Languagelearning and (fan)fiction

[martyna]

I don't know what about all of you, but personally fiction -and especially fanfiction- has helped me to learn English. It was more complicated for French, since I had a slight aversion for it due to one of my French teachers. But, being European, books in those languages are fairly easy to come by, thus guaranteeing a facility to find reading material.
Now, I'm focusing on Japanese currently and while there's a BookOff (happy me!) I have a hard time finding authors and books to enjoy. I've asked around for recommendations, but there's not much turning up. Also, it might simply be easier to read on the computer (while I prefer books) due to the wonderful look-up tools. Fanfiction having helped me in previous cases, I started to look around for some. The meagre results are not worth mentioning... so, my questions are two:

Have you used fandom for language acquisition and if, how so?
Do you know any Japanese site with fanfiction? (I've basically been mostly involved in the Harry Potter stuff, but there are others as well. Any place I could start from would be good.)

Other related comments are welcome, too!

Foreign Language Literature Finding Tips?

[viklikesfic]

First, I'm wondering if anyone has tips generally or for a specific language for finding relatively inexpensive reading materials.

Second, more specifically, I'm looking for a particular book. I would love to get my hands on an unabridged French copy of Les Misérables for practice. I read French at an advanced level and though I picked up some random novels last time I was in France, most of them turned out to be translations from English (I didn't realize because the authors weren't famous and didn't have obvious English/American names). I adore Les Mis and would like to have a copy for my collection, but when I checked Amazon all the copies appeared to be abbreviated learners editions. I checked Amazon.fr and everything was "extraits" or some other abridged version (you can tell from the pages, the full novel should be about 1900 pages total en français). Does anyone know where I might be able to get a copy, preferably for less than $30 or so?