Good Books for Grades 7-12

 

Q. Do you have a list of suggested books for a really good literary education for the secondary student?

 

Yes, I do, and I love sharing this list, which I've developed over many years. Yes, I've read all of these, and my older children have read most of them, too:

 

* = for reluctant readers

*** = for advanced readers

 

 

Adventure and Coping Skills

 

            Captains Courageous, Rudyard Kipling

       ***  Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott

            Don Quixote of La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes

            Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana

            The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper

            A Lantern in Her Hand, Bess Streeter Aldrich

            Heidi, Johanna Spyri

            Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Kate Wiggin

            Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maude Montgomery

            Pollyanna, Eleanor Porter

            The Railway Children, E. Nesbit

            The Ramsay Scallop, Frances Temple

 

 

All-Around Great (most of these are ***)

 

            The Holy Bible

            The Iliad and The Odyssey (abridged version, perhaps?), Homer

            The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls,

            Ernest Hemingway

            The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner

            The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

            Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

            Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Jane Austen

            Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert

            The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

            Paradise Lost, John Milton

            The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri

            War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

            The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

            The Return of the Native, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the

      Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain

            Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson

            Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe

            Billy Budd and Moby Dick, Herman Melville

O Pioneers!, My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, One of Ours,

      Willa Cather

            The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck

            The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Frances Hodgson Burnett

            The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck

            Rabbit, Run, John Updike

 

 

 

 

Animals

 

            The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

            Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White

            Bambi, Felix Salten

            Black Beauty, Anna Sewell

            Treasury for Children, collected animal stories of James Herriot

            The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit et. al.)

            Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Rudyard Kipling (and other stories from The Jungle Book)

            Old Yeller, Fred Gipson

            The Yearling, Marjorie Rawlings

            Lassie series, Eric Knight or modern versions

            Big Red series, Jim Kjelgaard

            My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, Green Grass of Wyoming, Mary O'Hara

            The Call of the Wild, White Fang, Jack London.

            Winnie the Pooh stories, A.A. Milne

            The Story of Dr. Dolittle, Hugh Lofting

            Misty of Chicoteague, King of the Wind, Sea Star, Orphan of Chincoteague, Born to Trot,                Brighty of the Grand Canyon, Justin Morgan Had a Horse, Black Gold, Stormy, Misty's                         Foal, and Mustang, Wild Spirit of the West, all by Marguerite Henry

            Black Stallion series, Walter Farley

            The Incredible Journey, Sheila Burnford

            Smoky the Cow Horse, Will James

            Rabbit Hill, Robert Lawson

            Summer of the Monkeys and Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls

         *  Runaway Ralph series, Cousin Marky and Other Disasters, Beverly Cleary

         *  The Warm Place, Nancy Farmer (baby giraffe in Africa)

 

 

 

 

Biography — Men

 

            Any American president, but at minimum George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,

                        Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S Truman

            Daniel Boone, James Daugherty

            Thomas Alva Edison, great American inventor

            Orville and Wilbur Wright, inventors of the first powered flight

            Charles Lindbergh, first to fly over the Atlantic Ocean

            Galileo Galilei, broke the code of the stars, invented modern science

            Leonardo da Vinci, Italian artist/inventor, perhaps greatest genius ever lived

            Michelangelo, Italian painter, perhaps greatest painter ever lived

            Pablo Picasso, greatest 20th Century artist?

            Johann Sebastian Bach, German composer

            Ludwig von Beethoven, German composer

            Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composer

            Sir William Blackstone, great British lawyer and writer

            William Ewart Gladstone, British leader

            Oliver Wendell Holmes, great judge and thinker

            Winston Churchill, greatest British leader ever?

            Geronimo, courageous Native American warrior

            Dr. Martin Luther King, great American black leader

            George and Ira Gershwin, great American composer-lyricist brothers

            Albert Einstein, biggest brain ever?

 

 

Biography — Women

 

            Queen Esther, Biblical queen

            Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt

            Mary, Queen of Scots

            Joan of Arc

            Marie Antoinette

            Lady Godiva

            Queen Elizabeth

            Catherine the Great of Russia

            Madame de Pompadour, the woman behind Louis XV

            Josephine, Empress of France and wife of Napoleon

            Mata Hari

            Sacagawea, guide for Lewis and Clark

            Queen Victoria, possibly greatest queen of all time

            Jane Addams, American social reformer

            Clara Barton, ground-breaking nurse

            Rachel Carson, environmentalist

            George Sand, great female French short-story writer, "love conquers all"

