To expand your vocabulary, books of any kind are good to read.
For adults, however, it can be difficult to find books that are both easy and interesting.
Harry Potter may be fun to read — but at 4,224 pages it requires a lot of time without offering a lot of useful vocabulary (unless you plan to attend wizarding school).
The same can be said for a lot of other famously easy books in English.
Instead, I usually recommend these books for my adult students:
- Being There by Jerzy Kosiński
- Heating & Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly
- The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
- The Giver by Lois Lowry
In addition to being relatively easy and short (under 200 pages), they feature situations and conversations that are typical for adults (like answering the phone, making small talk, and discussing health or relationship problems). They can also be enjoyable to read – with beautiful writing, interesting characters, and entertaining plots.
Easy English Books for Grown Adults
Being There | Jerzy Kosiński
Just 160 pages, Being There is a satirical novel by a Polish-born writer who learned English in his twenties, after emigrating to the United States.
The novel is about a gardener named Chance, who works for a wealthy old man and has lived his entire life on the man’s estate. When the old man dies, Chance is forced to leave the house and enter the ‘outside world’, where people mistake his simple words for deep wisdom. Powerful people begin asking ‘Mr. Gardiner’ for advice, and he soon becomes an advisor to the U.S. President.
The novel was also made into a film with the same simple style as the book, giving you a second opportunity to practice your English listening skills:
Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs | Beth Ann Fennelly
For readers who enjoy stories about real life, Heating & Cooling is a nice little collection of personal memories (called memoirs in book form) by the poet Beth Ann Fennelly.
At 111 pages, her memoirs range in length from ten words to three pages and cover a variety of ‘adult’ topics, like married life and social interaction.
Like poetry, the pleasure of these brief stories is in their emotion, imagery, and humor, rather than plot, setting, or characters.
You can also learn some interesting things about the English language (for example, that writer and rider have the same pronunciation in American English, and that the word story means both ‘a short narrative text’ and ‘a level of a building’).
The New York Trilogy | Paul Auster
Published in 1987, The New York Trilogy is a collection of three short crime novels written in a minimalist style, with simple situations and very few characters. Like fairy tales, but with criminals and detectives instead of princes and talking animals.
In the excerpt below, a character named Daniel Quinn receives a phone call from someone who wants to speak to a detective named Paul Auster. Quinn pretends to be Paul Auster, and becomes embroiled embroiled: to become involved in a difficult situation in a mysterious crime:
One entertaining aspect of Auster’s stories is that they’re highly modern (indeed, postmodern) and break a lot of traditional ‘rules’ about storytelling. In the excerpt above, Auster has made himself a character in his own story.
Easy English Books for Young Adults
In recent decades, books for teenagers have also become popular with grown-upsgrown-up: an informal word to describe an adult (often used by children, or when talking to children) since they tend to be more exciting — with stories set in future eras, exotic lands, or different worlds.
If the books above sound a little too boring for your taste (as they tend to be, for young people), then you may enjoy one of these books instead.
Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury
Written in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 imagines a future where books are illegal and television is the main source of information and entertainment.
The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman whose job is not to stop fires but rather to start them. One day he meets a new neighbor, a teenage girl named Clarisse, and they engage in a bit of small talk:
You can learn more about the political themes and historical context of the book in the video below (but beware of spoilersspoiler: a piece of information about a book, film, or television show that may ruin your enjoyment of the story, if you have not already read or watched it):
The House on Mango Street | Sandra Cisneros
Just 103 pages, The House on Mango Street is an award-winning and much-loved coming-of-age novel that is frequently studied in schools and universities in the United States.
It tells the story of a 12-year-old girl and her Mexican-American family through brief texts (like those in the excerpt below) that focus on different aspects of their lives over the span of one year.
While that may not sound very exciting, you can learn a lot of useful vocabulary for daily life (or the IELTS Speaking Test) from its poetic, diary-style chapters:
The Giver | Lois Lowry
A famous 130-page novella for teens, The Giver can be found in many classrooms in Australia, Canada, and the U.S.
Although it’s banned from some schools (due to references to violence and sexuality in the story), the story shouldn’t be too shocking for readers who have experienced pubertypuberty: the stage in a young person’s life when s/he changes from a child into an adult, and develops the ability to have children and/or ever watched a news program.
You may even enjoy reading about a future/fantasy world where crime, poverty, unemployment, and illness are non-existent. A perfect world, for almost everyone. Doesn’t that sound nice?
To further practice your English, you can watch the film version from 2014. (Warning: the video below contains a few spoilers.)
Photo by Nong Vang
