[Closed] Good (classic) books for a teenager

Billy Liar

Call of the wild and white fang - Jack london Great adventures and the historic setting is eye opening

Orwell? down and out in Paris and London makes good reading and Rad to Wigan Pier is hard hitting

Catcher in the Rye? I enjoyed reading that as a kid

Three Men in a Boat? funny as anything and lovely historical detail

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch by Solzhenitsyn.
Androcles & the lion by G K Chesterton (a play, but still a good read.)

Bit is a difference between the two but both books I read as an older teenager in amongst loads of sci-fi and history stuff.

Catcher in the Rye
Slaughterhouse 5
Faranheit 451

Good call on Denisovitch - I actually used that for my higher english - great read

If you like a war story " All quiet on the Western Front"

Wodehouse
Wodehouse
Wodehouse
And perhaps a little Wodehouse

Then, some Orwell, Three Men in a Boat as above. Add in a bit of Tom Jones, a dash of Frankenstein and Dracula (better than you expect them to be!). Cannery Row and On The Road for a little Americana.

Still got this on the bookshelf, been passed down since it was released to all our family . Been reread a few times.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kestrel-Knave-Penguin-Modern-Classics/dp/0141184981

Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Cannary Row, basically anything by Steinbeck

I read GoW when I was 19, had an impact like nothing I’d read before or up to the point where I read it again aged 52 where it had just as profound an effect. Truly one of the greatest pieces of writing of all time.

Yep, Steinbeck's shorter and more amusing novels would be my recommendation:
Cannery Row
Sweet Thursday
Tortilla Flat

I'd then go straight for East of Eden.

Grapes of Wrath every single day of the week. A book without parallels in my opinion.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

'The Reader' by Bernhard Schlink.

1984
Catcher in the Rye

As much Dickens as they can take.

And Sherlock Holmes.

I’m also a sucker for the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom / John Carter of Mars series

1984
Catch 22
Catcher in the rye
Cannery Row
Huckleberry Finn

John Buchan - 39 Steps. And his other stuff. Bit of historic adventure/spy/war.

Or Iain Banks. The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road are modern classics, quite fun.

Not lierature/novels, but Hamlet is a good read, and I do like a bit of TS Eliot poetry. So that too. And another vote for Orwell.

The Magic Faraway Tree.
Classic😀.

Both my eldest girls enjoyed Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation by Martin Miller around that age. You might want to read it first to check you are happy with the themes, but both mine loved it.

Lord of the Flies

Good call on 1984 - a very interesting read.

Also Clockwork Orange - it can be a bit hard work with the language, but a very good read.

As a former English teacher myself I’d rather eat my own liver than endure any Depression era American novels.

Brave New World is a much better novel than 1984. Huxley is also a vastly superior and more interesting author than Orwell.

Other classics that are actually readable: Don Quixote, most novels by Graham Green, The Woman in White, Frankenstein.

Rushdie is worth reading, but not The Satanic Verses, which is a work of opaque pretentiousness.

JP

Stig of the dump.

Razzle.

See, now, I'm going to disagree about Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden.

Don't get me wrong, both absolutely incredible books. I read them both in my late teens, early twenties, thinking myself terribly sophisticated to have done so. Then I read them again in my mid thirties and actually 'got' them. There's absolutely no way anyone with no 'life experience' can really appreciate them fully.

But, the shorter Steinbecks, deffo. One not often recommended that I'd suggest is Once There Was A War.

As for Wodehouse, sorry, no.

1970's Playboy. Lots of interesting articles which is the only reason my uncle ever bought it

@IHN - totally disagree. I read GOW in my early twenties, loved it and it stayed with me. It doesn’t take much to understand the underlying message of it and any half-intelligent teenager should get it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian

A bit different from your average Western.

Might be a bit 18/R rated for a teenager though - it's pretty savage

Dracula

My first thought from the title was Red Dwarf books. Not quite what has been suggested, but I couldn't put them down as a teenager and I'm sure there's some cultural value in them.

Rushdie is worth reading, but not The Satanic Verses, which is a work of opaque pretentiousness.

Midnight's Children is fantastic.

There are various reading lists out there, but I would personally focus on the more accessible end of the spectrum. A bit of Thomas Hardy, Austen, maybe JG Farrell, EM Forster, and don't forget poetry - Yeats, Hardy again, WH Auden, Plath.

Reading for pleasure will make diving into some of the denser texts easier later on.

Oh, and definitely some Wodehouse! 🙂

May I suggest substituting John Steinback for Neville Shute.

Also, Flemming - Dr No and You Only Live Twice were two of my favourites.

Classic storytelling if not classic content, Wilbur Smith, I liked Hungry as the Sea but the Courtney series starting with When the Lion Feeds is great.

Catch 22 is my favourite book, I also liked Martin Millar although he's a bit leftfield - The Good Fairies of New York was a highlight. Iain Banks, yes. Frank Herbert's Dune if you can stomach spaceships and magic. Michael Crichton was a very clever author.
The Beach - Alex Garland. Stephen King's early novels.

Anything by Orwell (including the essays, Politics and the English Language?), Down and Out?
Gorky's 'My Childhood'
Ch 1 of Terry Eagleton's 'Introduction to Literary Theory'

thanks all

As she's been recently getting an interest in politics as well, we're going for 1984 as a starter.....great story with enough to think about as well.

1984 is great.

Fahrenheit 451 is an absolute belter its a pretty good stab at the future which is now considering it was written in 1957 ( i think).

Catcher in the rye though. Second only to shakespeare in the category for most bullshit thing i was made to read in school. Its absolutely aweful.

The boy who wanted peace by george friel is pretty decent describing life in poverty stricken glasgow tenements. As are some of his other books Grace and Miss Partridge. But they're pretty scottish it may not have much to interest if you haven't experienced weegie land.

