让英语变得易学

小说

• Charlotte's Web · 1952

  E. B. White

  A pig and a spider, and the plainest prose in children's literature. White's sentences are taught in writing courses for a reason: short, exact, nothing wasted.

  About 180 pages. The last chapter undoes a lot of grown adults.

• The Tale of Peter Rabbit · 1902

  Beatrix Potter

  The first book many English-speaking children read alone. Short, illustrated, and Potter never dumbs the vocabulary down — children meet exert and implored here.

  Under 30 pages. Ten minutes read aloud.

• The Story of Ferdinand · 1936

  Munro Leaf

  A bull who will not fight and only wants to sit and smell the flowers. The shortest book here, and not remotely the smallest idea.

  About 70 sentences. Readable by a child still sounding words out.

• Frog and Toad Are Friends · 1970

  Arnold Lobel

  Five very short stories about two friends. The sentences are short enough that a beginner reads a whole page without a dictionary — and that feeling matters more than any lesson.

  About 64 pages, large type. The right first book if you have never finished one in English.

• The Tale of Despereaux · 2003

  Kate DiCamillo

  A small mouse who can read and believes in fairy tales. DiCamillo writes short sentences with a lovely rhythm, and she addresses the reader directly.

  About 270 pages, in very short chapters.

• Because of Winn-Dixie · 2000

  Kate DiCamillo

  A girl and the dog she finds in a supermarket. The narration is a real child’s voice, so the language is simple without being babyish.

  About 180 pages. An afternoon’s reading.

• Holes · 1998

  Louis Sachar

  Three stories a century apart lock into one. The structure is clever enough for adults, while the language stays easy.

  About 230 pages. Good for readers who like a puzzle.

• Matilda · 1988

  Roald Dahl

  A girl who reads the whole library before starting school. Dahl never talks down to children, and he plays with words constantly.

  About 240 pages. Dahl invents words; do not look them up, just keep going.

• The BFG · 1982

  Roald Dahl

  A giant who gets grammar wrong on purpose. Usefully so: you have to know the correct sentence to see the error, so it teaches grammar without a lesson.

  About 200 pages. Not the first book to read if your grammar is still shaky.

• Wonder · 2012

  R. J. Palacio

  A boy with a facial difference starts school, narrated in turn by several people. Each section changes voice, which trains you to hear the difference between narrators.

  About 315 pages, in short chapters.

• The One and Only Ivan · 2012

  Katherine Applegate

  Narrated by a gorilla living in a shopping mall. Very short sentences and a lot of white space — the easiest read in this group.

  About 300 pages but sparsely set; it is much shorter than it looks.

• The Wild Robot · 2016

  Peter Brown

  A robot washes up on a wild island and must learn to live with animals. Simple sentences, chapters of two or three pages.

  About 280 pages. There is an animated film if you want to preview it.

• New Kid · 2019

  Jerry Craft

  A graphic novel about a Black boy moving to a mostly white private school. The pictures carry much of the meaning, so there is little text and no loss of sense.

  About 250 illustrated pages. The first graphic novel to win the Newbery Medal.

• When You Trap a Tiger · 2020

  Tae Keller

  A Korean American girl bargains with a tiger out of her grandmother’s folk tales. It speaks directly to Asian readers about keeping or losing a mother tongue.

  About 300 pages. Newbery Medal 2021.

• The Last Cuentista · 2021

  Donna Barba Higuera

  Earth is about to be destroyed and a girl is the only one who still remembers the stories. About why losing your stories means losing a people.

  About 320 pages. Newbery Medal 2022.

• Amari and the Night Brothers · 2021

  B. B. Alston

  Magic, a secret bureau, and a girl looking for her missing brother. If you liked Harry Potter, this is the next thing to read.

  About 400 pages, but it moves fast.

• The Eyes and the Impossible · 2023

  Dave Eggers

  Narrated by a free dog who runs a park and considers himself its eyes. Fast, funny, and written in startlingly short sentences.

  About 250 pages. Newbery Medal 2024.

• The Iron Man · 1968

  Ted Hughes

  An iron giant walks out of the sea. Hughes was a poet, so every sentence has a beat; read it aloud and you hear it.

  About 100 pages. The first chapter is among the finest openings in children’s literature.

• Sarah, Plain and Tall · 1985

  Patricia MacLachlan

  A woman answers an advertisement for a wife and comes to live with a family on the prairie. Very short, very clean sentences.

  About 60 pages. Newbery Medal 1986.

