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Imagine a quiet place where you can sit comfortably holding a captivating book and a cup of hot tea. Isn’t in an amazing way to relax and enjoy a fascinating story? You can make it a habit and choose English books to read. A good news is that you can start reading English books even if your level of English is not very high. Beginners can choose abridged versions of books, whilst others would better go for originals. There are fundamental reasons why this activity is beneficial for you.
1 Reading English books is one of the best ways to develop your vocabulary easily
As you read, you either guess the meaning of a frequent word or look it up in the dictionary. The more captivating your book is, the quicker words slip into your memory themselves, without any effort. After you read a number of books, you’ll be amazed how much you understand.
2 While reading, you activate your passive vocabulary
When book characters use the same words again and again, your brain makes a quick decision to transfer them from your passive memory into your active memory. Later, as you communicate, you start using those words, as if by a miracle.
3 Reading in English improves your writing skills
Zealous readers usually have no problems with spelling and syntax. Again, this bonus comes as a beneficial effect of reading and training your visual perception.
4 You learn new things with each new English book you read
Reading books by British, American, Australian and Canadian writers you discover interesting factors about their world, culture and values.
5 Reading is captivating
You can spend much time reading English books only because it is interesting. Just make sure to select a book that you like, that will capture your whole attention and make you forget about everything else for some time. Don’t read boring books, sometimes it’s better to try several novels before you find the one you really enjoy.
So, what’s the best way to read?
I highly recommend you to buy an e-reader, preferably, Kindle. You can download a nice dictionary and tens of English books to read. It’s really easy to look up an unknown word, you just need to install a dictionary and then to scroll, moving a line in front of the word, and you’ll see its translation at the top or at the bottom of the page.
Amazon.com and gutenberg.org websites generously offer a lot of classical books for free, or you can buy thousands of bestsellers at amazon.com.
My choice of captivating and enjoyable English books
Here are just some of the books that I really enjoyed reading. I classified them by genre on purpose, so that you could discover something to your taste. Just choose some book and start reading! Descriptions are taken from Amazon.com
Classics
Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre
It is the story of a small, plain-faced, intelligent, and passionate English orphan. Jane is abused by her aunt and cousin and then attends a harsh charity school. Through it all she remains strong and determinedly refuses to allow a cruel world to crush her independence or her strength of will. A masterful story of a woman’s quest for freedom and love.
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
One of the world’s most popular novels, Pride and Prejudice tells the story of fiercely independent Elizabeth Bennet, one of five sisters who must marry rich, as she confounds the arrogant, wealthy Mr. Darcy. It is a sharp and witty comedy of manners played out in early 19th Century English society, a world in which men held virtually all the power and women were required to negotiate mine-fields of social status, respectability, wealth, love, and sex in order to marry both to their own liking and to the advantage of their family. And such is particularly the case of the Bennetts, a family of daughters whose father’s estate is entailed to a distant relative, for upon Mr. Bennett’s death they will lose home, land, income, everything. But are the Bennett daughters up to playing a winning hand in this high-stakes matrimonial game without forfeiting their own personal integrity?
Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility
In her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen presents us with the subtle portraits of two contrasting but equally compelling heroines. For sensible Elinor Dashwood and her impetuous younger sister Marianne the prospect of marrying the men they love appears remote. In a world ruled by money and self-interest, the Dashwood sisters have neither fortune nor connections. Concerned for others and for social proprieties, Elinor is ill-equipped to compete with self-centered fortune-hunters like Lucy Steele, while Marianne’s unswerving belief in the truth of her own feelings makes her more dangerously susceptible to the designs of unscrupulous men. Through her heroines’ parallel experiences of love, loss, and hope, Jane Austen offers a powerful analysis of the ways in which women’s lives were shaped by the claustrophobic society in which they had to survive.
Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights
Classic novel of consuming passions, played out against the lonely moors of northern England, recounts the turbulent and tempestuous love story of Cathy and Heathcliff. A masterpiece of imaginative fiction, the story remains as poignant and compelling today as it was when first published in 1847.
W. Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
It is the complex story of Charles Strickland, a man who abandons his family and his secure life as an English businessman to pursue an uncertain but meaningful existence as an artist, from Paris slums to the lush fertility of Tahiti, and into the glory of the creative wilderness. Inspired by the life of the artist Paul Gauguin, this is a psychological study of the creative urge as it stands in conflict with the bonds of ordinary life and personal relationships.