As mentioned before then, perhaps One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich should be next.

Slight digression but if she's interested in politics then Richard Wilkinson's 'The Spirit Level' is seismic in its scope and applications.

Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Secret History?

Hiw about some Jules Verne?

I was going to ask what books has she read recently, which did she enjoy, and what interests her. Then we can suggest a combination of further reading 😉
In the time honoured tradition of STW I'll pile in.
If John Buchan - anything but 39 Steps - Greenmantle is better IMHO. Geopolitics, and adventure.
CP Snow - Strangers and Brothers series. Set just before and after WW2 provided an insight into that period. Can be a bit dry at times.
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as said several times previously is a must read.
Walter Mosley
John Berendt - Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead
Thomas Pynchon - start with The Crying of Lot 49
Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
If interested in politics then NF must include Noam Chomsky and John Pilger.
Mike Davis has written good stuff about how we inhabit our world.

My tuppence worth. Agreed re Steinbeck though I found East of Eden hard going. Grapes of Wrath is a great read, with possibly the most powerful ending I've ever read. The lighter books are a good start, Cannery Row particularly.

Graeme Greene wrote some cracking books. Our Man in Havana and Brighton Rock are probably my favourites.

Someone mentioned Jules Verne above. Definitely worth a read.

Kidnapped by RLS is a great adventure tale. His other books are worth a read too.

And finally H G Wells. The War of the Worlds is one of my favourite novels of all time, and much of his other stuff is superb too. Though to be honest The Time Machine didn't live up to my hopes.

when I say interest in politics, she's no William Hague. I mean we're started to talk about the major UK parties, what policy differences they have, why we can't trust everything we see on Facebook and so on....some of these are maybe things I should read, but might be a bit deep for a just turned 16yo right now.

Thanks for all the suggestions though!

I won’t repeat any mentioned already but I will keep to a Russian theme.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol
Novel with Cocaine by M Ageyev

Classics,

1984, We, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Dracula, The Hobbit, The Count of Monte Cristo, Of Mice and Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Non-Classics,

anything by Brandon Sanderson esp, the Alcatraz series of shorts (so funny!) and Mistborn series.

Currently enjoying some Sarah J Maas myself

I enjoyed the French Realists at that age: Balzac, Zola and Flaubert.

Trollope's Palliser novels are fairly accessible.

My daughter is enjoying Anna Karenina.

On The Road

Catch 22 is a must read.

Master and the Margarita is good too, although it can be tricky to follow as there's an awful lot of characters, and the names are easy to get mixed up if you aren't Russian.

Call of the wild and white fang – Jack london Great adventures and the historic setting is eye opening

I was going to suggest these two, both are quite short too. Reading CofW with my 9year old at moment he loves it although its a tough read for him, lots of new words but he does a few pages then I read some.

Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The Hobbit

I (re)read The Hobbit as an adult, or at least I tried to. It's very much a kids' book, really twee. Not sure how well a 16yo would take to it.

Some books have ideal reading ages. For teenage boys off the top of my head I'd go for...

Catch 22
Catcher in the Rye
Brave New World
The Stand
Four Seasons (short stories)
The Outsider
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

They all have that coming of age and figuring out the world angle to them.

The road by Jack Kerouack

The subtle art of not giving a f*ck by Mark Manson (not swear filter avoidance but the title of the book). Its a book I read last year and so dearly wish I could of read it when was a teenager.

The Rum Diary is pretty entertaining.

Agree that 1984 is a cracking read and also of huge cultural and historical significance. But it's much better with a basic understanding of post- and cold war history and contemporary literature - but this could be addressed with some decent spy films.

Can't believe no-one's mentioned Dracula. I enjoyed when I went through a phase of reading seminal classic books as a young adult. I read Frankenstein at the same age which was good, but again is really transformed by a good understanding of the history of science from the period and also some classical knowledge. And it wants a good deal of discussion too. it must've been 25 years since I read it and I still think about what goes on in it - often prompted by something else I'm reading and watching.

So those are three absolutely seminal works that massively influence modern culture even more than stuff like Shakespeare. Oh and another one on similar lines - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Not sure I've read much else that so profoundly deals with what it means to be a man.

One more: I'm not especially well read compared to people who actually are, but for me I think THE greatest story ever told has to be A Christmas Carol. I mean it's so familiar now, but each year I see some version or other and am blown away a little bit more.

EDIT Yes to War of the Worlds - as long as you are able to talk about the subtext and not just view it as an action story. I was again not much older than that when I had a conversation about some film I was watching with an older English student. She pointed out a couple of things about the symbology and subtext and in my mind I went oooh.. WOW, I get that now! I really needed someone to turn that light on for me. Now I'm married to a different English student and we pause our Netflix shows between episodes and discuss them.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.

Anything by Hemmingway.

Catcher in the rye though. Second only to shakespeare in the category for most bullshit thing i was made to read in school. Its absolutely aweful.

There's a very good reason Shakespeare is held in such high esteem: he's great. Don't let your time at school colour reality, being forced to read something is not the same as reading it voluntarily.

I spent my teens reading Stephen King, James Herbert and Clive Barker. A lot of the books already mentioned were things I had to read at school. A lot of the classics are great (like GoW, Animal Farm, Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies) whilst others are clearly of their time and pretty much unreadable or I imagine would be extremely dull to a teenager. They were to me, but everyone is different.

My kids (Inc my lad who hardly ever reads) really recommend the Noughts and Crosses series by Mallorie Blackman.

Surprised no ones mentioned aldous hxley’s brave new world, incredibly prophetic and a cracking read (once you get past chapter 1).

Dracula

Can’t believe no-one’s mentioned Dracula.