• El Deafo · 2014

  Cece Bell

  A graphic memoir by a girl who is deaf. The panels show what imperfect hearing is like in a way prose cannot.

  About 240 illustrated pages.

非虚构

• Everything You Need to Know About Snakes · 2016

  DK

  A photographic reference from the DK Eyewitness line. Children read non-fiction out of curiosity rather than duty, and that curiosity teaches vocabulary faster than any coursebook.

  Designed to be dipped into, not read in order.

• A Child's Garden of Verses · 1885

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Poems for children. Verse teaches the rhythm of English in a way prose cannot, and rhythm is the thing Vietnamese learners most often lack when they speak.

  Meant to be read aloud. Read silently it loses half its point.

• Hidden Figures (Young Readers Edition) · 2016

  Margot Lee Shetterly

  The Black women mathematicians who computed trajectories for NASA. Science, told as story.

  About 230 pages. Plenty of aerospace terms, all of them explained.

• Ada Twist, Scientist · 2016

  Andrea Beaty

  A rhyming picture book about a girl who questions everything. The rhyme lets a beginner hear the rhythm of English.

  About 32 pages. Read it out loud.

• Grand Canyon · 2017

  Jason Chin

  A large-format picture book on the geology of the canyon. Its cutaway pages show geological time better than any paragraph could.

  About 56 pages. Beautiful, and genuinely informative.

• Who Was Albert Einstein? · 2002

  Jess Brallier

  A short biography from a series that now runs to hundreds of titles. The real benefit is that once you finish one, the next follows the same pattern and gets easier fast.

  About 100 pages. The series includes Marie Curie, Gandhi and Anne Frank.

• A Kids Book About Racism · 2019

  Jelani Memory

  Very little text, a sentence or two a page, on a hard subject said plainly. It shows that simple English can carry serious content.

  About 60 pages. Ten minutes.

小说

• The Giver · 1993

  Lois Lowry

  A society that abolished suffering by abolishing choice. The sentences are plain; the idea is not.

  About 180 pages. The best way into dystopian fiction.

• The Hobbit · 1937

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  A treasure hunt undertaken by a homebody. Tolkien writes as though telling it aloud by a fire, so its length never tires.

  About 300 pages. The vocabulary is older than you expect.

• The Lightning Thief · 2005

  Rick Riordan

  Greek myth relocated to modern America, narrated by a wisecracking teenager. The dialogue is close to real spoken English.

  About 375 pages. Five books in the series; finishing them builds real fluency.

• Coraline · 2002

  Neil Gaiman

  A door into a house just like her own, where her parents have buttons for eyes. Short, frightening, and very cleanly written.

  About 160 pages. Genuinely frightening; not a bedtime book.

• A Monster Calls · 2011

  Patrick Ness

  A boy whose mother is seriously ill, and a monster who comes to tell him three stories. Short lines with the rhythm of poetry.

  About 240 illustrated pages. Sad, but never sentimental.

• The Hunger Games · 2008

  Suzanne Collins

  Present tense, first person, every chapter ending on a hook. Engineered so you cannot put it down, which makes it ideal for building a reading habit.

  About 375 pages. It is violent.

• Long Way Down · 2017

  Jason Reynolds

  The whole book is in free verse, taking place across sixty seconds in a lift. Very few words, every one of them earning its place.

  About 300 pages, but you will finish it in an hour.

• The Crossover · 2014

  Kwame Alexander

  A verse novel about twin brothers and basketball. The rhythm imitates the game, which is an excellent way to hear English stress.

  About 240 pages. Newbery Medal 2015.

• Front Desk · 2018

  Kelly Yang

  A Chinese immigrant girl runs the front desk of her parents’ motel. Drawn from life, and honest about learning a new language as a child.

  About 290 pages. Especially apt if English is your second language.

• Ground Zero · 2021

  Alan Gratz

  Two storylines twenty years apart, one in New York in 2001 and one in Afghanistan in 2019. Short chapters, constant cutting.

  About 320 pages. Contains scenes of war.

• The Marvellers · 2022

  Dhonielle Clayton

  A magic school in the sky drawing on magical traditions from around the world rather than only Europe. A wide, fresh setting.

  About 400 pages. First of a trilogy.

• The Outsiders · 1967

  S. E. Hinton

  Two teenage gangs in Oklahoma. Hinton wrote it at sixteen, and the voice is exactly that age.

  About 190 pages. 1960s slang, but easy to infer.

• Refugee · 2017

  Alan Gratz

  Three refugee children in three eras — Germany 1938, Cuba 1994, Syria 2015 — and three storylines that finally touch.

