>>Using a program is boring but more efficient if you don't have much time. Then you can read a bunch of novels later if you want.>>
I see your point, I really do. But most of my recommendations, you will notice, are either essential reference works (Fowler, the King James) or else fine, clear prose that is merely of novella length (Huxley, Orwell, Sterne, Stoker) or very short, segmented pieces (Goldsmith, Stevenson, Wodehouse, Le Fanu, the fairy tales). My list gives very little in English that's on the vast scale of a Balzac or Proust "door-stopping brick" (there's only Kesey and Tristram Shandy, really, which I said should come later, and I couldn't decide which translation of Don Quixote to tilt for). Most of my list, indeed, offers reading as a sporting proposition, as attested by the presence of The Third Policeman :
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'You can safely infer that you are made of atoms yourself and so is your fob pocket and the tail of your shirt and the instrument you use for taking the leavings out of the crook of your hollow tooth. Do you happen to know what takes place when you strike a bar of iron with a good coal hammer or with a blunt instrument?'
'What?'
'When the wallop falls, the atoms are bashed away down to the bottom of the bar and compressed and crowded there like eggs under a good clucker. After a while in the course of time they swim around and get back at last to where they were. But if you keep hitting the bar long enough and hard enough they do not get a chance to do this and what happens?'
'That is a hard question.'
'Ask a blacksmith for the true answer and he will tell you that the bar will dissipate itself away by degrees if you persevere with the hard wallops. Some of the atoms of the bar will go into the hammer and the other half into the table or the stone or the particular article that is underneath the bottom of the bar.'
'That is well-known,' I agreed.
'The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.'
I let go a gasp of astonishment that made a sound in the air like a bad puncture.
'And you would be flabbergasted at the number of bicycles that are half-human almost half-man, half-partaking of humanity.'
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Of course your mechanical program will probably help. Doubtless you are being very practical and helpful. (Perhaps by analogy it's the difference between your recommending Music Master software and my advising that the questioner should listen to the symphonies of Haydn or the concertos of Medtner.) My top advice to "lazy-guy" was that he should practise English conversation in person whenever possible. Those books come a close second, to my mind. He never did indicate he was a foreign speaker, but either way it's crucial to interact in "live" English for constant improvement and enrichment. Since our questioner is taking the time to learn advanced vocabulary (whatever that may mean, we all seem to have somewhat different definitions for it) I'm not going to assume he lacks for time (or a desk). Fretting over having "no time" is very unwise, a ghastly self-fulfilling prophecy that will prove true enough and soon enough.
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"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places." - Flann O'Brien
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My idea was, this is an heirloom garden, an entire life's worth of reading to benefit everyone's English, particularly as regards style ~ an underrated aspect of learning any language, I think. Along with Gibbon and Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne is considered the consummate stylist ~ he was a favourite author cherished by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Goethe, and Virginia Woolf, who wrote of Tristram Shandy :
"So, finally, we get a book in which all the usual conventions are consumed and yet no ruin or catastrophe comes to pass; the whole subsists complete by itself, like a house which is miraculously habitable without the help of walls, staircases, or partitions."
I don't wish to harp on the one string about the Bible (you'll suspect I'm selling religion, which I'm not) but such a book (and especially an annotated edition with excellent footnotes, as with Shakespeare or Alice) discovers for the reader the original context of common phrases which are in present use, from "the writing is on the wall" and "a fly in the ointment" to "the apple of my eye" and "the salt of the earth".
Edgar F. Shannon writes of the King James Bible (in The Sewanee Review, 1912) :
"An ignorance of the Biblical style, unfortunately sometimes boasted of, confesses a culture of veneering instead of the solid substance. Yet because there has arisen in Egypt a new King who knows not Joseph is no reason that we should allow ourselves to be enslaved.
"Notwithstanding this apparent tendency to neglect the Bible, it still holds its place as the single greatest example of English prose style. Leaving out, if we can, consideration of its sacred and spiritual aspects and treating it merely as a piece of literature, we may say that the vitality of the influence of the Bible not only upon literature but also upon the popular speech is due largely to the variety of its literary forms, to the vividness and beauty of its style, and to the richness and excellence of its idioms."
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H. L. Mencken on Archaic English Words :
http://www.bartleby.com/185/11.html
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