First Russian Reader for Beginners

I had been looking for a book like this to learn Russian with for quite some time. I have a book on Ancient Greek called Athenaze which dumps you right into reading actual paragraphs of text instead of simple sentences, and I found it much easier to stay interested in than most language books, which give you a sentence or two at a time. I could never find such a text for learning Russian until I came across this gem. It doesn't really teach grammar directly, and Russian grammar is complicated, but for building vocabulary it is leaps and bound ahead of traditional self teaching books. Now that the publisher has added all of the audio files to their website, the resource is even more phenomenal. A smooth introduction to reading Russian texts. The author uses progressively more difficult readings and brings in new vocab at a reasonable pace. Also (I was not aware of this when I bought it) there are MP3 audio files on their website to accompany the book and allow you to hear the sections read by a native speaker. A great deal for the price and I've found it very helpful in my Russian studies. Now that the audio is available, I can say that this is the best beginner's reading/listening book I have found. It has full audio, it has side-by-side text translations, and each writing uses only basic vocab which it then adds to with about 30 new words per lesson and accompanying definitions.