2005-11-12 Fun reading in lost moments

The book starts with a number of potential useful phrases that can really be acquired from any language guide. But after that you get to a series of short self-contained texts that you can read with the help of the vocabulary in the back. These start with little stories and proceed with stories by Pushkin, Lermontov and the like, some USSR geography and history (yes, it's that old), the play "Medved" by Chechov, a few songs, poems etc.
The only drawbacks are that not every word is in the dictionary section and that you need to know some basic grammar, but apart from that, this is a really useful book for a beginner.