I got an extremely dorky high the other day when I realised that I could, with very little difficulty, understand virtually all* of my trusty Iwanami Bunko edition of the Kojiki. Admittedly, I'm reading the yomikudashi-ed text**, and without the copious footnotes it contains (and the Kojien dictionary), I'd be completely lost, but it's a pretty decent progression from the days when I didn't recognise the old-style character for kami.

Then, like a hubristic character in Sex and the City, I was brought sharply down to earth by a friend who asked if I could please stop pronouncing it kojiki as in 乞食, "begging". O cruel twist of pitch accent!

* At least in terms of surface meaning.
** E.g., in my book, the post-introduction opening sentence, yomikudashi (読み下し) style, is: "天地初めて發し時、高天の原に成れる神の名は、天之御中主神". The original text (原文) is: "天地初發之時、於高天原成神名、天之御中主神". (Give or take some modernised kanji.)