Elementary school teachers routinely admonish their charges’ parents to ensure they are reading for twenty minutes a day. But I don’t know anyone who became a great reader by simply fulfilling this mandatory checked-off task. Kids either find an author or a series they love and start passionately reading for pleasure (for many more than 20 minutes a day), and then, having consumed that gateway drug, begin a lifelong quest for more such material, or they don’t. Those who do soon reap what are for the young reader entirely unintended academic benefits of their purely pleasure-motivated self-indulgence. Those who don’t often find themselves struggling in ways which go far beyond mere academics. Because most of those who don’t ever pick up the reading addiction and its benefits are boys, it’s especially important that parents of boys be given suggestions (lots of suggestions; what works for some will not work for others) in the hopes that their sons will latch on to something. This is especially important in a culture where the illiterate screen is ever beckoning.
Herewith, a list of what are, in my purely subjective opinion (which happens to nevertheless be actually objectively accurate), the truly superlative books for boys. The qualifications for a book making this list are two-fold. It is comprised entirely of books that I personally read and loved between the ages of 8 and 18, or that one of my three sons (currently aged 10, 20, and 23) personally read and loved between those ages. In other words, actual boys who have learned to love reading did so via these books. Alphabetical by author:
Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels. I never finished the first book, but my son, and lots of other young men with the right sense of humor, have loved them.
Isaac Asimov: The Foundation Trilogy; the Robot series. The kind of mind-blowing stuff that makes sci-fi so popular during that adolescent period of our lives when we get to ask the big questions, and (spoiler alert) if you read far enough in both series they eventually merge.
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451; Something Wicked This Way Comes; The Illustrated Man; The October Country; The Martian Chronicles; A Medicine for Melancholy; I Sing the Body Electric; and other short story collections. The Twilight Zone TV Show was, alas, before my time. But I had the short stories of Ray Bradbury instead. They had the same spooky tricky endings, with the added bonus of beautiful writing.
Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything. I'm fairly certain that this book is the reason my second son became a science major in college. Bryson's engaging writing shows how fascinating scientific literacy should be, if only so many schools didn't do such a good job of taking what should be fascinating and making it interminably boring.
Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tarzan of the Apes and the sequels / series. Tarzan was the original superhero. He had an origin story that explained his superhuman strength, agility, intelligence, and ability to talk to animals, a dual identity (Lord Greystoke and also Tarzan), untold wealth, just like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne, plus lots of cool enemies from the hidden temples and lost civilizations of darkest Africa. What's not to like? Burroughs never researched anything, and his stories were full of errors about the geographical locations of various species, proving they were written with one goal in mind: entertainment.
Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game and its sequels; Ender’s Shadow and its sequels. Ender's Game and its parallel novel Ender's Shadow are both great reads, despite Hollywood's failure to do the first novel full justice. (For a great adaptation, instead of watching the movie, listen to the audioplay, Ender's Game Alive, available via Audible.com) Adult readers will enjoy the sequels to Ender's Game (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind) and younger readers will enjoy the Shadow Series, although both series dwindle with each volume, rather than building to a satisfactory conclusion, which is typical of Card, who is much better at stand-alone novels than at series. If that depresses you, then just read Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. They work on their own without any need to find out what happens next.
Arthur C. Clarke: 2001 A Space Odyssey; Childhood’s End. More good mind blowing big idea sci-fi.
Eoin Coifer: Artemis Fowl series. Never read these myself, but my two oldest boys must have consumed them, as the house was littered with them when they left home.
Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator; James and the Giant Peach. When I was in the 6th Grade I had to memorize a poem and recite it in front of an audience. I chose the long humorous poem about the little girl who ate her grandma's laxatives from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator which was a big hit with students and teachers. It's still the only poem I've ever memorized (literary memorization had clearly become a disfavored educational trend when I was growing up, stupid public education trends--I could use some good memorized poems).
Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo. I read this as an adult, but my son read it while he was growing up. A great story at any age.
Madeleine L’Engle: A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. Loved this book when I was a kid. Tried to get my kids into it by playing an audiobook on a road trip. But alas, the egotistical Ms. Engle had decided to narrate the book herself, long after she was of the proper age to do so, and her elderly and screeching voice, not to mention moist inadvertent lip-smacking, was so annoying to my kids they begged me to turn it off until I finally had to relent because I couldn't take it any more either. A note to publishers. Authors write. Hire an actor to do the reading. Especially if the author is in her last gasps.
Walter Farley: The Black Stallion. Also a very good movie from my youth.
John D. Fitzgerald: The Great Brain series. Set in turn-of-the-century Southern Utah (and, in the later volumes, SLC, where the children attend the Catholic academy) and narrated by the titular genius's younger brother, these incredibly entertaining books deserve a much wider audience than they have. Personally, I think they are better than Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, not as literature, but as entertaining reading for boys.
