[Florian L.]

"Holes" by Louis Sachar (for the grammar school- quiet easy to read and an interesting story, somewhere in between a youth story and a criminal fiction)

"The Truman Show" for grammar school, too.

"Lord of the flies"- grammar school, too

"A Midsummer night´s dream" and "Romeo and Juliet" by Shakespeare. We dealed with the originial versions and they are hard to understand since it is an ancient grammmar and different semantic meanign of certain words. But nevertheless it can be a pleasure to read or especially to watch or perform it.

Partly we also worked with "Macbeth", "Much ado about nothing" and other Shakespearean works.

Moreover I keep in mind a very impressing short story by Shirley Jackson called "The Lottery". This readingis alwasy worth reading because it presents the cruelty of human kind.

All these readings I did for the finalisation of my A-Level.

For my own amusement I joined reading all the "Harry Potter"-books. They are very clearly structured, no dialects or accents (except of Hagrid´s role) and you realise that it is written for youths. Probably it might be a good English book for beginners.

In addition I have read "The Hobbit" and I am reading "The Lord of the Rings" on the moment. Both are enjoyable but slightly more difficult than "Harry Potter" but still well to read.

Now I am dealing with "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen (a Christmas present by my brother) but I have just started reading.

One book I did not enjoy was "Rainmaker" by John Grisham since the topic did not touch me hardly although it is an interesting writing style which produces a lot of suspense. And the most difficult reading I did was "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov which shows a really striking topic but the style is not enjoyable at all. What you remark is that Nabokov is not a native speaker either.
For my English studies I have read and am still reading a couple of research papers on Linguistic, Literary studies, Cultutral studies and didactics.

One thing I would like to emphasize is that I find it most crucial that there is no dialectic languagein the reading since it is too hard for a non-native speaker to get the plot and the main meaning if there is a hard slang in it.