Ten books every schoolchild should read

[kezmondo]

The Motions chap's list made me laugh. How many 16 or 17 year olds can get through Ulysses with any sort of understanding? Not a whole helluva lot, I think.

I've never read it so I don't understand. Is it hard to follow or...?

[Riali]

The Motions chap's list made me laugh. How many 16 or 17 year olds can get through Ulysses with any sort of understanding? Not a whole helluva lot, I think.

I've never read it so I don't understand. Is it hard to follow or...?

I've never read the whole either, though I've read bits. A translation of Ancient Greek poetry is just pretty thick stuff. I'm sure there are high school students out there who can read it just fine, but I think they're the exceptions, not the norm.

[cassingtonscholar]

Riali, I really liked your list. I hadn't read (or heard of) the one for second grade, but I know all the others. I've either read them (like HDM, Watership Down, 1984) or they are on my list to read (like Jane Eyre). And I'm only in ninth grade, so I think I can make it. All the ones I have read I loved too, like Watership Down and From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenwieler.

[Will]

I'd forgotten all about Where the Wild Things Are; now I want to read it again.. If I were to pick a composite from these lists, I'd go for:

Paradise Lost - an edited version of books 1 & 2 cutting out the long sections where Milton gives an extended list of something. PL isn't actually especially hard to read and there should be some poetry on the list.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - you've got to have Roald Dahl somewhere. If you want a book that children actually want to read (which is important) then this is pretty much it.

Robinson Crusoe - maybe; some Victorian literature would be good, but I'd be tempted to switch this with HG Wells since he's more readable. One of his short stories maybe.


Andrew Motion needs a dose of reality.

[rats_rox]

I am very proud to say that I am reading Wuthering Heights at the moment. We had free choice of a pre-20th century novel for our GCSE and I chose that. Proving to be very good so far!

[Enitharmon]

I am very proud to say that I am reading Wuthering Heights at the moment. We had free choice of a pre-20th century novel for our GCSE and I chose that. Proving to be very good so far!

It's a cracker. I can't understand why people shy away from it.

[Peter]

I am very proud to say that I am reading Wuthering Heights at the moment. We had free choice of a pre-20th century novel for our GCSE and I chose that. Proving to be very good so far!

It's a cracker. I can't understand why people shy away from it.

It's Victorian and it's not been on the telly lately and it's a set book.

[rats_rox]

It's really weird though because I am the only one in my class who has chosen to do it.

[Aletheia Dolorosa]

It's a cracker. I can't understand why people shy away from it.

Also, strangely enough, I think it's better to read it as a teenager. I read it first when I was 14 and loved it, and I read it again this year and while I still enjoyed it, I think as a teenager I was better able to appreciate the emotion of it. When I read it as a 22-year-old, I wasn't able to identify passionately with the characters and what had seemed like profound love seemed more like pathological...cruelty, I guess. I suppose I was just reading it with different eyes.

[Enitharmon]

Also, strangely enough, I think it's better to read it as a teenager. I read it first when I was 14 and loved it, and I read it again this year and while I still enjoyed it, I think as a teenager I was better able to appreciate the emotion of it. When I read it as a 22-year-old, I wasn't able to identify passionately with the characters and what had seemed like profound love seemed more like pathological...cruelty, I guess. I suppose I was just reading it with different eyes.

Ronni, I think you hit the nail on the head there.

It's nice to see this thread still rolling. A thought about the original lists: Philip Pullman compiled a list for enjoyment; Andrew Motion, who is far from being a fool, compiled a list to stretch and challenge. That doesn't mean that those books that are a challenge aren't thoroughly enjoyable. I dare say there are some you would get on with and some you won't but you would always be better for trying. I bet Andrew Motion regularly revisits his choices. I'm sure Philip Pullman has very find memories of the Family Moomintroll but I doubt very much if if picks it up to re-read when he goes on holiday.

[Mockingbird]

It's a cracker. I can't understand why people shy away from it.

Also, strangely enough, I think it's better to read it as a teenager. I read it first when I was 14 and loved it, and I read it again this year and while I still enjoyed it, I think as a teenager I was better able to appreciate the emotion of it. When I read it as a 22-year-old, I wasn't able to identify passionately with the characters and what had seemed like profound love seemed more like pathological...cruelty, I guess. I suppose I was just reading it with different eyes.

Yes, I feel the same. That book was written with so much ferocious passion that it inspired the same feeling in me when I was fifteen…but now it seems not so much like cruelty but like childishness. It seems to me that Wuthering Heights was written by someone who lived solely on fiercely-held dreams, who understood love and passion only as ideas, which was true enough from what I understand of Emily Bronte’s life.

Charlotte Bronte got it right, I think, when she said that her sister had created something half-savage, full of hidden power that she herself barely understood. She’s still my top ‘deceased person I’d like to meet,’ it would have been something to speak with her and know her mind.

