Posted on 12/08/2013 6:53:26 PM PST by SeekAndFind
As a reader, the mother of four children, and an author, I want my kids to love to read and to approach reading as joy and nourishment. The following five works of fiction do not encourage and inspire the love of reading in children. They’re terrible books for kids. If you make your children read these they will develop a loathing for reading that will last their whole lives and may possibly poison their very souls. Let’s see why.
Note: Minor spoilers.
This is a set of four short stories set in the western United States and an excellent example of John Steinbeck’s famously spare, elegant prose. Beautifully written, with underlying themes of death and redemption, we can all agree that this is a classic. Did I mention the gruesome death of the title character, the beloved red pony? No? Want to watch your children sob in heartbreak and then continue on to read the next three stories with increasing puzzlement and despair as the complicated themes go over their heads and they must endure the agonizing death of another beloved horse? The Red Pony will not give your children a desire to read for pleasure. Just because a novel features a child doesn’t mean that the work is appropriate for them.
Yes, children should be exposed to stories of heartbreak, loss, and redemption, but there are much better novels than Steinbeck’s to share with your child. Hand over Old Yeller by Fred Gipson, Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, or Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Each of these books will make your child cry, but in the end will fill them with joy.
Oh, take that shocked look off your face. Of course this is a beloved classic and almost every school child has to read the story of Native American Karana and her tale of survival as a stranded young girl on an island off the coast of California. But why? Karana is an emotionless character who plods along in her adventure one grim day at a time. She makes a great sacrifice to save her brother, but her sacrifice is made useless when her brother dies shortly afterward. Scott O’Dell evokes the abundance of life and the beauty of the western coast, but Karana lives a spare, bleak life. She endures on the island for years, alone. In the end Karana is rescued by a passing ship, a passive ending to a sad tale.
Children need stories that teach them heroism, ingenuity, and success in the face of adversity. Try Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford, or My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. I never wanted to see Karana’s island after I finished Island of the Blue Dolphins. But Sam Gribley’s tree house in My Side of the Mountain? I wanted to go live there. Somewhere in my heart, I always will.
Don’t be surprised if your twelve year old comes home from school with this book as part of her required reading. All of mine did, and I read the novel and admired the gritty, urban life that Myers evokes in the story of Steve Harmon, on trial for murder after a botched robbery of a convenience store. Myers uses a nifty movie-script format interspersed with diary entries. This is an excellent book but it’s terrible for children. Why do I say this? Does exposing your child to a description of a homosexual gang rape sound like fun? Later in the story, your child will read about an anal butt plug insertion. My twelve-year-old children were assigned a novel that describes sodomy and sex toys.
Even worse, there is the sympathy that Myers creates for Steve, a terribly misled youngster who was involved in a murder. Pre-teens might identify with Steve so much that they think it’s okay to be found innocent of murder as long as you “didn’t really mean to.” Myers wrote a terrific book and I recommend it for older teens who can understand conflict without confusing it for absolution. Don’t give your children this book.
If you’d like your child to read a novel that describes the complexity and heartbreak of the accused, try To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Homelanders series by Andrew Klavan, or the always wonderful The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
This trilogy written by the English author Pullman consists of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, called the His Dark Materials series. They were written as an opposition to C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, a seven book fantasy series that intends to “inkle” a belief and love of Christianity in young children. His Dark Materials is intended to foster a belief in atheism in children. How charming.
Unlike an agnostic tale where God is not present, the His Dark Materials series is all about God, and is full of rage and bitterness at Him and His angels. Children often enjoy the tale of Lyra Belacqua and her Golden Compass, but they are really reading a revenge fantasy. Christian or not, this is not the kind of emotional bile you want your child absorbing.
If you want to show your children fantastical and wondrous worlds of magic and adventure, try The Chronicles of Narnia or the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan.These stories will uplift, entertain, and suffuse your children with the joy of reading.
The worst of the five terrible books for your children is this one, and this is a story that your child will devour in delight. A Series of Unfortunate Events is a tale of nihilism and despair packaged in such a charming way that children and their loving parents will laugh and only wonder later why their stomachs feel queasy and strange. The author, Lemony Snicket, writes incredibly well. The three main characters, Violet, Klaus and Sunny, are orphan siblings who love and care for each other. Their adventures are thrilling. But this is a terrible, terrible series for your children. Why?