John Fowles
The Magus
It is the story of Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching assignment on a remote Greek island. There his friendship with a local millionaire evolves into a deadly game, one in which reality and fantasy are deliberately manipulated, and Nicholas must fight for his sanity and his very survival.
John Fowles
The Collector
A clerk becomes obsessed with a pretty art student and holds her captive in his basement. Half of the story is told from his point of view in a recollective style, whilst the rest is relayed through the girl’s diary. The obvious differences in their views on life and the impossibility of them ever reaching a common ground is what grips you. Brilliant characterization and a brilliant study of human behaviour.
William Styron
Sophie’s Choice
This complex and ambitious novel opens with Stingo, a young southerner, journeying north in 1947 to become a writer. It leads us into his intellectual and emotional entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house: Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his lover, Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp and whose past is strewn with death that she alone survived.
Colleen McCullough
The Thorn Birds
This is the story of the Cleary family, originally from Ireland, who emigrate first to New Zealand, and early on, to Australia. The young Cleary daughter, Meggie, falls in love with the local Catholic priest, Ralph de Briccasart, who is a good and ambitious man who certainly does nothing to encourage this love, but who certainly returns it as he regards Meggie as the daughter he can never have. As Meggie matures, he comes to regard her in a more romantic way. A great struggle arises between this love on the one hand (“the forbidden rose”) and his ambition to become a Cardinal or perhaps more, on the other.
Margaret Mitchell
Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell’s epic novel of love and war won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to give rise to two authorized sequels and one of the most popular and celebrated movies of all time. In the two main characters, the white-shouldered, irresistible Scarlett and the flashy, contemptuous Rhett, Margaret Mitchell not only conveyed a timeless story of survival under the harshest of circumstances, she also created two of the most famous lovers in the English-speaking world since Romeo and Juliet.
P.G Wodehouse
The Mating Season
The Mating Season is a time of love, mistaken identity, and mishap for Bertie, Gussie Fink-Nottle and other guests staying at Deverill Hall-luckily there’s unflappable Jeeves to set things right. This is the classic volume in which Bertie finds himself at a place called Deverill Hall pretending to be Gussie Fink-Nottle, and Gussie Fink-Nottle shows up pretending to be Bertie. Bertie must do all he can to keep the Fink-Nottle/Bassett romance intact, and this, complete with two other rocky romances, keeps Bertie on his toes throughout this hilarious book.
P.G Wodehouse
Carry on, Jeeves!
“Carry On, Jeeeves,” a collection of ten short stories first published in 1925 involving the adventures of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, provides an excellent introduction to the world of P.G. Wodehouse. The collection contains the first Jeeves’ story, in which the valet comes to work for Bertie replacing a valet named Meadowes. A full cast of Wodehouse creations, including tyrannical relatives, beastly acquaintances, demon children, and literary fatheads return for further near catastrophes and sparkling comedy.
Jerome K. Jerome
Three Men in a Boat
It is one of the most amusing and enduring books in the English language. Semi-autobiographical, it recounts the adventures and mishaps of George, Harris, J. (the narrator), and his remarkable dog Montmorency during a boat trip along the Thames from London to Oxford. Jerome K. Jerome originally intended the book to be a guide to the Thames Valley, but his publisher thought it so entertaining that it was published as a comic novel to huge success. Surprisingly modern and wonderfully light in tone, Three Men in a Boat has endured as a classic of the genre ever since. On audio, it becomes real laugh-out-loud entertainment to be enjoyed by the whole family, with an irrepressible sense of fun throughout.
O’Henry
100 Selected Stories
This collection of 100 of O’Henry’s finest stories is a showcase for the sheer variety of one of America’s best and best-loved short story writers The variety of the stories is amazing; O’Henry is as at home describing life south of the Rio Grande as he is chronicling the activities and concerns of ‘the four million’ ordinary citizens who inhabited turn-of-the-century New York. They are marked by coincidence and surprise endings as well as the compassion and high humour that have made O’Henry’s stories popular for the last century.
Science fiction and phantasy
Isaak Asimov
Foundation
For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Sheldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future–to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire–both scientists and scholars–and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for a fututre generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.