  About 340 pages, in very short chapters.

• Ghost · 2016

  Jason Reynolds

  A boy who runs well because he is used to running away. Reynolds writes in real spoken English, and he writes for children who do not like reading.

  About 180 pages. First of four.

• The Book Thief · 2005

  Markus Zusak

  Nazi Germany, narrated by Death. That choice makes a familiar subject strange again.

  About 550 pages, but short sentences and plenty of white space.

非虚构

• Bomb: The Race to Build the World's Most Dangerous Weapon · 2012

  Steve Sheinkin

  The making of the atomic bomb told as a thriller — spies, sabotage, and men genuinely frightened of what they had made.

  About 270 pages. Non-fiction that reads at the speed of a novel.

• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind · 2009

  William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer

  A Malawian boy drops out of school when the money runs out, teaches himself from library books and builds a windmill for his village. He tells it himself, in English.

  About 300 pages. A young readers' edition exists.

• The Diary of a Young Girl · 1947

  Anne Frank

  The diary of a thirteen-year-old hiding in an Amsterdam attic. It is the writing of someone learning to write, and therefore easy to follow.

  About 350 pages. Read it with some historical context to hand.

• I Am Malala (Young Readers Edition) · 2014

  Malala Yousafzai

  The Pakistani girl shot for going to school. The young readers’ edition trims the politics and keeps the story.

  About 230 pages.

• Brown Girl Dreaming · 2014

  Jacqueline Woodson

  A memoir in verse about a 1960s childhood in the American South. Each poem is one memory, so it reads well in fragments.

  About 340 pages, very sparsely set.

• Fallout · 2021

  Steve Sheinkin

  The Cuban missile crisis told hour by hour. Same author as Bomb, and the same driving pace.

  About 350 pages.

• Born a Crime (Young Readers Edition) · 2019

  Trevor Noah

  A childhood in apartheid South Africa, told very funnily. Noah speaks six languages and writes brilliantly on how language decides which group accepts you.

  About 300 pages. The chapter on language is worth reading on its own.

• Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 1 · 2020

  Yuval Noah Harari

  The graphic adaptation of Sapiens. The pictures carry much of the argument, so the ideas stay hard while the text stays short.

  About 250 pages in full colour.

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Young Readers Edition) · 2013

  Rebecca Skloot

  A poor Black woman’s cells were taken without consent and became the basis of modern medicine. Scientific ethics told through one family.

  About 300 pages.

• Chasing Space (Young Readers Edition) · 2017

  Leland Melvin

  A professional footballer is injured and becomes a NASA astronaut. About changing direction when the first plan fails.

  About 190 pages.

小说

• Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

  George Orwell

  The novel that put doublethink and Big Brother into everyday English. Orwell wrote prose so clear he set down the rules for it: never use a long word where a short one will do.

  About 330 pages. Do not skip the appendix on Newspeak.

• Things Fall Apart · 1958

  Chinua Achebe

  Igbo society before and after the British arrived, told from inside it. Necessary because most of the English literature students meet is written from the other side.

  About 210 pages. Full of Igbo proverbs rendered straight into English.

• Of Mice and Men · 1937

  John Steinbeck

  Two migrant workers looking for a patch of land of their own. Short, largely dialogue, and Steinbeck’s sentences are worth imitating.

  About 110 pages. The shortest book in this band.

• To Kill a Mockingbird · 1960

  Harper Lee

  A trial in the American South seen through the eyes of a six-year-old looking back. The child’s voice keeps the language easy while the content is not.

  About 320 pages. The Southern dialect slows you down at first.

• Animal Farm · 1945

  George Orwell

  A fable about revolution, written in the plainest English Orwell could manage — and he did that deliberately.

  About 110 pages. The easiest way into Orwell.

• Lord of the Flies · 1954

  William Golding

  Boys marooned on an island organise themselves and then destroy themselves. The nature description is dense; the rest moves fast.

  About 220 pages.

• Never Let Me Go · 2005

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Three friends grow up at a strange boarding school. Ishiguro writes flatly, and the flatness is what makes it hurt.

  About 290 pages. Nobel laureate 2017.

• The Kite Runner · 2003

  Khaled Hosseini

  Friendship and betrayal in Kabul before and after the Taliban. The story pulls hard.

  About 370 pages. Contains severe violence.

• Klara and the Sun · 2021

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Narrated by an artificial friend observing humans she does not fully understand. The sentences are deliberately simple because the narrator’s thinking is.

  About 300 pages. Far easier to read than it is to think about.

