Not so long ago I was interviewed for a magazine published by the Japan Foundation. The article is here - all in Japanese I am afraid.
As it was part of a series on students of Japanese and their jobs, they asked me to take along some of the texts I had used to learn Japanese. I chose two manga books and a collection of poetry by Aida Mitsuo.
Hopefully I come across better than my last online interview, where I ended up suggesting I did most of my research by reading manga.