The Guiness Book of World Records. Always loved these as a kid. They are even more popular now that they come in big color annual hardbacks. Although I'm not sure they have as many cool facts as they used to.
Frank Herbert: Dune. One of the great sci-fi novels of all time. But don't bother with the sequels.
Conn and Hal Iggulden: The Dangerous Book for Boys. The publishing of this book could not have been more timely. Just what our world needed.
Brian Jacques: The Redwall Series. I haven't read these, but my oldest son devoured them when he was growing up.
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird. If you read this for school because you had to and you didn't enjoy it, do yourself a favor and read it again. There's a reason it's so famous. The greatest American novel ever written. And it's great for boys who need actual heroes but are living in a popular culture that increasingly refuses to give them any.
C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Screwtape Letters. Every Christian should read the Narnia books when they are still too young to understand and decode the symbolism, so they can internalize the symbols instead. And everyone should read the Screwtape Letters at least once a year.
James Michener: Hawaii, The Source. Books I started to read in my youth primarily to prove to myself that I could read something really long, but kept reading as they gave me a love of history.
George Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm. In addition to reading modern YA dystopian novels where the dystopia is merely the backdrop to an adventure story, make sure your kids have read these books where the story had a prescient point to make. Great reads and great social commentaries at the same time.
Gary Paulson: Hatchet. A book I have not yet read, but included here at the counsel of my youngest son, who I am still working on turning into a life-long reader.
Wilson Rawls: Where the Red Fern Grows; Summer of the Monkeys. Books to make a Fourth Grader cry.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not books. I don't know if they still even publish these, with their drawings instead of photographs, and their weird facts. But I remember being fascinated by the paperbacks when I was young.
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter series. My oldest son and I began reading these when he was 8 and the first three books had been published. They were instrumental in turning at least three of my children into life-long readers. I love the Harry Potter movies. Nevertheless, I consider it to be one of the great tragedies of our age and among the most terrible crimes ever committed against imagination that those movies were made so soon, before the series had even been completely written. Could not one generation of readers have experienced the Harry Potter universe purely and solely as books? Oh well, at least some of my children got to experience them when they were wholly new, and we were able to read each book before its respective film was complete.
Louis Sachar: Holes. Fun plotting.
Donald J. Sobol: The Encyclopedia Brown series. In the part of Las Vegas once known as "Charleston Heights" where a grungy locals casino now unfortunately stands, on Decatur between Charleston and Alta, there was once something so much better: a large red, white and blue slide, the kind you use a blanket to slide down, and behind that: a shopping center, with a local library branch, right across the aisle from where I got my hair cut. I can still remember the librarian in that location who introduced me to Encyclopedia Brown. I could rarely figure out the solution to each chapter's mystery without checking the back of the book, but Enclopedia Brown did inspire me to try to read more of our family's set of encyclopedias. I still think of these books every time I spin an egg to test if it has been hard boiled or not.
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J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit; The Lord of the Rings. The greatest works of fiction ever written. Bar none.
Leon Uris: Exodus. A great historical novel about one of the most interesting stories of the 20th Century, the founding of the nation of Israel.
Jules Verne: Around the World in 80 Days; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The original steampunk sci-fi. One of my favorite stories from LDS Church History is about John Taylor, the third President of the Church, coming into the parlor one evening and, upon seeing his son reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, advising him he shouldn't be wasting his time on such things as novels. Son went to bed, and upon waking up the next morning, came down to the parlor to find John Taylor finishing the book, which he had stayed up all night reading. He told his son he'd changed his mind and that this was a very good book which he should read.
Bill Watterson: Calvin & Hobbes collections. I truly believe that Bill Watterson will be remembered as a genius in the same way that other artists who have been the best in their genre, be it painting, jazz, or baseball, have been remembered. The rules of the comic strip make it a fairly brutal form to do well (here, take four little panels, now draw me a little picture and add some words that will make me laugh; repeat every day). This is why most comic strips are just lousy, with most of the comic page of the newspaper not worth the ink it is printed on, giving us 20 Marmadukes or Garfields for every one Frank and Ernest or Wizard of Id or Hagar the Horrible. Watterson nailed it and his comic strip collections are perfect for boys who are Calvin's age or slightly older.
H.G. Wells: The Time Machine; War of the Worlds; The Island of Dr. Moreau. I didn't know til I was much older that H.G. Wells was most famous in his own day not for his fiction, but for his social and political commentaries, most of which were nutsoid early versions of the socialist utopian ideas that made the 20th century so dismal for so many. Oh well, he still wrote good books. At least as far as I can remember. It has been a very, very, long time since I read them.
E.B. White: Charlotte’s Web. The one book I tried to read to all of my children. A timeless classic.
T.H. White: The Once and Future King. The definitive version of the Arthurian legend for the 20th Century.
The sad fate of my two oldest sons, who learned to love reading in their childhood:
Originally posted on January 28, 2015.
Last Update February 11, 2015
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