The present paper introduces Penguin Active Reading, a new series of English graded readers. These green-covered, beautiful books apparently stand out among various kinds of graded readers in that they are larger-sized and full-color with more exercises for comprehension.
It is true that the series consists mostly of some uninteresting, original works of fiction written with restricted vocabulary, and a number of abridged versions of already overly famous masterpieces from English and American literature, such as William Shakespeare’s great plays, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and so on, most of which are available from other publishers. Nevertheless, Penguin Active Reading has managed to include outstanding books from around the world, for example, the Chinese classic The Monkey King and the Greek counterpart The Odyssey, both of which are worthwhile and can be currently read as simplified graded readers only in this series. To the joy of Japanese readers, Penguin has rediscovered the value of Lafcadio Hearn’s book of Japanese ghost stories, Kwaidan, which is very popular in Japan but almost forgotten in Western countries. Penguin has also succeeded in finding curious materials from movies: E.T., Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Mr Bean, Sweeney Todd, The Full Monty, etc.
It is recommended that the students at Gunma National College of Technology use this paper as a guide and read as many books as possible in order to study English on their own.