Hi Becky, I think you can read the children's books which have both characters and pinyin at first.Pinyin will help you to know the correct sound and tone for each character. In the meantime, i am sure you will know more and more characters. For the fun books, i recommend ：《金色的鼹鼠》、《梦中的渡渡鸟》、《月光下的座头鲸》、《垂钓鱼的月亮》and《了不起的狐狸爸爸》。

郑渊洁和秦文君的童话书都不错。值得一看。我就是看着他们的书过来的。 Works by Zheng Yuanjie and Qin wenjun are my favourites.

Reading children's books is really boring when you are not a kid anymore. I would suggest you instead to get some texts online in the topic you are really interested in and then add pinyin annotations to the text in one of the annotators available on the web. Ok, here http://mandarinspot.com/annotate In this case you text can be much more complicated then your kids' book because annotator will also show you a translation of a word when you point it with a mouse. This particular annotator can also produce nice printouts with vocabulary list after the text, so you can read your stories offline.

When I was a little girl,I read many fairy tales,As they are for children so it´s easy to understand.Like《格林童话》《安徒生童话》and in China there're many diffrent kinds of books.you can also find a series of small green-covered books named《书虫》系列.Half of a page is in Chinese and the other is English,it may help you with ur study of Chinese.

Hello Becky, I was looking for the same and I wondered if I could find online . I occasionally found that site : http://pinyin.info/news/2008/online-texts-in-hanyu-pinyin/ It includes some simple stories to read to increase one's vocabulary with a parallel translation in English,but it is in pinyin not hanzi. You can convert the pinyin into hanzi,so you have the pinyin, hanzi and English translated text. I am looking for online simple readings in the 3 versions at the same time ,but could hardly find .If Chinese could recommend something ? :)