I had such a good time reading the Count of Monte Cristo that it made me wonder why I don’t read more so-called “classics.” So many times I have wandered into a book store or browsed through Amazon fruitlessly, when I might have gone for the known quantity that is the classic. First, let me define what I’m talking about here. People shy away from classics for two reasons: because they are old. You worry that the book will seem moldy and out of touch. And a classic is the sort of book that is assigned in middle school and high school, and therefore it doesn’t seem like the sort of book you’d want to read for fun (it might bring back bad memories, after all). But again and again I find that this is the wrong way to look at it. I am almost never disappointed when I read a classic novel. So, for all you casual readers out there, consider the classic.
But classics aren’t just great for us grown ups, they’re perfect for precocious young readers. When I worked at the book store, I would often encounter parents trying to find books for kids who had read all the kids books. These young readers had read all the Harry Potter, all the Lemony Snicket, and the parents were looking for more of the same. I realized that classic novels are the perfect way to graduate these young readers to the next level of reading. Sure they may get assigned some of these books in school, but I know that when I was young, I found reading books for fun to be far more gratifying than reading for school. Here’s a quick list of classics that I like to recommend to precocious young readers (I’m only recommending books that I have read, so if you’ve got any ideas please share – there are so many more!):
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Or you could just get ALL of them
Update: From the comments:
- Awakening by Kate Chopin (suggested by edan)
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (suggested by edan)
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (suggested by erin)
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (suggested by The Happy Booker)
Related: Ask a Book Question: The 27th in a Series (Classifying Classics)
Related: Giving Kids the Classics