At the end of each book, Count Olaf, the villain, has successfully removed the children from a loving home, having killed the person the children have just learned to love, and has turned them back into orphans. In each book, Violet and Klaus come up with a brilliant plan to escape him, or to defeat him, but they always just barely manage to escape, and usually through some plot twist that doesn’t even come from their ideas. Ask a child who loves the series and they’ll tell you that Count Olaf is a great guy. He’s the winner, and who doesn’t love a winner? He never gets his heart broken, he is never sad, dejected, or lonely. He never cries himself to sleep. Violet and Klaus and Sunny survive, but in such abject misery that no one in their right mind would choose to be them. No child looks at Violet and says: “Look how beneficial it is to study and be smart and invent things.” No. The lesson is that no matter how smart you are, no matter how hard you work, the bad guys are always smarter, and will come out on top because evil pays. That is the overall message of these books.
Do you think children understand this? Let me share a story. As an author of a children’s adventure book for reluctant readers, I am often asked to speak at schools. I was recently explaining about heroes to a group of kids in an elementary school in Parker, Colorado, when a young girl raised her hand. She was a cheerful and sweet little girl with long blonde pigtails. I called on her.
“What about evil? I like books where evil wins,” she asked me. I stood speechless as the teacher explained with a laugh that, not to worry, her student was currently enjoying the Lemony Snicket books.
There are places where evil wins, but that place should not be in our children’s hearts. Want to share a wonderful tale with your children that teaches them that evil doesn’t pay? Read Holes by Louis Sachar or A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my list. Which books did you despise as a youngster or love with all your heart? We all want to give our children the love of reading by sharing books with them that will encourage and inspire them, and avoid the books that don’t. Happy reading!
100 Great Books of Western Civilization
compiled by Mortimer Addler
(which every educated person should read)
1.Homer – Iliad; Odyssey
2.The Old Testament
3.Aeschylus – Tragedies
4.Sophocles – Tragedies
5.Herodotus – Histories
6.Euripides – Tragedies
7.Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
8.Hippocrates – Medical Writings
9.Aristophanes – Comedies
10.Plato – Dialogues
11.Aristotle – Works
12.Epicurus – “Letter to Herodotus”; “Letter to Menoecus”
13.Euclid – Elements
14.Archimedes – Works
15.Apollonius – Conics
16.Cicero – Works (esp. Orations; On Friendship; On Old Age; Republic; Laws; Tusculan Disputations; Offices)
17.Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
18.Virgil – Works (esp. Aeneid)
19.Horace – Works (esp. Odes and Epodes; The Art of Poetry)
20.Livy – History of Rome
21.Ovid – Works (esp. Metamorphoses)
22.Quintilian – Institutes of Oratory
23.Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
24.Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania; Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogue on Oratory)
25.Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
26.Epictetus – Discourses; Enchiridion
27.Ptolemy – Almagest
28.Lucian – Works (esp. The Way to Write History; The True History; The Sale of Creeds; Alexander the Oracle Monger; Charon; The Sale of Lives; The Fisherman; Dialogue of the Gods; Dialogues of the Sea-Gods; Dialogues of the Dead)
29.Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
30.Galen – On the Natural Faculties
31.The New Testament
32.Plotinus – The Enneads
33.St. Augustine – “On the Teacher”; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
34.The Volsungs Saga or Nibelungenlied
35.The Song of Roland
36.The Saga of Burnt Njál
37.Maimonides – The Guide for the Perplexed
38.St. Thomas Aquinas – Of Being and Essence; Summa Contra Gentiles; Of the Governance of Rulers; Summa Theologica
39.Dante Alighieri – The New Life (La Vita Nuova); “On Monarchy”; Divine Comedy
40.Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
41.Thomas à Kempis – The Imitation of Christ
42.Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
43.Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
44.Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly; Colloquies
45.Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
46.Thomas More – Utopia
47.Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
48.François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
49.John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
50.Michel de Montaigne – Essays
51.William Gilbert – On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
52.Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
53.Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
54.Francis Bacon – Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis
55.William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
56.Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
57.Johannes Kepler – The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
58.William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; Generation of Animals
59.Grotius – The Law of War and Peace
60.Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan; Elements of Philsophy
61.René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul
62.Corneille – Tragedies (esp. The Cid, Cinna)
63.John Milton – Works (esp. the minor poems; Areopagitica; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes)
64.Molière – Comedies (esp. The Miser; The School for Wives; The Misanthrope; The Doctor in Spite of Himself; Tartuffe; The Tradesman Turned Gentleman; The Imaginary Invalid; The Affected Ladies)
65.Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
66.Boyle – The Sceptical Chemist
67.Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
68.Benedict de Spinoza – Political Treatises; Ethics
69.John Locke – A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
70.Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies (esp. Andromache; Phaedra; Athalie (Athaliah))
71.Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
72.Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays on Human Understanding; Monadology
73.Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
74.Jonathan Swift – The Battle of the Books; A Tale of a Tub; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver’s Travels; A Modest Proposal
75.William Congreve – The Way of the World
76.George Berkeley – A New Theory of Vision; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
77.Alexander Pope – An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man
78.Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; The Spirit of the Laws
79.Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
80.Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
81.Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; Lives of the Poets
82.David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; History of England
83.Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality; On Political Economy; Emile; The Social Contract; Confessions
84.Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
85.Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
