What have you read lately?

[mamselle]

I don't know any of the others you've named, but John Bellairs was a sweet, funny, troubled, brilliant person.

I only met him, and read his books, much later, in adulthood. I was mixed on some of them. I wanted to like them, but sometimes they were hard to get into.

At other times, they were pure joy.

M.

[FishProf]

Thanks for the suggestions, it's been hard to find Smolt appropriate stuff.

We took her to see the musical WICKED, and decided to read the book first.  Not a big hit.

She still likes to go back to a Junie B Jones for a palate cleanser. 

[downer]

Ruth Ozeki. The Book of Form and Emptiness.

Very impressive. And her fans say it is not her best book. I should read the others.

[ergative]

Thanks for the suggestions, it's been hard to find Smolt appropriate stuff.

We took her to see the musical WICKED, and decided to read the book first.  Not a big hit.

She still likes to go back to a Junie B Jones for a palate cleanser.

How old is Smolt? I have a wide variety of recommendations for middle-school-ish readers.

[FishProf]

Thanks for the suggestions, it's been hard to find Smolt appropriate stuff.

We took her to see the musical WICKED, and decided to read the book first.  Not a big hit.

She still likes to go back to a Junie B Jones for a palate cleanser.

How old is Smolt? I have a wide variety of recommendations for middle-school-ish readers.

She's 10.  Recommendations welcome.

[ergative]

Hmmm. Here's what I was tearing through at age 10:

John Bellairs, Patricia C Wrede, and Tamora Pierce, as mentioned upthread. (Tamora Pierce might be best left until age 13 or so, as her books tend to start out with children and then over the course of a quartet the children have a sexual awakening.)
Redwall. All the Redwall. Every Redwall I could lay my hands on.
My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannet (the whole trilogy. It's quite old--I can't promise it's held up, but I remember it was very charming)
Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series (although be prepared to have Talks about the treatment of Native Americans in Little House on the Prairie)
CW Anderson's horse books. Great photorealistic (as I recall) illustrations.
Everything by Jim Kjelgaard: Terrific man vs. nature books, often with alternating narratives told from the perspectives of humans and wild animals.
The first half of Walter Farley's Black Stallion series. Things got weird around The Island Stallion Races (aliens), nd The Black Stallion's Ghost was profoundly disturbing to young me, but I quite liked The Horse Tamer and especially Man O' War from the later books.
Horatio Alger books. Like, the actual books by the actual guy. I still have a huge collection of them. I enjoyed the formula.
The Fabulous Flight and Mr Revere and I by Robert Lawson. I bounced off Ben and me for reasons I can't remember. Great illustrations.
Most things by Beverly Cleary

These are, of course, all 30 years out of date. I'm sure new stuff is being written that's terrific, but I'm not so up on those. As I mentioned upthread you sometimes need to be 10 to properly appreciate a book for a 10-year-old. I've been meaning to read Voyage of the Dogs by Greg van Eekhout, though. It has a terrific premise.

[mamselle]

Ohhh, can I play?

Let's see:

First off, no matter how old or young, everyone has to read the Dillingers' "Pish, Posh, said Heironymous Bosch." Beautiful artwork, layered story with applicable narrative for a range of ages in different ways.

All the Barbara Coney books: they may seem 'young' but are again multivalent and I still look at them. 'Island Boy,' 'Roxaboxen,' 'Elinor,' 'Miss Rumphius,' 'Emily' come to mind, there are more. Also good conversation prompts to get at the deeper implications for older young children.

A couple of my students' families love the dismally entertaining 'Lemony Snicket' series, have read all of them, and talk about them as a language of their own. (Some gruesome events are described, you may want to look at one first to see if your reader would be OK with it.)

Ditto the "Mysterious Benedict Society," with its prequel, sequels, and a companion "Puzzles, Enigmas, and Conundrums" book. Basic message, it's fun being intelligent and using that as gift, not as a weapon against others.

In discussing Alexander's other adventure series ("The Illyrian Adventure," etc.) I meant to mention that he takes his characters to places American kids don't hear much about, like Eastern European countries they have to look up to locate, and parts of China they would be unlikely to hear discussed in the (woefully blinkered) American news and social studies classes. Mind-broadening in more than one way.

MacKen's "Flight of the Doves" is a page-turner (also some violence implied, again, a pre-read might be in order) and has some beautiful description sections. Set in Ireland, it's more down-to-earth and gritty--no leprechauns help the kids out of their plight. I think there are others in the series but haven't read them.

"Landslide," I thought, was one of a group of Australian children's fiction books about how kids survive natural disasters and prevail, but it's not showing up in my searchers; can't recall the author, but I remember they were very realistic and very good.

