How is your reading experience in English?

Well, I am a literature and English language teacher, so I like so much reading in English. Unfortunately I don't have the time I dreamed about...Reading books in English is something that started in college with English and American literature classes. At the university I had the experience of creating, understanding texts and publishing two poems in a book organised by one of my professors who studied literary awareness. I was a gratifying experience. Later we could read more books in the literature courses and for me who had never read any book in English, it was very difficult in the beginning. It was difficult to feel the same emotions and sensations I had with the books in Portuguese. With the experience and the proficiency in the language comes the possibility of having a more pleasurable relationship with the books in English and I have already felt many good sensations as in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, that made me cry and feel sad about Santiago's difficult journey. In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" and the "Pit and the Pendulum", for example, I experienced the suspense and fear. Many writings of Thoreau as "Civil Disobedience" and Walden touched me and many others that I will add to this comment as soon as I remember. Now tell me, do you have the same literary experience in English as you have in Portuguese?