Great Books Program for Pre-Teens?

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stevej

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I am looking for a list of good books to read with my kids who are 9-13 years of age. I would like to read the same books at the same time. I would like the books to be engaging, and not necessarily overtly religious. They get plenty of that is school. It would be even better if there were a web page to track progress through the books.
 
Hmmm, has the nine-year-old read stuff like Treasure Island, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book? What about Caddie Woodlawn, Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Strawberry Girl, The Saturdays, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler? The Moffatts? Roller Skates? (Most of these books are about girls.)

Have you considerd the mystery genre? What, for instance, about Sherlock Holmes novels and stories?

Also, Agatha Christie books–And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Murder on the Orient Express are justifiably acclaimed. Christie isn’t a Great Writer, but her plots are excellent, her language fairly simple, and her books classic “Cozy Mysteries” that don’t contain sex and gore.

Father Brown mysteries are good. Actually, anything by Chesterton is good.

The schools probably will feed your kids The Power and the Glory at some point, but Our Man In Havana is delightful, and really Graham Greene in general is most enjoyable.

The older kids might enjoy Dorothy Sayers’ novels. She’s a better writer, if not as ingenious a plot constructor, as Christie.

Your family’s sense of humor may vary, but even as a kid I always loved P.G. Wodehouse (Jeeves, Emsworth, Mulliner, Golf, Psmith series are wonderful).
 
Oh, and Madeleine L’Engle and Ray Bradbury (when he’s not being all preachy) are very good for scifi/fantasy. I’d hold off on Ursula Le Guin, who gets all New Agey and Taoist. I’d also avoid Philip Pullman, whose militant atheism drives his writing.
 
Are your kids boys or girls? Obviously a nine-year-old girl might like stuff like Anne of Green Gables, but a boy…😃
 
I have two Girls and a Boy. They have all read the Chronicles of Narnia and they are starting in on Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. My Son, the middle one, has finished those, and is consuming some Star Wars books.
 
I’ve enjoyed The Well-Trained Mind. It has good reading lists to help students be well-rounded by the time they graduate. Even within the same grade, it suggests books of varying levels of difficulty-- for seventh grade, for example, it recommends both “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (which was already recommended as a read-aloud for the pre-K years) and things like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, “A Christmas Carol”, “Pride and Prejudice”, “Tom Sawyer”, “Grimm’s Fairy Tales”, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle”, “The Raven”, Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth”, and Douglass’ “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, among plenty of others. I’d definitely recommend checking it out— it’s a good resource that covers all the school years.
 
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