You can listen to these books while reading along!

This book list is curated from esl-bits. net. Go directly to the site for more choices. 

Dracula
​by Bram Stoker

Young lawyer Jonathan Harker journeys to Transylvania to meet with the mysterious Count Dracula only to discover that his nobleman client is a vampire who is thirsty for new blood. After imprisoning Harker in his castle, Dracula travels to England to seduce Jonathan’s fiancée, Mina, and the battle against an ineffable evil begins.
Led by philosopher and metaphysician Professor Van Helsing—Dracula’s most indomitable adversary—Harker, Mina, and a band of allies unite, determined to confront and destroy the Count before he can escape.
Bram Stoker ingeniously modernized gothic folklore by moving his vampire from traditional castle ruins to modern England. With Dracula, Stoker changed the vampire novel forever.

Holes
​by Louis Sachar

"Stanley Yelnats and his family have never had anything but bad luck, so it's not really a surprise to him when he is falsely accused and convicted of theft. Given the choice of jail or Camp Green Lake, Stanley chooses Green Lake because he's never been to camp before. Unfortunately, Camp Green Lake doesn't have a lake and it isn't really a camp. It's a juvenile detention facility. And to build character, the warden, who paints her fingernails with snake venom, has each "camper" dig a hole five feet deep by five feet wide by five feet long every day, even Saturdays and Sundays. What Stanley and the rest of the boys don't know is that the warden isn't just building character, she's looking for the lost buried treasure of outlaw, Kissing Kate Barlow. So begins Holes, a terrific, action filled story, full of great characters with strong voices, exciting, funny scenes and enough twists and turns to keep you reading non-stop to the end of the book. Louis Sachar has written a masterpiece full of humor, insight, wisdom and the triumph of the human spirit, and he deserves all the awards this book won. ​

Nightmares & Dreamscapes
​by Stephen King

This collection of stories is typical King--you may not like every single one, but you're sure to find at least one that scares you and one that makes you laugh. My favorite was "Dolan's Cadillac," a chilling tale of painstakingly-plotted revenge. Also intriguing is "The 10 O'Clock People," a must-read for every smoker who has cut back but who just can't seem to quit completely.
What makes King's writing particularly effective is that he tells tales of common people (like you and me) experiencing extraordinary things. When you put this book down, you can't help but wonder if the same thing will happen to you.
Steven King wrote:
"When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights. I knew even then, you see, that there were people in the world--too many of them, actually--whose imaginative senses were either numb or completely deadened, and who lived in a mental state akin to colorblindness."  [ADVISORY: Stories contain profanity and violence.]

The Great Gatsby
​by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies the American obsessions for money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream. The mysterious Jay Gatsby embodies the American notion that it is possible to redefine oneself and persuade the world to accept that definition. Gatsby's youthful neighbor, Nick Carraway, fascinated with the display of enormous wealth in which Gatsby revels, finds himself swept up in the lavish lifestyle of Long Island society during the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby is a mystical, timeless story of integrity and cruelty, vision and despair. The story of Jay Gatsby and his love for Daisy Buchanan is widely acknowledged to be the closest thing to the Great American Novel ever written.   

Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley

"Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of the drug somato fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. There is no violence and everyone is provided for, but Bernard Marx feels something is missing . . .
Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come.

Lord of the Flies 
​by William Golding

At first it seems as though it is all going to be great fun; but the fun before long becomes furious and life on the island turns into a nightmare of panic and death. As ordinary standards of behaviour collapse, the whole world the boys know collapses with them—the world of sports and homework and adventure stories—and another world is revealed beneath, primitive and terrible.Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies has established itself as a true classic.

House on Mango Street
​by Sandra Cisneros 

The language in Mango Street is based on speech. It's very much an antiacademic voice—a child's voice, a girl's voice, a poor girl's voice, a spoken voice, the voice of an American-Mexican.

What happened to you? Did you stay in school? Did you go to college? Did you have that baby? Were you a victim? Did you tell anyone about it or did you keep it inside? Did you let it overpower and eat you​? Did you wind up in jail? Did someone harm you? Did you hurt someone?

Will you go back to school, find somebody to take care of the baby while you're finishing your diploma, go to college, work two jobs so you can do it, get help from the substance-abuse people, walk out of a bad marriage, learn to be the human being you are not ashamed of? Did you run away from home? Did you join a gang? Did you get fired? Did you give up? Did you get angry?

You cannot forget who you are.

Big Mouth and Ugly Girl
​by Joyce Carol Oates

​High school student Matt Donaghy is considered an okay guy. He gets good grades, writes for the school paper, and is known for his witty, if immature, humor. Students and teachers seem to like him. But one day he says something that makes a few classmates think he's out to bomb the school. The school principal is notified, the police are called in, and rumors are abuzz. Even his buddies doubt his innocence, and none of the guys come forward in his defense. Only the school renegade, the somewhat frightening Ursula Riggs, a girl who Matt barely knows, is willing to speak up on his behalf. But even if Ursula can help Matt clear up this misunderstanding, will life ever be the same again? 

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
by Stephen Chbosky

Charlie is a freshman. And while's he's not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. He's a wallflower--shy and introspective, and intelligent. We learn about Charlie through the letters he writes. Charlie encounters the same struggles that many kids face in high school--how to make friends, the intensity of a crush, family tensions, a first relationship, exploring sexuality, experimenting with drugs--but he must also deal with his best friend's recent suicide. Charlie's letters take on the intimate feel of a journal as he shares his day-to-day thoughts and feelings. 

