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 10 vocabulary words that I 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 10 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.
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're having some kind of difficulties, 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, thoroughly.
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.
Never more.
