Here’s a chance for you, my friends and readers, to tell my kids what to read: what book do you remember most fondly from your 6th-8th grade years? Get your suggestion to me by Thursday night and I’ll probably put it on my school’s middle school summer reading list! (I still want to hear your thoughts if it’s later than Thursday — there’s always next year!)
I’m updating the list, and it really needs a facelift. In particular, I want some older books — I’m pretty on top of what’s new, but I forget about the classics. Bonus points if it’s not fantasy or science fiction, because I’m a bit overloaded in those categories. (Shocker.)
If you’re in the MG/YA lit world and you have a favorite recent (paperback) suggestion, I’d love to hear that, too. Especially if it’s historical fiction, realistic girl fiction, and/or involves characters of color.
(These aren’t required books, in case you’re wondering — you don’t have that much power. Each kid has to choose a couple from the list. I try to shake it up a little every year, so the options don’t get stale. They should have some literary merit, but we’re looking more for enticing than Great Works of Literature.)
Thanks for doing my job for me!
16 responses so far ↓
1 rebecca // Feb 23, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
Ludell, Brenda Wilkinson
2 Martha // Feb 23, 2010 at 7:20 pm
These may be the least helpful suggestions, but here are a whole bunch of things I liked around then. 12-year-old me votes for Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges, partly because I was pretentious but also because they’re neat! I was also into On the Road, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, and Wodehouse – the Code of the Woosters is a good one.
More appropriate and more obvious: L.M. Montgomery, Madeleine L’Engle (I might have loved her Austin family ones more than the fantasy), a bunch of fantasy authors you already know. The later books in the Betsy-Tacey series had high school girls making life decisions. I haven’t reread those in years, so they might be faily in ways I don’t remember, but I really liked them at the time – they were written in the 1930s or 40s but set in the early 1900s, so there’s a weird layer of nostalgia going on. Agatha Christie?
3 Kirsten // Feb 23, 2010 at 7:25 pm
Is the Tripods trilogy (John Christopher) too young? I can’t remember when I read them. I think it was 6th grade. But yeah, sci-fi.
Watership Down. Do kids read that any more?
Set them on some Crichton and see if they are fooled by all his awesome phony citations. Jurassic Park rules.
It’s free verse, not prose, but I had a thing for archy and mehitabel (Don Marquis) in 8th grade.
4 Greg // Feb 23, 2010 at 7:37 pm
While I love Borges, I have a lot of trouble imagining the average 12-year-old appreciating his work.
When I was in the younger end of that age range, I used to really enjoy Beverly Cleary (and is that too old already for Encyclopedia Brown?). As I got a little older I really liked John Bellairs. That’s also around when I discovered Edgar Allan Poe. Oh, and that’s definitely the age when I discovered Douglas Adams and thought he was fantastic.
5 Natalie // Feb 23, 2010 at 8:02 pm
I don’t remember reading much besides Anne of Green Gables in middle school. But from being in a middle school library recently, I’ve seen some older titles still fly off the shelves – The Face on the Milk Carton, A Child Called It (I don’t understand the fascination with this one), Chris Crutcher or Matt Christopher’s sports books, Holes, Tangerine, Stuck in Neutral… I’m sure I could go on and on. :)
6 Michelle // Feb 23, 2010 at 8:35 pm
I don’t know what made me think of them but I remember loving Sign of the Chrysanthemum, The Master Puppeteer, and Of Nightingales That Weep by Katherine Paterson. They are historical fiction set in Japan and China.
7 Serin // Feb 24, 2010 at 9:59 am
I second The Westing Game, The Face on the Milk Carton, and the Tripod trilogy, though some of those might have been 5th grade for me. Really really second Watership Down – I had great conversations with my Jr High librarian about that book.
I also really loved Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NYMH and Gary Paulson’s Hatchet, but again I think those were a little younger than 11.
I was on a horror streak in Jr High and read Stephen King and Ann Rice. Not sure you should necessarily recommend either. Louis Duncan had a couple of YA thrillers that I and my friends read around that age – scary enough to be exciting, YA enough not to have to read them behind our parents’ backs. Oh! Down a Dark Hall especially – it’s about an evil and mysterious boarding school, and I don’t remember the book well, aside from that I loved it.
8 redbeard // Feb 24, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His short stories are beautiful, and not as intimidating as his novels. Also, Like Water for Chocolate might be a fun one around then.
9 Brian // Feb 24, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Third vote for Watership Down. It was the first example I could think of that wasn’t fantasy or sci-fi related.
P.S. What happened to your full RSS feed?
10 Mary // Feb 24, 2010 at 5:57 pm
I loved Ender’s Game and the Alanna series in middle school. Also, I think my first brush with Jane Austen may have been in middle school. More recently (and in the historical fiction world) I though Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson was amazing.
11 Arun // Feb 24, 2010 at 6:25 pm
It’s more of a boy-centric series of books, but I love the Great Brain series, by J.D. Fitzgerald.
12 Greg // Feb 24, 2010 at 10:06 pm
Really, Brian, you don’t consider talking rabbits to be “fantasy-related”?
13 Brian // Feb 24, 2010 at 11:38 pm
Point taken. But compared to all the Terry Brooks novels I was reading at the time, I’d say no. The rabbits weren’t casting spells, right?
14 Greg // Feb 24, 2010 at 11:44 pm
No, I think there was just one who was clairvoyant :-)
But then again, I was also reading Terry Brooks novels at the time, so who am I to judge anything?
15 Casey // Feb 25, 2010 at 11:22 am
I recall thoroughly enjoying the Issac Asimov short story anthology “Robot Dreams” around that time. Had they been available, I also would have probably enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s short stories around that age as well.
I’ll second redbeard’s earlier comment about short stories not being as intimidating as full novels. I think short stories offer a nice stepping stone to more mature works by providing increased depth in “bite-sized” pieces. They also often hint at deeper themes not explicitly mentioned due to their shortness, and this can be motivating when readers realize more is going on beneath the surface. If they are anything like I was, this curiosity may encourage intrepid young adult readers to stretch themselves with longer works. (*Then again, my appreciation of the short story’s form was firmly cemented by a great high school teacher, so I may be biased.*)
I recall wanting to stretch myself with something more challenging, and reading both Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World around that time, and being thoroughly bewildered. They stuck with me, and I came to understand them later, but the more important lessons were that 1. there was “somewhere to go from here” and 2. knowledge that I wasn’t quite ready for them yet. (I promptly redirected to more accessible material.) While I would not recommend those works, discovering that personal boundary was invaluable as I defined my self identity, so I wholeheartedly recommend a couple challenging works be on your list, perhaps with cautionary notes indicating them as “stretch books.”
16 Summer reading! // May 24, 2010 at 6:45 pm
[...] when I asked you for summer reading list suggestions? I finished the list a long time ago, of course, but it’s finally on our website. (That link [...]
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