Reading list
English reading practice: 15 stories for intermediate learners
The best reading practice is a story you want to finish. These fifteen are for the reader past the basics: real stories by Wilde, Tolstoy, O. Henry, Chekhov and Conan Doyle, and tales from India, none of them simplified.
15 stories, all free to read
Each is marked with its level, and they run from the easiest to the hardest. Read one a day: most take ten to twenty minutes. Press and hold a word you do not know and Doomreader saves it with its sentence, a vocabulary builder made of your own reading.
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1. Jack and the Beanstalk
by Joseph Jacobs · from English Fairy Tales
A cow sold for five beans, a beanstalk to the sky and a giant who smells the blood of an Englishman. The classic, told simply.
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2. The Happy Prince
by Oscar Wilde · from Children’s Stories
A golden statue and a swallow give everything away to the poor of the city. Wilde's most loved story, and a sad one.
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3. The Nightingale and the Rose
by Oscar Wilde · from Children’s Stories
A student needs a red rose for a girl, and a nightingale pays for it with her life. Short, beautiful and bitter.
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4. The Broken Pot
by Joseph Jacobs · from Indian Fairy Tales
A man daydreams about what he will buy with a pot of rice, and kicks it over. A tale from India in a few paragraphs.
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5. After Twenty Years
by O. Henry · from Short Fiction
Two friends promised to meet in New York twenty years later, and one of them is a policeman. O. Henry's neatest twist.
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6. The Three Hermits
by Leo Tolstoy · from Short Fiction
A bishop teaches three old hermits to pray properly, then sees them running across the sea after his ship. Tolstoy at his simplest.
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7. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
by Arthur Conan Doyle · from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
A lost hat, a Christmas goose and a stolen jewel. A gentle Sherlock Holmes case, a good first one.
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8. The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal
by Joseph Jacobs · from Indian Fairy Tales
A Brahman frees a tiger from a cage, and the tiger wants to eat him. A jackal judges the case. Short and very clever.
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9. Three Questions
by Leo Tolstoy · from Short Fiction
A king wants to know the right time, the right person and the right thing to do. Tolstoy's answer, in a few pages.
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10. How the Camel Got His Hump
by Rudyard Kipling · from Just So Stories
A camel says "Humph!" to every job and gets a hump for it. Kipling's Just So Stories, made to be read aloud.
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11. A Scandal in Bohemia
by Arthur Conan Doyle · from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
A king, a photograph and Irene Adler, the woman who beat Sherlock Holmes. The first of the short Holmes stories.
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12. The Monkey and the Crocodile
by Vishnu Sharma · from The Panchatantra
A crocodile's wife wants a monkey's heart, and the monkey has to think fast. A Panchatantra favourite.
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13. The Monkey’s Paw
by W. W. Jacobs · from The Lady of the Barge
A dried paw grants three wishes, and each is worse than the last. A horror story often read in schools, for older readers.
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14. Fat and Thin
by Anton Chekhov · from Short Fiction
Two school friends meet at a station, and one finds out the other has a much higher rank. Chekhov in three pages.
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15. The Little Match Girl
by Hans Christian Andersen · from Andersen's Fairy Tales
A poor girl selling matches on New Year's Eve, and the visions she sees by their light. Short and very sad.
Read it as a path: English for learners: Intermediate
Eight books for the reader who has the basics, easiest first: folk tales, Wilde, Sherlock Holmes, Dickens and the Panchatantra.
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Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.