Hello and welcome back to Real Easy English, the podcast, where we have real conversations in easy English to help you learn.
I'm Neil.
And I'm Becca.
You can find a video version with subtitles of this podcast on our website bbclearningenglish.com.
Hi Becca, how are you?
Yeah, I'm well, thank you Neil.
How about yourself?
I'm very good.
I'm excited because we're talking about books and reading today and I really love reading.
How about you?
Yeah, I like reading as well.
I do like reading.
How often do you read though?
Well, I read every day, but different types of things.
So I do.
I sit down and read for the longest period of time and the most serious kind of book when I'm travelling to and from work.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
When I'm at home I read stuff.
That's not so difficult, because usually at home I just fall asleep if I read.
Yeah, so I see a lot of people reading on the tube and I wish I could be.
That kind of person.
But for me, I only read when I'm in a relaxed environment.
So like sometimes I'll go to the park in summer or take a book to the beach.
So I do like reading, but I don't read as often as I feel like I should.
So, Becca, what kind of books do you like to read?
I like short books.
I sometimes feel a bit stressed when I see a long, thick book.
A lot of the books that I have on my shelf at home are poems.
Poetry is a form of literature that it's usually quite emotional and a lot shorter than a short story or like a novel, for example.
Yeah, poems.
They also sometimes have a lovely kind of sound quality to them if you read them loud, so some of the words might rhyme and they use a lot of metaphor.
So I really enjoy short stories or Books that have lots of poems in them.
How about yourself now?
What stories or what books do you enjoy?
I like fiction.
So fiction is when the story is not true.
It's made up by the writer.
And I like novels and novels are fiction books.
That's just one quite long story.
So, you know, probably more than 100 or 150 pages.
Otherwise, it's a short story and short stories are shorter.
Yes.
Have you ever read a nonfiction book?
So maybe something that's based on like a real event or like a biography from someone's perspective that you really enjoyed.
Yeah, I like reading books. biographies as well.
So a biography is somebody's life story.
I like biographies of musicians and people like that.
Yeah, I know you play guitar.
So music seems to be quite a hobby that you enjoy.
Yeah yeah yeah definitely um, and i like reading about the lives of people who've worked in music.
Do you like non-fiction?
Um, i prefer to watch non-fiction.
I prefer to watch documentaries.
Um, i haven't read many non-fiction books.
Do you have a favorite author?
Author an author is a person who writes books.
Yeah so, actually a lot of my favorite authors um, Some of them have written novels.
I prefer poets, so authors that have written poems, and I prefer them because they're quite moving and usually quite short as well.
So, I find that the authors that I enjoy the most write short things like poems or short stories.
Okay, let's recap some of the vocabulary we've heard in this podcast. starting with fiction.
Fiction is a type of writing where the story is not true.
It's made up.
And the opposite is nonfiction.
Nonfiction is a true story.
And our next word, novel.
A novel is a fiction and it's usually a longer story.
We also heard the word biography.
A biography is a type of book about a person's life.
And if that person wrote the story of their own life, it's called an autobiography.
We also mentioned poems.
Now, poems are a shorter piece of writing, even shorter than a short story or a novel.
And the sounds of the words and the ideas are very important in poetry.
That's it for this episode of Real Easy English.
But don't forget to go to our website.
That's bbclearningenglish.com where you can find a free worksheet.
And we'll be back next week with another conversation in Easy English.
Goodbye for now.
Goodbye.
