The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Simply written but good books
Anarchy Rules!
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
My girlfriend doesn't have English as her first language, but would like to read more books in English (as opposed to translations). She's not stupid, so doesn't want to read 'simple' books. I was thinking about things along the lines of modern/early modern classics?
Anarchy Rules! on
0
Posts
I struggle with English at times too, but I recently found the dictionary feature in my e-reader where I highlight a word I don’t understand in the text and a little dictionary with a definition pops up. You can even search Wikipedia for related articles. It’s great for learning!
After those try Freak the Mighty or The Outsiders.
To Kill a Mockingbird or A Wrinkle in Time are good ones too that would work after she gets used to the language a bit more.
PSN: ChemENGR
For someone without a good grasp of English this is a terrible suggestion.
Do you have a sense of what her reading level is? Other books that she's enjoyed? Simply written is a pretty wide range.
Invisible Man
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translations of Chekhov and likely Tolstoy
George Orwell (1984 and so on)
BF3 Battlelog | Twitter | World of Warships | World of Tanks | Wishlist
The Pratchett children's/YA books are good and so are the regular Pratchett books, these were some of the books I started reading English with.
All the books by Neil Gaiman
The Hobbit, LotR not so much
Ender's Game
Basically a lot of genre scifi/fantasy stuff, especially for the YA demographic, think Hunger Games, etc.
The Harry Potter series
Everything by Nick Hornby is pretty easy
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I only read Redshirts, but John Scalzy seems to be a pretty easy read
1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World as well as Lord of the Flies, standard Highschool reading here in Germany
To kill a Mockingbird
Graphic Novels are also a good way to learn, as the pictures help with understanding what is going on generally.
Aside from the lack of things like quotation marks, he's about as simple as you could possibly get.
His prose does not use complex sentence structure or much in the way of $5 words.
Reading his stuff always puts me in a contemplative and introspective mood, though some critics might say he's depressing.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Is she interested at all in fantasy/fairytale type books? One of my favorite books is Howl's Moving Castle. It was written for "young readers" but it is still a good book to me - but this is because I like both fairy tales and sarcasm, two things the book does excellently.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Then again, I think everyone should read that book.
I'll also second Hemingway and add in the Seamus Heaney version of Beowulf.
Best book in the English language, but not remotely comprehensible to a weak reader.
Stephen King has written a lot of good stories that only use simple prose, and as a plus, would introduce her to a lot of Americana that some authors would just assume she knows. The Harry Potter series would be another great option, although she may need to look up the occasional britishism.
Yeah, King's great.
This is a really bad ESL suggestion.
I recommend the short stories of Raymon Carver.
The problem with Douglas Adams' works is that while it's very funny and well-constructed, from an ESL standpoint it's not so great if you aren't pretty fluent to begin with. You've got everything from special, one-use vocabulary to complicated sentence structures and idiomatic concepts used in a context that could be difficult to pick up, making really independent reading (even with a dictionary) very difficult. It's very good, but she might save it for the next level up.
The only issue might be the "made-up" words, where he's talking about the sci-fi elements of the stories. You generally get the idea of where the root of the word came from and what he means by the made-up word, but that might be a little trickier in her case. I mean, he doesn't just go completely ridiculous with making up his own words, but he's pretty good at it. After all, this is the guy that came up with the the word "robotics".
I actually really enjoyed that book and I read it when I was like 12 years old.
It's about a boy who runs away from home and hitchhikes his way to an old plot of land his family used to own out in the mountains before they moved into the city. The story is written in a journal format and talks about him finding food, somewhere to live and training a young pet falcon he finds.
It's not especially long but a great read.
I think the Pratchett sugggestion from a few people suffers from the same 'problems', potentially.
Librarian's Neil Gaiman suggestion could be good, though. Maybe Stardust?
She has enjoyed, though:
The Picture of Dorian Grary by Oscar Wilde
Books by Michael Crichton (particularly Sphere, which is a great book if you didn't see the movie (which is terrible))
The Talented Mr Ripley
The Day of the Triffids
http://newnations.bandcamp.com
http://newnations.bandcamp.com
Steinbeck = super accessible. Definitely a good suggestion.
Oh god, I loved that book as a kid. I only rediscovered it recently after finding out the author passed away.
And yeah, I don't get the Adam and Pratchett recomendations, as both seem to have a love for word play and puns that are going to be lose on a non native speaker.
Lauren Beukes has a nicely vernacular style that would be good if you're better with spoken than written English.
Similar resources are also available for most of the "classic american novel" authors, and some of them are much more straightforward than Hemmingway or Fitzgerald. i.e. Jack London, Steinbeck, Mark Twain. Again, short stories are great intros to the author and style. The pearl, To Build a Fire, etc.
3DS: 0447-9966-6178
Isn't that a thousand page tome about politics and economics?
I'd recommend she start out with modern childrens literature (The Hobbit, Harry Potter, Wrinkle in Time) rather than jumping back to older writers like Dickens or Austen.
They also do Dostoyevsky. I'm reading Demons right now, it's quite good.
Kafka's short stories are also great, I like In the Penal Colony, and The Burrow. His novels are also excellent, but perhaps starting with his shorter fiction may lend to a slightly hastier review.
Robert Walser did some interesting stuff, a modernist author of the early twentieth century, he was also an influence on writers such as the aforementioned Kafka. He has various short fiction/novellas that are fairly quick and amusing to read, in that the language he uses is quite absurd and dynamic. I'd suggest The Walk, an absurd passage through the sights and sounds of a man simply walking through his own fevered interpretation of the reality he encounters. Berlin Stories is his other widely available work, though I haven't read it in a long time, so I don't have much to say about it. Even his life (Walser's) is interesting to read about really. So is Dostoyevsky I would think,
I've heard good things about Simone de Beauvoir's novel Les Belles Images about a woman who works as an advertising executive in the sixties. Perhaps if a fan of Mad Men, specifically I've read that it does the existential angst of the exec of the time in a more sublime, less 'safe' manner. Not sure though, the english edition is out of print, but Amazon probably has a seller with a copy.
Lastly, for now, Bruno Schulz's.collection of short stories Street of Crocodiles is amazing, rarely seen is such dream like, surreal prose yet dripping with the small elements of reality that contain beauty in many forms. His prose is very enchanting. It's quite tragic that he was murdered by a Nazi, and after only having written a relatively small amount of work.