            Isadora Duncan, great dancer

            Amelia Earhart, aviatrix

            Martha Graham, great dancer

            Grandma Moses, painter

            Billie Jean King, ground-breaking athlete/tennis star

            Clare Boothe Luce, diplomat, politician

            Margaret Mead, anthropologist

            Florence Nightingale, great nurse, Lonely Crusader, Cecil Woodham-Smith

            Sandra Day O'Connor, U.S. Supreme Court justice

            Georgia O'Keeffe, artist

            Sojourner Truth, suffragette, abolitionist

            Babe Didrikson Zaharias, great athlete

            The Unsinkable Molly Brown, heroine of Titanic, Denver philanthropist)

            Sophie Germain, a founder of mathematical physics, expert on elastics

            Hetty Green, brilliant financier, "The Witch of Wall Street"

            Margaret Knight, inventor of the grocery bag and heavy machinery

            Belle Starr, female outlaw

            Helen Keller, multiply handicapped woman becomes champion overcomer

 

 

Conflict

 

            Person vs. person:

                        Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

                        The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

                        A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

            Person vs. society:

                        Lord of the Flies, William Golding

                        1984, Animal Farm, George Orwell

                        Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

                        Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, Ayn Rand

            Person vs. self:

                        Shane, Jack Schaefer

            Person vs. nature:

                        My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George.

                        The Red Pony, John Steinbeck

                        Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O'Dell

Documents

 

            Mayflower Compact

            Pamphlet, Common Sense, Thomas Paine

            Declaration of Independence

            Federalist Papers, 1787-88, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

            U.S. Constitution, 1787

            Emancipation Proclamation, 1863

            U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, 1954

            Robert's Rules of Order (parliamentary procedure)

 

 

Drama

 

            The Clouds, Aristophanes

            Oedipus the King, Antigone, Sophocles

            Electra, Euripides

            Our Town, Thornton Wilder

            Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

            Pygmalion, Arms and the Man, George Bernard Shaw

            Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Julius Caeser, Macbeth, Hamlet, William Shakespeare

            A Doll's House, Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen

 

 

Fables

 

Aesop's (over 100 with neat drawings by Alexander Calder in $3.50 paperback: "Fables of Aesop," according to Sir Roger L'Estrange, New York: Dover Publications, 1967).

            "The Gorgon's Head," "The Three Golden Apples," Nathaniel Hawthorne.

 

Fairy Tales

 

The Little Mermaid, The Nightingale, The Little Match Girl, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, Thumbelina, The Ugly Duckling, Hans Christian Andersen

Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Bluebeard, French writer

            Charles Perrault

Snow White, Rumplestiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, Tom Thumb, Rapunzel, and others of the more than 200 tales written by German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

            Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi

            The Rose and the Ring, William Makepeace Thackeray

            The Selfish Giant, Oscar Wilde

            Rootbaga Stories, Carl Sandburg

 

 

Fantasy

 

            Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Silver Chair, and The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis

            The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum

            Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien

            The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams

            Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie

   Loretta and the Little Fairy, Gerda Marie Scheidl

 

 

 

Figures of Speech / Vocabulary Development

 

            Crossword puzzles

            Word play books

            Slang (several slang dictionaries available)

            Foreign phrases

            Cliches (several trade books available)

            Symbolism (dictionaries of literary symbols exist)

            Proverbs (Biblical book)

            Poor Richard's Almanack, Benjamin Franklin

 

 

Folklore

 

            The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White

            The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Robert Browning

            The Arabian Nights, or The Book of the 1001 Nights, told by Scheherazade

            Mules and Men (African-American tales), Zora Neale Hurston

            William Tell, Swiss hero

            Robin Hood

            King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table

            "The Boy Who Kept His Finger in the Dike," Holland

"The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story," "How Brer Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Brer Fox," and others, from Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings, Joel Chandler Harris

            American tall tales: Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill, etc.

"Jackalope" bragging and other folklore by Nebraskan Roger Welsch, the "Liar from Dannebrog,"The Treasury of Nebraska Folklore and Uncle Smoke Stories

 

Heros

 

            Goodbye, Mr. Chips, James Hilton (beloved English schoolteacher)

The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom (Dutch lady saves 700 Jews from the Holocaust and survives concentration camp)

Number the Stars, Lois Lowry (fictional account of how the Danes saved 90% of their country's Jews from the Nazis)

Biographies of American military geniuses such as George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, John J. Pershing, Douglas MacArthur, George S. Patton, and Jeremiah Denton (the latter blinked out "S O S" and "torture" in Morse code while being interrogated as a POW by the Viet Cong, encouraging and inspiring other Americans to rescue him)

Biographies of excellent achievers who are non-athletes and non-politicians (kids get enough about them as it is!) such as singer Ella Fitzgerald, zillionaire Warren Buffett, the story of the Hallmark Cards founder, photographer Margaret Bourke White, etc.