[Aletheia Dolorosa]

I bet Andrew Motion regularly revisits his choices. I'm sure Philip Pullman has very find memories of the Family Moomintroll but I doubt very much if if picks it up to re-read when he goes on holiday.

I have a couple of favourite books from my childhood which I probably reread a few times a year. People read for so many reasons, for enjoyment and to be stretched, as you say, but also to be distracted, for work - and the reasons change according to the book. For me, these books of childhood are read FOR CONSOLATION. If I'm feeling bleak, worried, or have just finished a book that will keep me awake at night, I pick up one of these faithful old favourites and I instantly become calmer, more cheerful, better able to cope with my recently-rearranged-by-new-books world. I have fond memories of these books, and although I've read them so many times that I can quote them and really only need to skim-read every five sentences or so, I will never be tired of them. I need them for something different to what I originally needed them for, but that doesn't mean that I don't still need them.

[Max]

Wind in the Willows - A or the quintessential children's fable.

Peter Pan - An introduction to metaphor, allegory, symbolism, and the potential of literature to open up different worlds and minds.

Great Expectations - Written with a charm and vivacity, with characters of such humour and memorability, and a plot so compelling, I can't imagine even the most obdurate of kids could persist in disliking it if they gave it a chance. I think it'd be your best bet for obviating them going through life dismissing anything written before the first world war.

The Gormenghast trilogy - To show them what imagination can be, and how literature can bring it into being and allow you in.

The Catcher in the Rye - Can't believe I can't see this on anyone else's list.

The Odyssey - While we're certainly better off no longer centring all of education on the Classics, I think it'd be a mistake to lose sight of them altogether. Plus it's a cracking tale.

The Outsider - It'll make them think if anything will.

Animal Farm - Lucidly illustrates the dynamics of societies and authority, and the perils of ideology

Watership Down - As above, but because it's not pure allegory it explores the nature of individual lives within those contexts, and how these things may be resisted.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - It physically pains me to think that people pass through childhood without having read this.

[Bellerophon]

My list, in no particular order:

Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder (trans. by Paulette Moller)
Spring Awakening - Frank Wedekind (trans. by Jonathan Franzen)
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Romeo & Juliet - William Shakespeare
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Sophie's Choice - William Styron
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez (trans. by Gregory Rabassa)
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Lord of the Flies - William Golding

[Blossom]

I keep popping back to this thread and trying to think of what would be on my list, but it's very hard to think of 10 books every should read. The only one I'm certain so far would be on my list is The Catcher in the Rye, because I think it serves so many purposes, for instance as a short book good for an introduction into essay-type analysation (with a character that won't have the students bored senseless) and also as a sort of companion to teenage life.

And I'm pretty tempted to stick another favourite of mine on my list - Winnie the Pooh. I think it teaches important writing skills, and the importance of not taking things too seriously, and that everyone should have a little pooh bear logic

[eggnostic]

What is a schoolchild? Elementary School?

Tuck Everlasting
If all kids read this in say... 3rd grade the world would be marvelously better.

[Mockingbird]

What is a schoolchild? Elementary School?

Tuck Everlasting
If all kids read this in say... 3rd grade the world would be marvelously better.

Yeah, I don't know who this list is for.

For children under 5th grade (and everyone over 5th grade too) I would recommend, in no particular order:

1.Peter Pan
2.Tuck Everlasting
3.The Giver
4.Oh, the Places You Will Go
5.Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
6.The Secret Garden
7.Bridge to Terebithia
8.Sarah, Plain and Tall
9.The collected works of Roald Dahl
10.The Happy Prince, and about 50 others.

It's even harder to pick just 10 for older schoolchildren.

1.To Kill A Mockingbird
2.A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
3.The collected works of Charles Dickens, or at least Great Expectations and David Copperfield.
4.The Catcher in the Rye, as much as it pains me.
5.Brave New World or Animal Farm
6.Fahrenheit 451
7.A Separate Peace
8.Wuthering Heights
9.The Lord of the Rings
10.Pride and Prejudice
11.Some bleeding Shakespeare because they should know it at least.

[Trystobefunny]

One book I think everyone should read is "The giving tree" by Shel Silverstein. Obviously for younger readers but I think it can be enjoyed just as well by any age. (don’t think anyone said TGT yet but if they did sorry for the repost)

[intotheworld]

My response is best summarized as I generally dislike fiction.
I must be one of the few people who finds reading non-fiction enjoyable. Personally I've enjoyed more text books than fiction books that were English class forced reading.

One exception though, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is good (I wasn't forced to read it though).

[AUST]

right, by the time you 18 you should have read (IMO)

1) Peter Pan -E.M.Barry
2) Hard Times/Oliver - Dickens
3) The Illustated Man - Bradburry
4) 1984-Orwell
5) Carpe Juggliem - Pratchett
6) His Dark Materials - Pullman
7) The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
Hamlet - Shakespeare, and Rozencratz and Guildenstern are Dead - T. Stoppard
9) The Giver
10) Lord of the Flies - Golding

I've tried to pick a mix of 'kids' books and more classical peices.