My son is just about 9, homeschooling, and loves to read. I'm looking at books to populate a shelf, for his reading enjoyment. Recommendations please?
So far I'm getting him:
Big Friendly Giant
Harry Potter 1
Navigating Early
Charlotte's Web
Puss in Boots
Picture Unrelated
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The Little Prince
Alice in Wonderland
Watership Down for when he's a little older
...
James and the Giant Peach
The Belgariad
In a year or three:
The Colour of Magic
Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A Series of Unfortunate Events
The Hobbit
Bartimaeus, soon
infinit jeps
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>Harry Potter 1
I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?
It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."
Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
>his kids aren't reading the greeks
Memes aside, you should seriously get him in on greek mythology. There are plenty of kid friendly collections out there and it's the kind of stuff that you have to have read at some point.
how about some books about natural science and social science? The simple kind. He