 

 

Historical Novel

 

            Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace

            The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas

            The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

            Drums Along the Mohawk, Walter D. Edmonds

            Johnny Tremain, Esther Forbes

            Little House on the Prairie (and eight others), Laura Ingalls Wilder

            Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

            The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane

            The Slave Dancer, Paula Fox

            Across Five Aprils, Irene Hunt

            The Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl, John Steinbeck

            A Night to Remember, Walter Lord (the sinking of the Titanic)

            The Bridges of Toko-Ri, James A. Michener (U.S. Navy during WW II)

            The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Pierre Boulle (Allied POWs in Japan)

            One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexsandr Solhenitsyn

         *  The Midwife's Apprentice, Karen Cushman

 

 

Horror

 

            The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Black Cat, Edgar Allan Poe

            Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

         *  The Ghost of Whispering Rock, Nancy Kay Robinson

         *  Shark Shock, Donna Jo Napoli

 

 

Human Relations

 

       ***  The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli

       ***  Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau

            The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

            Uncle Wiggly, Howard Garis

         *  The Shorty Society, Sheri Cooper Sinykin

         *  Colt, Nancy Springer

         *  A Girl's Best Friend, Harriet May Savitz

         *  The Toilet Paper Tigers, Gordon Korman

         *  How to Be Cool in the Third Grade, Betsy Duffey

         *  Fig Pudding, Ralph Fletcher

 

 

Humor

 

         *  Top Secret, John Reynolds Gardiner

         *  Mr. Popper's Penguins, Richard and Florence Atwater

         *  The Extraordinary Adventures of an Ordinary Hat, Wolfram Hanel

            Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh

            The Big Bazoohley, Peter Carey

         *  The Marvin Redpost series

         *  The Molesons series

            Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray

The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, and Math Curse,

Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith

            With All Disrespect, Calvin Trillin

            Anything by Erma Bombeck

            Quotations from Will Rogers

            Quotations from W.C. Fields

            Quotations from H.L. Mencken

            Contemporary cartoon books, such as The Far Side

            Keep a scrapbook of newspaper comic strips and analyze what makes them funny.

 

 

 

Multiculturalism

 

            Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

            Black Elk Speaks, John G. Neihardt (25 chapters; easy to take excerpts; Nebraska

                        poet laureate and perhaps best interpreter of Native American culture).

            The Light in the Forest, Conrad Richter (white boy raised by Indians)

         *  Guests, Michael Dorris

The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu (Japanese woman wrote what some think

      is the world's oldest novel; died in Kyoto in about 1025).

A Raisin in the Sun, first Broadway play by a black woman playwright, Lorraine Hansberry.

            Dragonwings, Laurence Yep

            Jewish folk tales by Isaac Bashevis Singer

            Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

            Biography, Mahatma Gandhi.

            Ramayana and Mahabharata, epic poems of India

            Dhammapada, the Path of Virtue, Buddha

            Poem for the inauguration of President Clinton, Maya Angelou.

            Quotes from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois

            Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington

            Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton

            Native Son, Richard Wright

            Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

            The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

            Gifted Hands, Ben Carson, M.D. (disadvantaged black boy becomes leading doctor in the

                        separation of Siamese twins)

            Optimist's Daughter, One Writer's Beginnings, Eudora Welty

            Middlemarch, George Eliot

            Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

            Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, Lillian Schlissel

 

 

Mystery

 

            The Great Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles,

                        Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

            The Father Brown detective stories, G.K. Chesterton

            The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Tales of Mystery and Imagination,

                        Edgar Allan Poe

            The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

            Lord Peter Wimsey stories by Dorothy Sayers

            The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, Raymond Chandler

            I, the Jury, Kiss Me Deadly, Mickey Spillane

            The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett

            The Big Four, Agatha Christie

            To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

            Original Nancy Drew series, Carolyn Keene

            The Hardy Boys series

            Mrs. Frisbie and the Rats of NIMH, Robert O'Brien

 

 

Myth

 

Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, Mayan, Aztec, Native American, Chinese and other cultures

            Selections from The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer

            Selections from the "mother of all myths," Beowulf (3,000 lines, so use excerpts, please!)

 

 

 

Nature

 

            The Black Pearl, Scott O'Dell

            Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

            A River Runs Through It, And Other Stories, Norman Maclean

            Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen

            Silent Spring, The Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson

 

 

Nonfiction

 

            The Republic, Plato

            Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, Esther Forbes.

            Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, economics and capitalism

            Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, 1830s

            Abraham Lincoln, The Backwoods Boy, Horatio Alger

            Self-Reliance, 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate, Eliza P. Donner Houghton (1840s emigrants to California trapped by treachery, starvation)

            Shame of the Cities, Lincoln Steffens (1904 muckracking of political corruption)

            The Jungle, Upton Sinclair (1906 expose of meatpacking industry).

The Elements of Style, Strunk and White (the latter is the E.B. White who

      wrote Charlotte's Web, etc.), greatest writing manual ever.