OK, work to do and disaster will strike if I don't get started on it!!

M.

[onthefringe]

Here's what the fringelet was enjoying at or near that age (10-ish years ago)

Rick Riordan, especially the Percy Jackson Series and the Kane Chronicles.
The (endless) Warrior Cats series by Erin Hunter (fair warning I loathed these, but she adored them)
All the Tamora Pierce books
Age appropriate Neil Gaiman (Coraline and The Graveyard Book and Odd and the Frost Giants)
D'Aulaire's Greek Mythology
Cathrynne M. Valente's Girl who Ruled Fairyland series

Though the vast majority of Seanan McGuire is likely NOT tween-appropriate, I found her "Up and Under" series starting with Over the Woodward Wall (written under the name A. Deborah Baker for reasons) thoroughly charming (kind of a self-aware Oz/Narnia series), and I think an actual 10 year old might like it too...

[fleabite]

Smolt might enjoy The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its sequel, Black Hearts in Battersea. Other favorites: The Phantom Tollbooth, A Walk Out of the World, and My Side of the Mountain (I'm not sure whether the last might be most suitable for a child one or two years older).

[ergative]

Smolt might enjoy The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its sequel, Black Hearts in Battersea. Other favorites: The Phantom Tollbooth, A Walk Out of the World, and My Side of the Mountain (I'm not sure whether the last might be most suitable for a child one or two years older).

Oh, yes, I loved The Phantom Tollbooth.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series is, I think, written for people who can appreciate that it's an alternate history of England in which the Jacobites won (so instead of Bonnie Prince Charlie you have Bonnie Prince Georgie). That all went way over my head and I found the political stuff very perplexing. My mother loves those books. She had to explain the history stuff to me.

[fleabite]

I had no idea that an alternative history of England was involved. My father purchased the first of the two books on his way home from work when I was home sick at around age 10 and I gobbled it down and loved it. I read it a number of other times and never found it puzzling. Maybe I just didn't know English history well enough.

[onthefringe]

I had no idea that an alternative history of England was involved. My father purchased the first of the two books on his way home from work when I was home sick at around age 10 and I gobbled it down and loved it. I read it a number of other times and never found it puzzling. Maybe I just didn't know English history well enough.

Agreed — I loved that book an found out it was alternate history...today. Maybe the lifetime of reading speculative fiction left me inured to being confused by a book's politics?

[apl68]

Beau Geste, by P.C. Wren.  This is one of those bestsellers of yesteryear that has long been best known to the general public through its Hollywood adaptations and parodies.  Interested readers can still find the originals in public-domain reprints, such as the used Dover paperback that I read here.  Beau Geste is, of course, one of the principal originators of the now largely forgotten genre of French Foreign Legion thrillers.  The doomed garrison of Fort Zinderneuf certainly fits the stereotype of hard-cases being pushed into mutiny by brutal martinet officers.  It's worth noting that the book's narrator pointedly says that most legionnaires and their officers were not like that.  The Fort Zinderneuf disaster is portrayed as stemming from a most unfortunate collision of personalities and circumstances. 

But that's the image that most subsequent depictions of the Legion picked up on.  The real-life Legion has ever since had to contend with a reputation as a collection of crazed officers and fugitives from justice (And, after World War II, a probably equally exaggerated reputation for harboring escaped Nazis).  P.C. Wren famously claimed that he had personally served in the Legion.  His details of Legion life in the early 1900s do reportedly check out for the most part.  Whether he actually experienced these details first-hand has long been open to debate.

Like many vintage thrillers, Beau Geste comes across as talky and slow-paced by more recent standards.  It consists largely of very long conversations.  If you have a soft spot for the rhythms, vocabulary, and humor of vintage dialog, this may not be an objection.  The author's idea of how Americans, Italians, and other nationalities talked can be quite amusing if you're in the mood for it.  There are, inevitably in such an old book (Or in almost anything written more than about ten years ago, really) casual expressions of social attitudes that would not be welcome today.

[mamselle]

A French film, 《Beau Travail》might be based on that, or just in the genre, but was very were done. There's not a lot of dialogue, so even if ones French is limited, it communicates well.

Just a crossover thought....

M.

[Parasaurolophus]

Redwall. All the Redwall. Every Redwall I could lay my hands on.

Oh yes! I loved Redwall around that age (as did my partner, whose first present to me was the Redwall Cookbook!).


You probably don't know about these, since they're Canadiana, but I highly recommend Gordon Korman's books (everything he wrote until the early 1990s is great; the stuff after that, I can't vouch for). You should start with I Want to Go Home, which is hilarious (even for adults). If she likes that, then the Macdonald Hall series is also great.