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
So begins Pride and Prejudice, one of the most universally loved and admired English novels. Although published as a popular entertainment in 1813, the artistry of Jane Austen transformed this effervescent tale of rural romance into a witty, shrewdly observed satire of English country life that is now regarded as one of the principal treasures of the English language.
In a remote village in Hertfordshire, England, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet -- a country squire of no great fortune and his scatterbrained wife -- must marry off their five vivacious daughters. At the heart of this all-consuming enterprise are the headstrong second daughter Elizabeth and her aristocratic suitor Fitzwilliam Darcy, two lovers in whom pride and prejudice must be overcome before love can bring the novel to its magnificent conclusion. 

To Kill a Mockingbird 
​by Harper Lee 

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.

Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this story by Harper Lee claims universal appeal. Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story, but today it is regarded as a masterpiece of modern American literature.
​

Riding the Bullet 
by Stephen King

The story is vintage Stephen King. Alan Parker, 21, learns that his beloved mother has had a stroke and hitchhikes through rural Maine to see her. On the way he's picked up first by a horrid old man, then by someone far more awful: a dead young man --the dead man, George Staub, drives a Mustang, and as the corpse pulls on a cigarette, Alan sees "little trickles of smoke escape from the stitched incision on his neck." Staub offers Alan a terrible choice - a choice of life or death. Stephen King's simple, potent prose skims along spurred by high suspense, it roils like a classic nightmare: a moonlit graveyard, howling wind, rising mist; but King spins them all with a wicked modern touch.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez 

Julia Alvarez’s brilliant and buoyant and beloved novel gives voice to four sisters recounting their adventures growing up in two cultures.
In this novel, the García sisters— Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía —and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after their father’s role in an attempt to overthrow a tyrannical dictator is discovered. They arrive in New York City to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean. In the wild and wondrous and not always welcoming U.S.A., their parents try to hold on to their old ways, but the girls try find new lives.
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents sets the sisters free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home—and not at home—in America.

Slaughterhouse Five or 
​The Children's Crusade
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Slaughterhouse Five" is one of those great books that defies easy classification. A blend of science fiction, satire, and war fiction, it is both fun and grim. The book tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist, World War II veteran, and apparent UFO abductee who becomes "unstuck in time." We accompany Billy back and forth from his wartime experiences to his encounters with aliens and to other events in his remarkable life.
The book has an intriguing structure. Vonnegut's prose is a joy to experience: he combines a sort of Hemingwayesque simplicity with a knack for rendering startling, and often ridiculous, details. He is often very ironic and funny. Along the way, he explores ideas about free will and the nature of time. Much of the book is about writing itself.
"Slaughterhouse Five" is sad, surreal, whimsical, brutal, and oddly gentle. It's a remarkable book; I highly recommend it.
​
NOTE: Slaughterhouse-Five contains adult themes and adult language. It is not for children or adults with tender sensibilities

The Outsiders
by S.E. Hinton

A heroic story of friendship and belonging
No one ever said life was easy. But Ponyboy is pretty sure that he's got things figured out. He knows that he can count on his brothers, Darry and Sodapop. And he knows that he can count on his friends—true friends who would do anything for him, like Johnny and Two-Bit. And when it comes to the Socs—a vicious gang of rich kids who enjoy beating up on "greasers" like him and his friends—he knows that he can count on them for trouble. But one night someone takes things too far, and Ponyboy's world is turned upside down...
S.E. Hinton's 1967 classic, written when she was 16 and published when she was a freshman in college, is as appropriate and realistic today as it was then. No character is all good or all bad, and when the final violent confrontation erupts, listeners are sorrowful but not shocked. This moving story is excellent for all ages.

The Girl from Everywhere
by Heidi Heilig

​As the daughter of a time traveler, Nix has spent sixteen years sweeping across the globe and through the centuries aboard her father’s ship. Modern-day New York City, nineteenth-century Hawaii, other lands seen only in myth and legend—Nix has been to them all. But when her father gambles with her very existence.
If there is a map, Nix’s father can sail his ship, The Temptation, to any place and any time. But now that he’s uncovered the one map he’s always sought—1868 Honolulu, the year before Nix’s mother died in childbirth—Nix’s life, her entire existence, is at stake. No one knows what will happen if her father changes the past. It could erase Nix’s future, her dreams, her adventures . . .
"The Girl from Everywhere blends fantasy, history, and a modern sensibility with breathless adventure, a multicultural cast, and an enchanting romance."

The Hobbit
by J.R.R. Tolkien

Bilbo Baggins is an upstanding member of a "little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded dwarves." He is, like most of his kind, well off, well fed, and best pleased when sitting by his own fire with a pipe, a glass of good beer, and a meal to look forward to. Certainly this particular hobbit is the last person one would expect to see set off on a hazardous journey; indeed, when Gandalf the Grey stops by one morning, "looking for someone to share in an adventure," Baggins fervently wishes the wizard elsewhere. No such luck, however; soon 13 fortune-seeking dwarves have arrived on the hobbit's doorstep in search of a burglar, and before he can even grab his hat or an umbrella, Bilbo Baggins is swept out his door and into a dangerous adventure.

Joyland
by Stephen King

What a smart, sweet, spooky, sexy gem of a story. In this story of Devon Jones--"a twenty-one-year-old virgin with literary aspirations … and a broken heart"--who spends the summer at Joyland amusement park in North Carolina. Devon makes new friends, proves himself to the hard-core carnival workers, saves a girl’s life, befriends a dying boy (who has a secret gift), and falls for the boy’s protective, beautiful mother.
Devon learns about the woman who had been killed in the Funhouse, whose ghost still haunts Joyland. The second half of the story gets spookier, spinning into a murder mystery--but also a love story, and a coming-of-age-story, with some supernatural fun woven in.