Learning a new language - Dutch in this occasion- can be accelerated if you can associate it to a lanuage you already know. I am student of English for many years and since English and Dutch are of the same language family -Germanic that is, English is going to be my primary tool in learning Dutch. Moreover there is virtually no decent training material for Dutch in my own language so my options are really limited.
Free tools are always better and Project Gutenberg is the best one. There are at least 100 Dutch texts in Project Gutenberg and the number is growing.
I chose "Around the World in 80 Days" by Jules Verne or in Dutch "De reis om de wereld in tachtig dagen" by Jules Verne. I will study both of them side by side and by a method I think is efficient -for me at least- I will try to learn as much Dutch as possible in the short time I have.
I chose this text mainly because its freely available in English and Dutch and other languages too, also eventhough its now directed to younger audiences it appeals to the older too from wikipedia I found that
"Leo Tolstoy loved his works. 'Jules Verne's novels are matchless', he would say. 'I read them as an adult, and yet I remember they excited me. Jules Verne is an astonishing past master at the art of constructing a story that fascinates and impassions the reader. (Cyril Andreyev, "Preface to the Complete Works", trans. Francois Hirsch, Europe, 33: 112-113, 22-48).