A Reading List for the young!

A Reading List for the young!

Recently a good friend asked me for a list of the essential books that I would give a young adult... assuming of course they still know how to read something more complex than a text message. I thought about it for awhile and this is MY list that I gave him.

What books would be on yours? I am really curious and would like to know.



[edit on 7-6-2007 by UM_Gazz]

"The Illiad"...Homer... the madness of war.
"The Odyssey"...Homer... the intelligence and spirit of man
"The Meditations"... Marcus Aurelius... A soul trying to understand
"Don Quixote"... Cervantes... No comedy though funny, a plumbing of the
depths of a soul.
"Walden"...Henry David Thoreau... One of Americas 3 essential books
"Moby Dick"... Herman Melville... Another of Americas masterpieces
"Huckleberry Finn"... Mark Twain... The 3rd of the American trilogy
"The Varieties of religious Experience"... William James... How to think
clearly about matters of the spirit
"The Once and Future King"... T.H. White... the struggle to do what is right.
"A Sand County Almanac"...Aldo Leopold... Toward an ethic of the land.
"The Immense Journey"... Loran Eisley... The work of a truly humane soul
"The Joy of Sex"... Dr. Alex Comfort... no masterpiece but something we
should never be arrogant about.


There are of course many others. What are yours?


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[edit on 7-6-2007 by grover]

Anything by the three masters of science fiction: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

Starship Troopers being a read by Heinlein that everyone should read in my opinion.

How old are we talking about? I found the Dragonlance series to be quite entertaining when I was 12-13.

I was really talking about books that would enrich and enlighten... there are plenty of things to entertain. As for age 14/18... that was the age i was exposed to most of those books.

Personally would make "The Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius required reading, especially the first chapter (or section) where he methodically thanks everyone in his life from nanny on up who had a positive influence on his life and made him the person he was.

When I went back to college in 03 I was appalled at the kids who thought that it was just a given that they had the best of everything and gratitude was the last thing on their minds.

In another context Garrison Keillor writes in his book "Homegrown Democrat" that he is a liberal because he is grateful for all the opportunities that he, the child of poor folk was given... that is not to say that you cannot be grateful and be a conservative, I wasn't saying that at all, rather I was giving another example of gratitude, a trait sorely missing in today's America.

Each and everyone of those books teach something profound about the nature of the human spirit which is why they are important.... Read section two of Don Quixote and see if you are not confronted with the question of who was mad and who was sane and ponder the nature of dreams... Samuel Putnam's translation is the best.

My list would include.

1. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
2. 2001: Space Oddysey
3. The 3 Musketeers
4. The Illiad
5. The Oddysey
6. The Count of Monte Cristo
7. Alls Quiet on the Western Front
8. Pride and Prejudice
9. Catcher in the Rye
10. The Grapes of Wrath

edit for spelling

[edit on 6/9/2007 by AegisFang]

Enrich and Enlighten eh?

Peronally I would be like. "Get out in the real world and learn stuff, talk to people about the real world, get a job and learn real stuff."

Rich dad poor dad.
Freakanomics.
The art of war.

There are some great books listed already, but (and this is very much my opinion) they really won't do a lot of good in this crazy world, yes some of them have wonderful moral teachings and are beautifully crafted peices of literature, but they'll be more time for all that jazz if you get a good hold in life first.

Hope I'm not offending as I don't know you and the full situation.

Also most teenagers are a little unstable. Don't let an unstable teenager read "Catcher in the rye": it asks the question WHY just a little to forcefully and is the fast track to depression!

Originally posted by ChiKeyMonKey

There are some great books listed already, but (and this is very much my opinion) they really won't do a lot of good in this crazy world, yes some of them have wonderful moral teachings and are beautifully crafted peices of literature, but they'll be more time for all that jazz if you get a good hold in life first.

I beg to differ. I was exposed to every single one of those books in my teens and they enriched and deepened my interior life in ways I cannot express. It is by having a rich and complex inner life that we become fully actualized human beings.

I was a voracious reader from the age of six. I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and Doc Savage at the age of eight.

Many of the books on your list were required reading when I was in high school. I don't know if that was the reason, or if they were too serious for my age at the time, but I didn't enjoy them. Same for Shakespeare, Paradise Lost, and some others they made us read.

I think that a lot of young people would benefit from ANY book, so long as it was literate and not full of pictures. There's not enough reading today.

But your average teen these days probably would be quite overwhelmed and intimidated by the classics reading lists here. Just my take on it.

I think I'd recommend books in the technical sci-fi realm, or, like ChiKey, nuts and bolts books on modern life. I think my early exposure to sci-fi/fantasy helped keep my mind open and me wondering about things all my life.

There are just so many great books -- even fiction -- that deal with modern themes on life I couldn't make a comprehensive list here.

But some books I'd like to see on the list are (in no particular order):

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Anything by Sherri Tepper
Anything by Ray Bradbury
Red Mars, Blue Mars, & Green Mars all by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Songs of Distant Earth and others by Arthur C. Clarke
Callahan's series by Spider Robinson
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Becoming Alien, Being Alien & Human to Human by Ben Bova
Lamb by Christopher Moore

I think that fiction can both entertain and teach, and reach modern kids in ways that some of the classics can't anymore.

I always thought dystopia novels were enlightening, especially Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.