• The Vanishing Half · 2020

  Brit Bennett

  Twin Black sisters, one of whom goes on living as a white woman. About identity, and the cost of denying where you came from.

  About 350 pages.

• Homegoing · 2016

  Yaa Gyasi

  One generation per chapter, from eighteenth-century Ghana to modern America. That structure makes it easy to read in pieces.

  About 300 pages.

• Piranesi · 2020

  Susanna Clarke

  A man lives in an endless house of statues and tides. Short, strange, and beautifully clear.

  About 250 pages, written as a journal.

• Fahrenheit 451 · 1953

  Ray Bradbury

  A society that burns books. Bradbury writes highly figurative prose that sometimes shades into poetry.

  About 190 pages. Denser in metaphor than it looks.

• The Handmaid’s Tale · 1985

  Margaret Atwood

  A theocracy in America strips women of everything. Atwood has said she put nothing in it that had not happened somewhere.

  About 310 pages. The appendix changes how you read the whole book.

• Pachinko · 2017

  Min Jin Lee

  Four generations of a Korean family in Japan. Especially apt for Asian readers: it is about being a minority next door to your own homeland.

  About 490 pages. Plain sentences, short chapters.

• Normal People · 2018

  Sally Rooney

  Two young Irish people fall in and out of love across four years. Rooney uses no quotation marks for speech; you adjust within pages.

  About 270 pages.

非虚构

• A Short History of Nearly Everything · 2003

  Bill Bryson

  The whole of natural science told as gossip — cosmology, geology, evolution. Bryson is funny without ever being unserious.

  About 550 pages. The chapters stand alone.

• The Elements of Style · 1959

  Strunk & White

  Under a hundred pages on writing an English sentence cleanly. If you are sitting IELTS Writing, this is the highest value-per-page book you will find.

  Thin, but meant to be read slowly and applied.

• Educated · 2018

  Tara Westover

  The memoir of someone who did not set foot in a classroom until seventeen and finished with a Cambridge doctorate. About how education can separate you from your family.

  About 340 pages.

• Between the World and Me · 2015

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

  A letter to his son about living in a Black body in America. The prose is beautiful and demanding: long sentences, many layers.

  About 150 pages, but slow going.

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind · 2011

  Yuval Noah Harari

  The whole history of our species in one volume. Some of the argument is contested, but the prose is exceptionally clear.

  About 450 pages. It works read a chapter at a time.

• Why We Sleep · 2017

  Matthew Walker

  The science of sleep, written for a general reader. Aptly aimed at students staying up to revise.

  About 360 pages. Some of its stronger claims have been contested since.

• Crying in H Mart · 2021

  Michelle Zauner

  A memoir about a mother, about grief, and about Korean food as a way of holding on to half an identity. Especially apt if you grew up between two cultures.

  About 240 pages.

• Braiding Sweetgrass · 2013

  Robin Wall Kimmerer

  A Native American botanist writes about plants through both science and traditional knowledge. Slow, lovely sentences.

  About 390 pages. Read it one essay at a time.

• The Sixth Extinction · 2014

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  On the mass extinction now under way. Kolbert reports from the field, so it stays concrete rather than abstract.

  About 320 pages. Pulitzer Prize 2015.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow · 2011

  Daniel Kahneman

  Two systems of thought, by a Nobel laureate in economics. Demanding, but it changes how you watch your own mind work.

  About 500 pages. Several of its studies later failed to replicate.

• An Immense World · 2022

  Ed Yong

  On how animals sense the world through faculties we lack. Beautifully written, and genuinely enlarging.

  About 450 pages.

小说

• The Great Gatsby · 1925

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  A mysterious rich man throws parties waiting for one woman. Under two hundred pages, and every sentence is built to be read aloud.

  About 180 pages. The sentences outshine the plot.

• Beloved · 1987

  Toni Morrison

  A formerly enslaved mother and the cost of having survived. Morrison's sentences demand a great deal and return more.

  About 320 pages. Not a book to skim.

• Mrs Dalloway · 1925

  Virginia Woolf

  One day in London, with thought sliding between people mid-sentence. Hard, but this is where the modern novel begins.

  About 200 pages. Read slowly, and do not worry about getting lost.

• The Remains of the Day · 1989

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  An English butler recounts his life while admitting nothing. A masterclass in the unreliable narrator.

  About 260 pages. Booker Prize 1989.

• Americanah · 2013

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  A Nigerian woman goes to America and comes back. Sharp on accent and identity: you become someone else when you change how you speak.

  About 480 pages.