86.William Blackstone – Commentaries on the Laws of England
87.Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
88.Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
89.James Boswell – Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
90.Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
91.Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and United States Declaration of Independence)
92.Jeremy Bentham – Comment on the Commentaries; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
93.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
94.Thomas Robert Malthus – An Essay on the Principle of Population
95.John Dalton – A New System of Chemical Philosophy
96.Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
97.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – The Phenomenology of Spirit; Science of Logic; Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
98.William Wordsworth – Poems (esp. Lyrical Ballads; Lucy poems; sonnets; The Prelude)
99.Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems (esp. Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ); Biographia Literaria
100.David Ricardo – On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
101.Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
102.Carl von Clausewitz – On War
103.Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
104.François Guizot – History of Civilization in France
105.Lord Byron – Don Juan
106.Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
107.Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
108.Nikolai Lobachevsky – Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels
109.Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
110.Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
111.Honoré de Balzac – Works (esp. Le Père Goriot; Le Cousin Pons; Eugénie Grandet; Cousin Bette; César Birotteau)
112.Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
113.Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
114.Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
115.John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; Principles of Political Economy; On Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
116.Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
117.William Makepeace Thackeray – Works (esp. Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond; The Virginians; Pendennis)
118.Charles Dickens – Works (esp. Pickwick Papers; Our Mutual Friend; David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Hard Times)
119.Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
120.George Boole – The Laws of Thought
121.Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
122.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Das Kapital (Capital); The Communist Manifesto
123.George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
124.Herman Melville – Typee; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
125.Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
126.Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
127.Henry Thomas Buckle – A History of Civilization in England
128.Francis Galton – Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development
129.Bernhard Riemann – The Hypotheses of Geometry
130.Henrik Ibsen – Plays (esp. Peer Gynt; Brand; Hedda Gabler; Emperor and Galilean; A Doll’s House; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder)
131.Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; “What Is Art?”; Twenty-Three Tales
132.Richard Dedekind – Theory of Numbers
133.Wilhelm Wundt – Physiological Psychology; Outline of Psychology
134.Mark Twain – The Innocents Abroad; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; The Mysterious Stranger
135.Henry Adams – History of the United States; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams; Degradation of Democratic Dogma
136.Charles Peirce – Chance, Love, and Logic; Collected Papers
137.William Sumner – Folkways
138.Oliver Wendell Holmes – The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers
139.William James – Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; A Pluralistic Universe; Essays in Radical Empiricism
140.Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
141.Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality; The Will to Power; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist
142.Georg Cantor – Transfinite Numbers
143.Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method; The Foundations of Science
144.Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays to the Theory of Sex; Introduction to Psychoanalysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; The Ego and the Id; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
145.George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
146.Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
147.Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
148.John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; The Quest for Certainty; Logic – The Theory of Inquiry
149.Alfred North Whitehead – A Treatise on Universal Algebra; An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
150.George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Scepticism and Animal Faith; The Realms of Being (which discusses the Realms of Essence, Matter and Truth); Persons and Places
151.Vladimir Lenin – Imperialism; The State and Revolution
152.Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (formerly translated as Remembrance of Things Past)
153.Bertrand Russell – Principles of Mathematics; The Problems of Philosophy; Principia Mathematica; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
154.Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
155.Albert Einstein – The Theory of Relativity; Sidelights on Relativity; The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
156.James Joyce – “The Dead” in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
157.Jacques Maritain – Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; Freedom and the Modern World; A Preface to Metaphysics; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
158.Franz Kafka – The Trial; The Castle
159.Arnold J. Toynbee – A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
160.Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
161.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle; Cancer Ward
Eventually kids will read and watch what they want, but their choices need to be guided. They will then have a foundation to explore with a critical eye.
Ibsen still evokes arguments. ‘A Doll’s House’ and ‘Hedda Gabbler’ still have the power to shock an audience.
That's the attitude my parents had. Outside of school, I don't think I read anything but sports books until I was 15. However, I tested at a 12th grade reading level when I was in 6th grade.
My youngest son (he'll be 12 in two weeks) has different tastes than his old man. He's more into survival manuals and Hunger Games, but he also takes his Bible to school every day, reading it while he's on the bus.
Two nights ago, I planted a seed regarding the works of Frederic Forsyth. I had DVR'ed The Day of the Jackal, and he watched a bit of it before going to bed. Simply put, the first 100-150 pages of a Forsyth novel can be a bit of a trudge, but you quickly learn where to stop. If you continue, you won't get any sleep that night because you can't put it down.
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