Isaak Asimov
Robot Trilogy: The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn
This “Robot Trilogy” is set two thousand years into the future. ‘The Caves of Steel’ (an acronym for the cities of the future) is set on Earth, while ‘The Naked Sun’ and ‘The Robots of Dawn’ are set on colonised planets elsewhere in the galaxy. Each story follows the investigations of detective Elijah Baley and his human-looking robot partner (mascarading as a ‘Spacer’), Daneel Olivaw, as they solve murder mysteries on each planet.
J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Harry Potter has no idea how famous he is. That’s because he’s being raised by his miserable aunt and uncle who are terrified Harry will learn that he’s really a wizard, just as his parents were. But everything changes when Harry is summoned to attend an infamous school for wizards, and he begins to discover some clues about his illustrious birthright. From the surprising way he is greeted by a lovable giant, to the unique curriculum and colorful faculty at his unusual school, Harry finds himself drawn deep inside a mystical world he never knew existed and closer to his own noble destiny.
George Martin
A Game of Thrones
Long ago, in a time forgotten, a preternatural event threw the seasons out of balance. In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister and supernatural forces are massing beyond the kingdom’s protective Wall. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the land they were born to. Sweeping from a land of brutal cold to a distant summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, here is a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens. Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; and a determined woman undertakes the most treacherous of journeys. Amid plots and counterplots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, the fate of the Starks, their allies, and their enemies hangs perilously in the balance, as each endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.
Terry Pratchett
Wyrd Systers
When Duke Felmet kills King Verence and names himself the new King of Lancre, Verence’s ghost haunts the castle and his young son is smuggled out of the kingdom and taken to a coven of three witches for protection. These witches bestow three gifts upon the baby and place him with the owner of an acting troupe. The new king is an evil one, and the entire kingdom (animal, vegetable, and mineral) expresses its displeasure. How could the witches possibly refrain from using their magic skills to meddle in royal politics, place the rightful heir on the throne, and set things right?
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings
In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. When Bilbo reached his eleventy-first birthday he disappeared, bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the Ruling Ring and a perilous quest: to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom.
Adventures
John Grisham
The Firm
When Mitch McDeere signed on with Bendini, Lambert & Locke of Memphis, he thought that he and his beautiful wife, Abby, were on their way. The firm leased him a BMW, paid off his school loans, arranged a mortgage, and hired the McDeeres a decorator. Mitch should have remembered what his brother Ray, doing fifteen years in a Tennessee jail, already knew: You never get nothing for nothing. Now the FBI has the lowdown on Mitch’s firm and needs his help. Mitch is caught between a rock and a hard place, with no choice, if he wants to live.
John Grisham
The Pelican Brief
A young law student prepares a legal brief. To Darby Shaw it was no more than a legal shot in the dark, a brilliant guess. To the Washington establishment it’s political dynamite. Suddenly Darby is witness to a murder, a murder intended for her. Going underground, she finds that there is only one person, an ambitious reporter after a newsbreak hotter than Watergate, she can trust to help her piece together the deadly puzzle. Somewhere between the bayous of Louisiana and the White House’s inner sanctums, a violent cover-up is being engineered. For someone has read Darby’s brief, someone who will stop at nothing to destroy the evidence of an unthinkable crime.
Jack London
The Valley of the Moon
Billy and Saxon Roberts are hard working people living in Oakland. When a issue erupts between the San Francisco bricklayers and the Oakland bricklayers, it leads to a riot that pulls both Billy and Saxon into the frantic fray. When the commotion settles down, Billy and Saxon realize that the growing labor unrest will only get worse and decide to find a safer place to live. They eventually find it — in the Valley of the Moon.
Jack London
The Sea-Wolf
Shipwrecked during a weekend pleasure cruise, gentleman scholar Humphrey Van Weyden thinks his mysterious rescuers have saved his life. He’s wrong. Van Weyden’s trapped abroad the Ghost–a seal-hunting schooner crewed by the most desperate, brutal outcasts of the Pacific. Ghost’s evil captain, Wolf Larsen–The Sea-Wolf–is murderous tyrant who uses his superhuman strength to torture and destroy, his brilliant mind to invent sick games, and his relentless will to control his mutinous crew.
Henry Rider Haggard
King Solomon’s Mines
King Solomon’s Mines was one of the bestselling novels of the nineteenth century. H. Rider Haggard?s thrilling saga of elephant hunter Allan Quatermain and his search for fabled treasure is more than just an adventure story.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Lost World
The science fiction stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stand alongside those of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. The protagonist, the ‘cave-man in a lounge suit’, is the maddening, irascible and fascinating Professor George Edward Challenger. In these collected tales he faces adventures such as that high above the Amazon rain forest in The Lost World and the challenges of The Land of Mist.
