Btelo English
Read the classics sentence by sentence
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Every book below is out of copyright and free to read. What is hard to find out is which one you are ready for. Each title here is measured against a core of about 1600 everyday English words: the higher the score, the more of the book you can already read without stopping to look anything up.
| Book | In core | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm · 1812
|
86% |
| 2 |
Black Beauty
Anna Sewell · 1877
|
85% |
| 3 |
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe · 1719
|
85% |
| 4 |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll · 1865
|
84% |
| 5 |
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum · 1900
|
83% |
| 6 |
Andersen's Fairy Tales
Hans Christian Andersen · 1835
|
83% |
| 7 |
A Little Princess
Frances Hodgson Burnett · 1905
|
83% |
| 8 |
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett · 1911
|
83% |
| 9 |
Heidi
Johanna Spyri · 1881
|
82% |
| 10 |
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1883
|
82% |
| 11 |
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892
|
82% |
| 12 |
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins · 1868
|
82% |
| 13 |
Peter Pan
J. M. Barrie · 1911
|
81% |
| 14 |
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1902
|
81% |
| 15 |
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde · 1890
|
81% |
| 16 |
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift · 1726
|
81% |
| 17 |
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen · 1811
|
81% |
| 18 |
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen · 1813
|
81% |
| 19 |
Pollyanna
Eleanor H. Porter · 1913
|
80% |
| 20 |
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain · 1876
|
80% |
| 21 |
Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery · 1908
|
80% |
| 22 |
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott · 1868
|
80% |
| 23 |
The Jungle Book
Rudyard Kipling · 1894
|
79% |
| 24 |
White Fang
Jack London · 1906
|
78% |
| 25 |
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley · 1818
|
78% |
| 26 |
Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte · 1847
|
78% |
| 27 |
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte · 1847
|
78% |
| 28 |
Macbeth
William Shakespeare · 1606
|
75% |
| 29 |
Hamlet
William Shakespeare · 1603
|
75% |
| 30 |
The Call of the Wild
Jack London · 1903
|
75% |
| 31 |
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare · 1595
|
74% |
| 32 |
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare · 1597
|
73% |
Scores come from the same vocabulary the Btelo English app teaches, so the ladder matches the order the app introduces words in. Fairy tales and adventure stories sit at the top; Shakespeare, written in Early Modern English, sits at the bottom — a modern learner meets thou, thy and hath on the first page.