Dickens wrote for people who read aloud, in instalments, with time. Nietzsche wrote in fragments that assume the argument he made two books ago. Tolstoy gives everyone four names. Reading the same paragraph five times is the normal result.
So: read the real text, unaltered. When a paragraph slides off, tap it and get the same paragraph in today’s English, right underneath. Ask who someone is and get an answer drawn only from the pages you have actually turned. 59 books, free and complete, straight from Project Gutenberg.
Sentences that run for half a page and a cast of forty. The trouble is rarely the words — it is keeping hold of the thread.
The gentlest way in. Short, and you already know the shape of it.
First person, clear plot. The best full-length starting point.
His shortest novel.
Two narrators, a lawsuit nobody understands. Keep the tracker on.
Unfinished — he died mid-sentence, more or less.
Not hard because of vocabulary — hard because each aphorism assumes an argument he made somewhere else. Read slowly; one section is a full sitting.
Short, furious, and unusually direct for him.
He called it a summary of his whole philosophy. Best first Nietzsche.
Three connected essays — the closest he gets to a normal book.
Written as scripture parody. Beautiful, and the hardest thing here.
His autobiography. Chapters titled 'Why I Am So Clever'.
Assembled from notebooks after his death — fragmentary by nature.
The prose is plain. The problem is the cast — every character has three names and a title, and they rotate. This is what the tracker was built for.
A novella. Read it in one evening and see how the tools feel.
Turn the character tracker on before chapter one. You will need it.
580 characters, four families, a war. Recaps are not optional here.
His first book. Start of the autobiographical trilogy.
Dense interiority and a lot of unmarked irony. The narrator is often not telling you the truth, and the plain-English pass will say so.
The most readable of the six. A good place to begin.
Nested narrators, two generations, everyone named Catherine or Heathcliff.
Short and clear. The easiest Brontë by a distance.
Long stretches of untranslated French — tap them and they resolve.
Every tool is a switch. Turn them all off and you have a clean, well-set e-reader; turn them on one at a time and find the level of help you actually want. Nothing here rewrites the book you are reading — the original text is always what is on the page.
One paragraph lit, the rest faded. Your eye cannot slide back up the page, which is what causes the re-reading in the first place.
The same paragraph in current words, same length, same events, same irony. A crutch to lean on for one paragraph, not a replacement to read instead.
Select a name, get an answer built only from the text behind your bookmark. It cannot spoil you because it has not read ahead either.
Press and hold any word — or click it on a laptop — for how it sounds, what the dictionary says including the senses that died out, and what it means right here.
For the ninety-word sentence with six subordinate clauses: the main clause, then everything hanging off it, labelled.