L'Etranger

"Ebooks are great for learning to read in a foreign language and, as a good book to start out with, Five Books contributing editor Ben King has selected L’Etranger , by the great French existentialist author Albert Camus. Translators are constantly making difficult decisions about how to render words in English—including, even, L’Etranger’s opening lines—so it’s almost always better to read a great work of literature in the original, if you can. Normally, when you embark on reading books in a language you’ve studied, you need a dictionary to hand for the many new words you come across, which makes the going prohibitively slow and boring. With ebooks, you can have a dictionary open permanently. Whenever you come across a word, you simply press it and the translation—along with the full dictionary entry, to check idiomatic usage etc—appears instantly. If you studied French at school, there’s no reason not to have a go at L’Etranger . It’s reasonably short and the French is reasonably simple. Impress yourself!"