30 Free Classic Books for English Learners (Project Gutenberg)

Project Gutenberg has more than 61,000 English books, and every one of them is free. That is wonderful, and it is also the problem. A learner who opens the catalogue sees Shakespeare next to 19th-century sermons and has no way of telling which book they can actually finish.

When I rebuilt ABC George around whole books, the first shelf I made was called “Start here”. It holds thirty books, picked because they are short, plainly written and widely read. This post is that shelf, with a note on each book. Every title links to its Project Gutenberg page, where you can read it in the browser or download it as EPUB, Kindle or plain text.

A few honest notes before the list. The word counts are my own: I counted the words in each book’s plain-text file on Gutenberg, leaving out Gutenberg’s header and licence, and rounded them. Introductions and notes inside the book are included. The notes on difficulty are my impressions. I did not use a readability score. The books are old. Some words have changed meaning, and a few books carry attitudes of their time. And they are in the public domain in the United States, which is what Gutenberg goes by. If you live somewhere else, the site asks you to check your own country’s rules.

Fables and fairy tales

These are the shortest pieces on the list. Most stories take a few minutes, so you can stop after one and still feel you finished something.

1. Aesop’s Fables, Aesop (a new translation). Hundreds of very short fables, each ending in its moral. The sentences are simple, and you already know many of the stories, which helps more than people expect. About 40,000 words.
2. The Aesop for Children, Aesop, with pictures by Milo Winter. The same fables retold for children, in even plainer English. If the first book feels heavy, start here. About 27,000 words.
3. Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin and many more in an older English translation. Each tale is short, but the language is a little more formal than the Aesop books. About 100,000 words.
4. Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Andersen. The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Little Match Girl and others. Some are a page long and some, like The Snow Queen, run to several chapters. About 56,000 words.
5. English Fairy Tales, Joseph Jacobs. Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Little Pigs and other British folk tales. Be aware that a few stories are written in dialect, with spellings you will not find in a dictionary. Skip those without guilt. About 62,000 words.
6. The Blue Fairy Book, Andrew Lang. Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and more, collected from many countries. It is a thick book, but every story stands alone. About 140,000 words.
7. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter. A picture book you can read in ten minutes. It is the easiest book on this list and a good way to test that everything works. About 1,000 words.
8. The Happy Prince, and Other Tales, Oscar Wilde. Five fairy tales, including The Selfish Giant. The English is beautiful and not difficult, and the stories are sadder than you might expect. About 17,000 words.
9. Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling. How the Leopard Got His Spots and other made-up explanations. They are written to be read aloud, with repetition and invented words, so they look easier than they are. About 31,000 words.
10. The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling. The Mowgli stories, plus Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and a few others. The animals often speak in an old style with “thou” and “thee”, which takes a chapter to get used to. About 52,000 words.

Short novels

Here the books become proper stories with chapters. Most are between 25,000 and 75,000 words. Sherlock Holmes is longer, but it is twelve separate stories.

11. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll. Short and famous. The plot is easy to follow, but the jokes are wordplay, so some lines will puzzle you even after you look up every word. That is normal. About 27,000 words.
12. Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll. The sequel, built around a game of chess. Similar length, even more wordplay. About 31,000 words.
13. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum. Plain, direct American English and a clear plot. If I had to recommend one first novel from this list, it would be this one. About 40,000 words.
14. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens. A short book in five chapters. Dickens writes long sentences, but the story carries you, and you probably know how it ends. About 29,000 words.
15. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. Twelve short stories, each one a complete case. One story is a good length for one evening. About 105,000 words.
16. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson. A pirate adventure with a lot of sailing words and pirate speech. Look up the ship words once and the rest moves quickly. About 70,000 words.
17. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain. The narration is easy. The dialogue is written in the speech of a small Missouri town, which is harder. Reading those lines aloud helps. About 74,000 words.

Longer children’s novels

These take longer, but they were written for young readers, so the sentences stay manageable. Many of them are episodic, so you can put them down between chapters and pick them up days later.

18. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell. The life of a horse, told by the horse. Plain first-person English and short chapters. About 60,000 words.
19. Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery. Anne talks a great deal and loves long words, so expect to look up more than usual. It is also one of the warmest books here. About 107,000 words.
20. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett. The narration is plain. Some characters speak Yorkshire dialect, which is spelled the way it sounds. About 83,000 words.
21. A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett. Clear English, a simple plot and short chapters. A comfortable read. About 67,000 words.
22. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame. A children’s classic with a rich, descriptive vocabulary. I would call it harder than its reputation. About 61,000 words.
23. Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie. The novel, not the play. The narrator makes a lot of ironic comments to the reader, and those are the tricky parts. About 48,000 words.
24. Five Children and It, E. Nesbit. Five children find a creature that grants one wish a day. Each chapter is one wish, so it is easy to read in pieces. About 54,000 words.
25. The Railway Children, E. Nesbit. Plain, gentle English and chapters that each tell one small event. About 60,000 words.
26. The Story of Doctor Dolittle, Hugh Lofting. Simple English and a short book. This is the original 1920 text, which contains racist passages that later editions removed. I think a reader should know that before starting. About 28,000 words.
27. Heidi, Johanna Spyri. An English translation of the Swiss novel. Plain language, and a story most people half know already. About 92,000 words.
28. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott. A long novel, and this edition has both parts, 47 chapters in all. The English is not hard. Worth it if you like stories about families. About 190,000 words.

Two older classics

These two were written in the early 1700s. The sentences are longer and some spellings and words are old. I put them last for that reason.

29. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe. Long paragraphs and very practical detail about surviving on an island. Slow at first, then oddly absorbing. About 120,000 words.
30. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift. Four voyages, and the first, to Lilliput, is a good read on its own. It is satire, so much of the fun depends on knowing what Swift was mocking. About 105,000 words.

How I would read them

Pick a book whose story you already know, even from a film or a picture book in your own language. Knowing the plot frees your attention for the English.

Do not look up every word. Look up a word when it comes back a second or third time, or when you have lost the thread of the story. The rest you can guess from context, and guessing is a large part of how reading teaches.

Stop when it stops being fun, and pick a different book. A book you drop after ten pages costs nothing here. They are free.

Reading them with a dictionary

All thirty of these books are on the “Start here” shelf in ABC George, the free English reader I make for iPhone and iPad. You download a book, and after that it reads offline. Long-press a word and the meaning appears over the page, and the word is saved with the sentence you found it in. A few days later it comes back in a short quiz. There are no ads and no account.

If you prefer to read on the Gutenberg site or on a Kindle, the links above work just as well. The important thing is to finish a book, whichever way you read it.