the most important part about choosing a book to read to practice and improve your english skills is to select something that you will enjoy reading. do you like thrillers? romances? crime novels? pick something that you will want to read or it will become a chore.
the two other considerations are language style and complexity. language style is mostly about time and location. learning english, you will notice that all books have grammatical oddities in them. some of this is dialectic, some because english changes so rapidly that it is hard to publish something and know it will still use modern english grammar and structure in ten or fifteen years – it won’t. the general rule is to find something written in the last ten or twenty years by a writer of modern (non-dialectic) english. these lists are a good place to start, as are the bestseller lists of major american newspapers like the new york times.
if you are an advanced learner, the complexity is not really an issue. download a sample of the book you are thinking of reading and read the first few pages. if they are incredibly difficult for you, select another book. if they are very easy, this book may not be useful for you to expand your skills. before committing to reading a book, make sure it’s right for your level. if you don’t find it interesting after a few pages, pick something else. there’s no shame in starting a book and moving on to something else, only in giving up reading in general.
ready to browse the lists?