            A good atlas

 

 

Oaths and Prayers

 

            The Lord's Prayer

            The Apostle's Creed

            The Beatitudes

            Wedding vows

            Presidential inaugural oath

            Boy Scout oath and Boy Scout law

            Hippocratic Oath (physicians)

 

 

Poetry

 

            "The Lamb," 'The Tyger," William Blake

            Robert Browning

            "Don Juan," Lord Byron

            "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

            e.e. cummings

            Emily Dickinson

            "Death, Be Not Proud," John Donne

            The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

            "The Choir Invisible," George Eliot

            Ralph Waldo Emerson

            "The Duel," "Little Boy Blue," Eugene Field

            "The Road Not Taken," "Mending Wall," Robert Frost

            Edgar Guest

            Shakespeare in Harlem, Montage of a Dream Deferred, Langston Hughes

            "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and nightengale and Grecian urn odes, John Keats

            "If," Rudyard Kipling

Tales of a Wayside Inn, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish,     Paul Revere's Ride, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

            Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Lee Masters

            "In Flanders Fields," to war dead, John McCrae

            "The Metamorphoses," Ovid

            The Raven, Edgar Allen Poe

            Chicago Poems, Fog, Good Morning, America, Carl Sandburg

            "Ozymandias," Percy Bysshe Shelley

            A Child's Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson

            "The Charge of the Light Brigade," Alfred, Lord Tennyson

            "O Captain! My Captain!" Walt Whitman

            "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," William Wordsworth

            "Sailing to Byzantium," and other poems, William Butler Yeats

 

 

Quotations

 

            Proverbs, book of the Old Testament of the Bible

Leaders in hard times, such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy

            American patriots

            Famous "sound bites" throughout history

            Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

            "Meditation," by John Donne

            Dorothy Parker

            James Thurber

 

 

Romance

 

            Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand (immortal love story based around a big nose!)

            Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

            Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

            Seventeen, Booth Tarkington (humorous account of a boy's first love)

 

 

Satire

 

            Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift

            Babbitt, Main Street, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis.

 

 

Science Fiction

 

            Foundation trilogy, I, Robot, Isaac Asimov

            The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

            Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty                                              Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne

            The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells

            Slaughter-House Five, Kurt Vonnegut

            A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle

 

 

 

Short Stories

 

            "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Ernest Hemingway

            "The Devoted Friend," Oscar Wilde

            "The Gift of the Magi," O. Henry

            Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

            Complete Short Stories, Mark Twain

            Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling

Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (first collection of short stories in America;

      includes "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleep Hollow"), Washington Irving

            A Good Man is Hard to Find, story collection, Flannery O'Connor

48 Saroyan Stories, Love Here Is My Hat, Peace It's Wonderful, collections by William Saroyan

 

 

Song Lyrics

 

            Yankee Doodle (American Revolution)

            America (My country 'tis of thee), Samuel Smith, 1832

            America, the Beautiful  (Katharine Lee Bates, inspired by view from Pikes Peak)

            Star-Spangled Banner (Francis Scott Key, War of 1812)

            Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe

            Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (Southern spiritual)

            Simple Gifts (American Quakers and Shakers)

            Clementine (American Gold Rush)

            Oh! Susanna (settling the American West)

            Shenandoah (importance of rivers in early America)

            She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain (hillbillies)

            I've Been Working on the Railroad  (How the railroads built America)

            Home on the Range (cowboys)

            John Brown's Body  (Underground Railroad fights slavery)

            This Land is Your Land (Woody Guthrie, American folk song, 1940s)

            If I Had a Hammer (peace song)

            Big Blue Frog  (Peter, Paul and Mary song from 1960s, allegory about racial prejudice)

 

 

Speeches

 

            Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be or not to be," Hamlet, Shakespeare

            Patrick Henry, "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, March 23, 1775

            Nathan Hale, "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country," before his execution

            "The Conscience of the Nation Must Be Roused," Frederick Douglass, 1852

            Gettysburg Address, "Fourscore and seven years ago," Abraham Lincoln, 1863

            William Jennings Bryan's "cross of gold" speech, 1896

            Franklin D. Roosevelt, speech to Congress, asking for declaration of war, 1941

            Winston Churchill's "blood, sweat and tears" speech

            John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, 1961

            Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, 1963

           

 

Spirituality

 

            Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan (Christian "journey" in classic form)

Quo Vadis, Henryk Dienkiewicz (conflict between paganism and Christianity in Nero's Rome)

            Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace

            Jewish folk tales, Isaac Bashevis Singer

 

 

 

Homework: "The Ultimate Reading List" has many of these titles, and is posted on:

 

www.eagleforum.org/educate/1997/june97/list.html

 

You and your child might want to print out one or both of these lists and set a goal of reading even 10% of these by high-school graduation. Note that in yesteryear, students read almost all of these books. They were considered "the canon," or must-reads, of American literary competence, back in the day.