What books should I read to improve my English

True! Nervous -- very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am! But why will you say that

I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses -- not destroyed -- not dulled them. Above

all was the -- oh, hey guys. This is Alex. Thanks for clicking, and welcome to this lesson

on "What books should I read?!" So very often, students are asking me -- especially at the

intermediate and advanced levels -- they say, "Alex, or Teacher, I want to improve my English.

I want to improve my vocabulary. Can you give me some suggestions of books and authors to

check out? What's easy enough for me, but challenging enough so that I can improve?"

Today I'm going to give you a couple of book suggestions. In addition to that, I'm also

going to give you ten vocabulary words that I've picked out from the books.

So today, to start out, I was reading "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" by famous American

author Edgar Allan Poe. And this is actually an excellent, excellent collection of stories.

However, it might be a little bit too advanced for intermediate speakers, and even for advanced

speakers it poses a challenge. It poses a challenge for native speakers. So what do

you do if you're interested in reading Edgar Allan Poe or other classic authors, but you

might find the language of the real book to be too challenging or too difficult. Well,

thankfully, there are, actually, a couple of companies out there who make graded versions

of books such as the Edgar Allan Poe "Tales of Mystery and Imagination", Sherlock Holmes,

"To Kill a Mockingbird", "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" -- any number of classics you can think

of. And I'm going to show you a couple of those today. So give me one moment.

Okay. This is a Penguin Reader. So Penguin Readers are really, really excellent because

what they do is they take famous authors, famous books and they make them accessible

to an English as a second language learner. So, again, if you're interested in starting

out to read English, this is an excellent way of doing that. So today, I'm going to

give you two suggestions. And if you're interested in horror, if you're interested in mystery,

if you're interested in detective stories, you really can't do much better than Edgar

Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Now, you might not be familiar with the name Arthur

Conan Doyle, but you are probably familiar with the name Sherlock Holmes. And Arthur

Conan Doyle is, actually, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Now, these two books

here, "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" by Edgar Allan Poe and "Sherlock Holmes Short

Stories" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are both short story collections. So if you feel a

little bit intimidated by reading a complete novel, another thing that's great about these

is a lot of these stories are five pages, six pages. So you can sit down -- you can

learn a lot of vocabulary, a lot of grammatical structure just with six pages of reading,

and you'll feel that you have read a complete story, okay?

So, again, I really, really recommend these, especially if you're into murder mysteries,

detective fiction, and you want something that is very short but gives you enough so

that you can learn a lot. And what I'm going to do now is, actually, give you guys ten

vocabulary words that I have chosen from these two books, and I'll give you the definitions.

We'll talk about some examples, and then you can finish the quiz and test your understanding,

as usual. All right. Let's get to it. Okay, so the first word that we have here

is "disturb". Now, "disturb" is a verb which means to interrupt someone or to make someone

nervous or a little scared. So for example, if you see a bloody crime, like in a Sherlock

Holmes story, that might disturb you; it might make you feel a little weird, a little nervous.

Someone can also come in and "disturb" you while you are working.

The next word is "horizon". "Horizon" is a noun, and when you think of a picture of the

ocean, of the sea, and you think of the sun in the back, the "horizon" is that line; it's

the line where the land or the sea seems to meet the sky. Okay? So it's that line in a

picture. The next word is "immense". This is an excellent

vocabulary word. This is an adjective which just means extremely large. So you can say,

"The buildings in New York are immense" -- extremely large.

The next word is "mercy", which is a noun. Now, "mercy" is something that you show towards

a person or that you have for someone. So "mercy" is "kindness and a willingness to

forgive". So for example, if you're fighting with someone and you're beating them and they

say, "Stop! Stop! Stop! Have mercy! Show me mercy!" This means, like, "Show sympathy for

me! Be kind! Please forgive me! I give up!" Okay? You might see this a lot in, like, war

movies and stuff like Gladiator and all that stuff. Okay.

"Misery", "misery" is a noun. The adjective is "miserable". So "misery" just means "great

unhappiness", so you can live in "misery". And there's actually a book by Stephen King

of the same title, so you can check that out if you're into Stephen King and stuff like

that. So the next word is "consult". This comes

from "consultation", which is the noun form. "Consult" is to ask for advice or information.

So in the Sherlock Holmes stories, people with problems come to consult with Sherlock

Holmes. If you are having some kind of difficulty, some kind of physical illness, you should

probably consult a doctor. The next word is "forge". Now, to "forge"

is to illegally copy something. Usually, we talk about "forging money" or "forging a person's

signature". So maybe when you were a child and you had to get permission to go somewhere,

but you knew your parents would not let you go there, maybe you would forge your parents'

signature illegally -- copy it, essentially. Don't do that.

"Soil" -- okay. "Soil", we're talking about the noun, which is the top layer of earth

where plants grow. So if you want to start a garden in your house, you have to go and

buy some soil, okay? "Tremble": This is a verb which means "to

shake because of worry or fear or excitement". You can also tremble because you're cold,

okay? Very, very useful verb. And finally, a word that most of my students

in my life have had a difficult time pronouncing, and it's "thoroughly", "thoroughly". So "thur-oh-ly".

Okay? This is an adverb which means "completely" or "wholly". So "I was thoroughly surprised

to hear the news" -- completely. "The police searched the room thoroughly", okay?

So let's just do a quick listen and repeat with pronunciation of this vocab, guys. So

from the top: disturb, horizon, immense, mercy, misery, consult, forge, soil, tremble, thoroughly.

Okay, now that you have looked at these vocabulary items, you might be interested to know, "Where

can I get the books that Alex is talking about?" Attached to this video, you will find a link

to the Amazon website. You will also find a link to a list of authors who are in the

public domain. Now, what this means is that there are authors whose works, whose fiction

is freely available on the Internet for everyone to read because the copyright is so old. And

finally, you will also find a link to the Penguin Readers website, which you can check

out if you're interested in finding out which books are available in the Penguin Readers

collection. All right, guys. So, as always, you can test

your knowledge of this material by doing the quiz on www.engvid.com, and don't forget to

subscribe to my YouTube channel. Nevermore!