How to read your first English book without giving up
Choose a short book one level below what you think you can manage, and read it with a translation under every sentence rather than a dictionary in your hand. The goal of the first book is to finish it, not to understand every word.
Why most first books are abandoned
The first English book almost always fails the same way. You open a classic everyone recommends, look up four words in the first paragraph, lose the thread, and by page three you are reading the dictionary rather than the story. The problem is not your English. It is that a novel is a long text, and any long text read one unknown word at a time turns into work.
Two things fix this: the right length, and the right kind of help. A short book keeps the finish line in sight. Help at the level of the sentence, not the word, keeps you inside the story.
Pick shorter and easier than you think
If you are B1, start with something rated A2 or an easy B1, under about 25,000 words. It should feel slightly too easy on page one. That feeling disappears by page twenty, because tiredness catches up with everyone, and a book that started easy is a book you can still read in the evening after work.
The short books shelf lists the shortest titles in the library, shortest first, and every level has its own page. Good first books that people actually finish: The Happy Prince and Other Tales, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Canterville Ghost, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland once you want something longer.
Read the sentence, not the word
The method is simple. Read a sentence in English. If you understood it, keep going. If you did not, look at its translation, which on Booklern sits directly under the English, then read the English sentence once more and move on. Do not stop to record the word, do not open a dictionary, do not reread the paragraph.
This feels like cheating to people trained on dictionaries. It is not. You are still reading English, and the translation does what a good teacher does: it confirms the meaning and gets out of the way. The words you meet often enough will stick on their own, which is the subject of another guide.
Use the audio
Have the passage read aloud to you at least once per session. Hearing the sentence while you see it links the written word to the spoken one, and it sets a pace. Readers who listen tend to stop subvocalising every syllable and start taking in phrases, which is what fluent reading is.
A schedule that survives real life
Twenty minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday. At a learner's pace of around 150 words a minute with the translation there to glance at, twenty minutes is about 3,000 words, so a 15,000-word book takes a week. Finish it, write the title down somewhere, and open the next one the same day. The second book is always easier than the first, and by the third you are a person who reads in English.