Junior High
Books Boys Will Read
High School
College / Adult
Poets

An incomplete list of classic books from the course of literary wanderings, both from voracious reading and a librarian stint. They are delightful, well-written, and thought provoking. After all, isn’t the purpose of an excellent book to shape your thinking by dialogue with great minds across time?

These lists are divided by reading ability and subject matter. Books that are longer, harder to read, or with more mature subjects have been separated accordingly. Books in the junior high category contain no overt sexuality or graphic depictions of things such as mental disorders, while those in the high school category may contain some non-gratuitous references and treatment. The college and adult section lists books with sometimes dramatic depictions of sex or insanity—again, not gratuitous but merely depicting reality. I wouldn’t recommend a book if it were lascivious beyond reason, like most romance or cheap literature today. If you are very concerned, look up the title on Wikipedia, or ask your local librarian.

Oh, and I plead: do not read an abridged version! Not only do you gain scope, a longer attention span, and a wider vocabulary by reading the original prose, abridgments often cut out the richest parts of the stories, leaving it a gutted carcass (ok, so I have read abridgments that also cut out really long and boring sections from books like Gone With the Wind and War and Peace, but you should still read them for the sake of integrity). If you or your child are unable to plow through Joyce, read something simpler. You can get to him later.

Junior High

• Eight Cousins, Louisa May Alcott
• Little Men, Louisa May Alcott
• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
• Alice in Wonderland, Louis Carroll
• Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
• Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Kim, Rudyard Kipling
• Chronicles of Narnia series, C.S. Lewis
• Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
• The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
• Animal Farm, George Orwell
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Books Boys Will Read

Note that this list is heavy in fantasy, because boys seem to like dragons and knights and wizards. If that bothers you, look up the book before you buy it or check it out of the library and are annoyed. I have listed those fantasy books more in the vein of C.S. Lewis rather than J.K. Rowling. You might also visit GuysRead.com for a more comprehensive list of books tried and recommended by guys of all ages.

• Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
• Artemis Fowl series, Eoin Colfer
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
• Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
• Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates, Mary Mapes Dodge
• Redwall series, Brian Jacques
• Kim and The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling; former more fore junior high and up, latter as early as elementary school
• Chronicles of Narnia series and the Space trilogy, C.S. Lewis
• Castle, David Macaulay (or anything by him)
• Animal Farm, George Orwell
• Eragon, Christopher Paolini (the first of a good trilogy)
• Hatchet, Gary Paulsen
• Holes, Louis Sachar
• Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
• Shadowmancer trilogy, G.P. Taylor
• The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien
• Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
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High School

• Emma, Jane Austen
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
• Good Earth, Pearl Buck
• Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
• Inferno, Dante Alighieri
• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
• Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
• Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
• Murder in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot
• Basil and Josephine stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Diary, Anne Frank
• Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• Space trilogy, C.S. Lewis
• ‘Til We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
• 1984, George Orwell
• Hamlet, William Shakespeare
• Macbeth, William Shakespeare
• Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare
• Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
• Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
• Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
• Picture of Dorien Gray, Oscar Wilde
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College / Adult

• Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
• Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
• Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
• Anna Karenina, Count Leo Tolstoy
• I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe
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Poets

• Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• E.E. Cummings
• T.S. Eliot
• Robert Frost
• Rudyard Kipling
• William Shakespeare
• Walt Whitman
• William Wordsworth
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