I'd like to read some story made up of the 150 most commonly used Chinese words. Do you have any suggestions?

The Chinese Breeze Graded Reader series does this, except they start with 300 characters. Haven't heard of anything else that explicitly seeks to minimize the number of characters in the stories like that. We have some of the Chinese Breeze lists available already.

Thank you

I think the story "The Lady in the Painting" does that too. It has a neat new version that comes in simplified or traditional characters with a cd-rom that has both version and can read you the story paragraph per paragraph.
There are also vocabulary lists and some grammar explanations and some excercises in both the book and the cd-rom.
The story itself is modelled after old Chinese folk tales.

edit: I think they also start at 300 characters.

I'm almost done with the first Harry Potter book but I'm pretty sure the only reason I understand what is going on is that I've already read it in English and seen the movie. I think I'm definitely going to look into the Chinese Breeze series for something more suitable to someone learning!

Ha, I've only read the Harry Potter books in German, though that's about all I can do in German anymore. It started as a language learning/practicing thing, and then it was just a fun thing to do.

I picked up a copy of the first book in Chinese with the same idea, but I'm a long way away from being able to read that yet... This thing with characters is tough!

I got a few movies in mandarin - madagascar, ice age ,shrek, Lord of the rings , kungfu panda , avatar.

Lord of the rings is the easiest to follow, going to get the books and see how I go.

For iphone/ipad there are lots of free mandarin kids books.
There's a Peter rabbit version from nciku
http://tool.nciku.com/ipadreader/

They have a web version at (English and Mandarin)
with mouse over for pinyin(uses flash)
http://www.nciku.com/books/peter_rabbit/

Wouldn't work for me in chrome but works fine in firefox.

They have quite a few free books for iphone but some weirdish topics
http://tool.nciku.com/iphoneER/

Anyone else not getting any buttons showing here ?

wow the web version of Peter Rabbit is great, thanks @alxx!

Works fine on Chrome* even without Flash, except for the sound, which requires Flash.

Since it's HTML+JavaScript-based I can use my two trusty extensions,

Zhongwen to give me hover vocab tips
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kkmlkkjojmombglmlpbpapmhcaljjkde

and New TongWenTang to turn simplified into tradtional
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ldmgbgaoglmaiblpnphffibpbfchjaeg

*I use Chrome 11.0.696.60 beta. There's a Chrome 13? Wow I am so out of it!

I have the Graded Chinese Reader 1 from Sinolingua (ISBN 978-7-80200-374-3).

It uses around 2000 Chinese words mainly from the old HSK level A vocab list (1033 words) and some from level B.

I started using it when I had very few characters under my belt (in the pre skritter dark ages of study... To think what we had to live with back then!) and it's ok, pinyin above the characters and lots of info on idioms etc. in the margins, plus an MP3 CD and all the stories are adapted from contemporary Chinese literature so they are actually readable.

I think they are a good way of seeing all the characters/words in context once you have the HSK basics down.

Hi Oliviero, I am Italian too, which part of Italy you came from? I am from Rome, you can find many book in the Chinese bookshop near Vittorio Station, you can also buy Italian-Chinese version of many Chinese novel they have a cd with the mp3 audio. For example:
http://www.hoepli.it/libro/piccoli-discorsi-cinesi/9788820340438.asp
Ciao!