I often find that directly comparing Japanese grammar to English trips me up, and I seem to understand better through repetition and variation rather than memorizing lists.. If anybody has any recommendations, I'm all ears!

P.S. If anyone has a favorite book witten in Japanese that's way too hard for me, tell me that too! Part of why I want to learn is that I love to read! I'm a ****** for the classics but I also have an affair with Anne Rice novels--and I'm reluctant to reveal how many times I've read the LOTR. I figured, hey, if I learn another language I'll have a whole new selection of literature! Japanese can't be that hard, right???

 

[Silty]

Before I knew a lot of kanji, I practiced kana reading by playing Pokemon in Japanese. The latest have an option to display things in only kana, and the older ones only display kana no matter what. I hear it gets annoying once you can read kanji well, but it's underrated practice until you can. The other nice thing is you can understand only half of it, and still enjoy it and learn from it. The same can't be said for most other things, especially non-interactive reading materials.

Next, you can move on to shonen or shojo manga. Yotsuba& is supposed to be among the easiest, but pretty much anything is a doable step up from Pokemon, in my opinion. The trick is that they have "furigana", or kanji annotated with hiragana. It's like training wheels for kanji.

EDIT: There are ways to acquire these things for free if you are poor like me, but the rules page for the forum is broken so I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say. I guess I can say that I used DesMUME to run DS Pokemon games, VisualBoyAdvance to run the others, emuparadise.me for the games themselves, and comic.dawnfun.com for Japanese comics.