Detective stories
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Set against the foggy, mysterious backdrops of London and the English countryside, these are the first twelve stories ever published to feature the infamous Detective Sherlock Holmes and his side kick Doctor Watson.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Another entertaining mystery book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle contains a lot of short mystery stories documented by Watson, Holmes’ assistant. The plots keep you guessing the entire time but at the end you see the methods as plain as day.
Agatha Christie
Murder on the Orient Express
Just after midnight, a snowdrift stopped the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train was surprisingly full for the time of the year. But by the morning there was one passenger fewer. An American lay dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside.
Agatha Christie
The Body in the Library
It is seven in the morning. The Bantrys wake to find the body of a young woman in their library. She is wearing an evening dress and heavy makeup, which is now smeared across her cheeks. But who is she? How did she get there? And what is the connection with another dead girl, whose charred remains are later discovered in an abandoned quarry? The respectable Bantrys invite Miss Marple to solve the mystery before tongues start to wag.
Agatha Christie
Cat Among the Pigeons
Unpleasant things are going on in an exclusive school for girls – things like murder! Late one night, two teachers investigate a mysterious flashing light in the sports pavilion, while the rest of the school sleeps. There, among the lacrosse sticks, they stumble upon the body of the unpopular games mistress — shot through the heart from point blank range. The school is thrown into chaos when the ‘cat’ strikes again. Unfortunately, schoolgirl Julia Upjohn knows too much. In particular, she knows that without Hercule Poirot’s help, she will be the next victim!
Women’s romance
Helen Fielding
Bridget Jones’s Diary
This laugh-out-loud chronicle charts a year in the life of Bridget Jones, a single girl on a permanent, doomed quest for self-improvement–in which she resolves to: visit the gym three times a week not merely to buy a sandwich, and form a functional relationship with a responsible adult. Caught between her Singleton friends, who are all convinced they will end up dying alone and found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian, and the Smug Marrieds, whose dinner parties offer ever-new opportunities for humiliation, Bridget struggles to keep her life on an even keel (or at least afloat). Through it all, she will have her readers helpless with laughter.
Candace Bushnell
Summer and the City: A Carrie Diaries Novel
Summer is a magical time in New York City and Carrie is in love with all of it: the crazy characters in her neighborhood, the vintage-clothing boutiques, the wild parties, and the glamorous man who has swept her off her feet. Best of all, she’s finally in a real writing class, taking her first steps toward fulfilling her dream. This sequel to The Carrie Diaries brings surprising revelations as Carrie learns to navigate her way around the Big Apple, going from being a country “sparrow”, as Samantha Jones dubs her, to the person she always wanted to be. But as it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile her past with her future, Carrie realizes that making it in New York is much more complicated than she ever imagined. With her signature wit and sparkling humor, Candace Bushnell reveals the irresistible story of how Carrie met Samantha and Miranda, and what turned a small-town girl into one of New York City’s most unforgettable icons, Carrie Bradshaw.
Susan Wiggs
The Winter Lodge
On the longest night of the year, Jenny Majesky loses everything in a devastating house fire. But among the ashes she finds an unusual treasure hidden amid her grandfather’s belongings, one that starts her on a search for the truth, and on a path toward a life that she never imagined. The Winter Lodge, a remote cabin owned by her half sister on the shores of Willow Lake, becomes a safe refuge for Jenny, where she and local police chief Rourke McKnight try to sort out the mysteries revealed by the fire.
Paulina Simmons
The Bronze Horseman
An epic tale of passion, betrayal, and survival in World War II Russia. Leningrad, 1941: The European war seems far away in this city of fallen grandeur, where splendid palaces and stately boulevards speak of a different age, when the city was known as St. Petersburg. Now two sisters, Tatiana and Dasha Metanov, live in a cramped apartment, sharing one room with their brother and parents. Such are the harsh realities of Stalin’s Russia, but when Hitler invades the country, the siege of its cities makes the previous severe conditions seem luxurious. Against this backdrop of danger and uncertainty, Tatiana meets Alexander, an officer in the Red Army whose self-confidence sets him apart from most Russian men and helps to conceal a mysterious and troubled past.