• Small Things Like These · 2021

  Claire Keegan

  An Irish coal merchant discovers what is happening in the local convent. Very short, with nothing wasted.

  About 120 pages. The perfect one-evening novel.

• Shuggie Bain · 2020

  Douglas Stuart

  A boy cares for his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow. Booker Prize 2020. The Scots dialogue is thick.

  About 430 pages. Emotionally punishing.

• The Promise · 2021

  Damon Galgut

  A white South African family and a promise not kept, told across four funerals. Booker Prize 2021.

  About 290 pages. The point of view slides constantly, on purpose.

• The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida · 2022

  Shehan Karunatilaka

  A dead photographer has seven nights to settle his affairs, in the Sri Lankan civil war. Booker Prize 2022.

  About 400 pages. Narrated in the second person.

• Prophet Song · 2023

  Paul Lynch

  Ireland slides into totalitarianism, seen by one mother. Booker Prize 2023. No paragraph breaks for dialogue, which makes it hard going.

  About 320 pages. Deliberately suffocating.

• Orbital · 2023

  Samantha Harvey

  A day on a space station: six astronauts, sixteen sunrises. Booker Prize 2024. Almost plotless — it is really a long poem.

  About 140 pages. The shortest recent Booker winner.

• Flesh · 2025

  David Szalay

  The life of a Hungarian man told through the silences between events. Booker Prize 2025.

  About 350 pages. Very sparse dialogue.

• Demon Copperhead · 2022

  Barbara Kingsolver

  David Copperfield relocated to Appalachia during the opioid crisis. Pulitzer Prize 2023. A very strong narrating voice.

  About 550 pages. Long, but the voice carries you.

• Trust · 2022

  Hernan Diaz

  Four contradictory documents about the same New York financier. Pulitzer Prize 2023. You decide who is telling the truth.

  About 400 pages. Each section is written in a wholly different style.

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow · 2022

  Gabrielle Zevin

  Thirty years of friendship between two video game designers. The easiest read in this band.

  About 400 pages.

• A Little Life · 2015

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Four friends in New York across decades. Notorious for its brutality — check the content warnings first if you are sensitive.

  About 720 pages. The longest book on this list.

• Girl, Woman, Other · 2019

  Bernardine Evaristo

  Twelve British women, most of them Black, a chapter each. Written almost without conventional punctuation.

  About 450 pages. Joint winner of the Booker Prize 2019.

• The Nickel Boys · 2019

  Colson Whitehead

  A Florida reform school, based on a real one. The prose is restrained, and the restraint is what makes it land.

  About 210 pages. Pulitzer Prize 2020.

• Lincoln in the Bardo · 2017

  George Saunders

  Told entirely in fragments of speech from the dead and stitched historical quotation. Odd enough that it takes a few chapters to settle.

  About 340 pages. Booker Prize 2017.

• The Overstory · 2018

  Richard Powers

  Nine people and the trees that bind their lives. It opens as nine short stories and then becomes one.

  About 500 pages. Pulitzer Prize 2019.

非虚构

• Silent Spring · 1962

  Rachel Carson

  The book that started the modern environmental movement. Carson was a marine biologist who wrote like a poet and changed a country's law.

  About 300 pages. The first chapter reads like a short story.

• On Writing · 2000

  Stephen King

  Half memoir, half manual. Its advice on sentences applies just as well if English is your second language.

  About 290 pages. Surprisingly easy.

• Being Mortal · 2014

  Atul Gawande

  A surgeon on ageing and death, and on how medicine often treats the wrong problem. Clear and calm.

  About 280 pages.

• Say Nothing · 2018

  Patrick Radden Keefe

  A 1972 disappearance opens onto the whole of the Northern Irish conflict. Non-fiction at thriller pace.

  About 450 pages.

• Empire of Pain · 2021

  Patrick Radden Keefe

  The Sackler family and the American opioid crisis. Meticulously reported and thoroughly gripping.

  About 560 pages.

• The Anxious Generation · 2024

  Jonathan Haidt

  The argument that smartphones rewired adolescence. Worth reading — and so are the rebuttals, which are substantial.

  About 400 pages. Researchers still dispute how much of this is causal.

• Wintering · 2020

  Katherine May

  On the fallow seasons of a life, and accepting rather than fighting them. Slow, lovely, short chapters.

  About 250 pages.

• The Wager · 2023

  David Grann

  An eighteenth-century shipwreck, a mutiny, and two irreconcilable accounts. Non-fiction told as an adventure novel.

  About 340 pages.