Some of you have asked me for a list of books that would be appropriate for 7th and 8th Grade English Literature students (and for parents who might wish to reacquaint themselves with the classics). The canon is so rich and diverse that this just scratches the surface, but it's a start:
Emily Bronte—"Wuthering Heights"; Alexander Pope—"The Odyssey"; Jonathan Swift---"Gulliver's Travels"; Charles Dickens---"Oliver Twist" or "Bleak House";
Isak Dinesen---"Out of Africa"; Thoreau---"Walden";
E.M. Forster---"A Passage To India"; Rudyard Kipling---"Captains Courageous";
Virginia Woolf---"To the Lighthouse"; Anthony Trollope---"Barchester Towers";
Willa Cather---"O Pioneers!" or "My Antonia";
William M. Thackeray---"Vanity Fair"; George Eliot---"Middlemarch";
George Orwell---"Animal Farm" or "1984";
Ernest Hemingway---short story collections, "In Our Time" or "Men Without Women", or "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" or "A Moveable Feast" or "The Sun Also Rises" or "A Farewell To Arms";
Mark Twain---"Huck Finn";
Jane Austen---"Pride and Prejudice"; T.H. White---"The Sword in the Stone"; Herman Melville---"Typee";
Joseph Conrad---"Heart of Darkness"; Oscar Wilde---"The Importance of Being Earnest" or "The Picture of Dorian Grey";
John Steinbeck---"The Red Pony" or "Of Mice and Men";
Walt Whitman---"Leaves of Grass"; Robert L. Stevenson---"The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" or "Treasure Island";
William Shakespeare---"The Sonnets" or "Romeo and Juliet" or "Macbeth" or "Julius Caesar";
Theodore Dreiser----"An American Tragedy";
P.G. Wodehouse---"My Man Jeeves"; H.G. Wells---"The Time Machine"; Evelyn Waugh---"A Handful of Dust";
A selection from the poems of Longfellow, Tennyson, Dickinson, Larkin, Keats, Plath, T.S. Eliot, Hardy, Frost, Burns, Emerson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Blake.
Well, that's a beginning. Happy reading and regards, Doug
