Nihongo Somatome N2 Dokkai (NOKEN JLPT Japanese Reading)

Great quality, no damage to the book; came in quickly; great customer service!

Waste of money.

THUMBS DOWN. This book is a really inefficient way to prepare for N2. Not a completely useless book, but the publishers were too lazy to do what would have been really useful, which is to provide translations of the essays or explanations (yeah, that would require translation into English, Korean, and Chinese; well, if ASK cannot do this, maybe they should reconsider their educational/publishing mission). As it is, there is no explanation for the answers to questions, not even in Japanese. So, you will not know WHY you cannot get the right answer. Also, they don't justify using hundreds of N1-level words in their examples (nor do they define these many terms, so you are left to your dictionary, only to find that those phrases are nowhere to be found). You will spend hundreds of hours trying to figure out what these essays mean, which was ASK's job. Then you will pull your hair out and even start to hate foreign language study, which is a real shame. I'd look at other textbooks before choosing.