Reading list (thus far)

[icarus]

Avast! Here is the tentative first cut of vocab-building works for my SAT students, a menu of genres so they can find something they like. I'm thinking of including a quote from each work or a blurb to help kids decide. A blank list of books is so daunting.

Thank you all for your excellent recommendations.

Still needed: possibly two sci-fi works, and non-fiction. Ender's Game and Fahrenheit 451 might not make the final cut if the vocab isn't challenging enough. I'm still checking the vocab on all of these, hunting through googlebooks. My rule of thumb: at least one $10 word per page.

We're collecting short stories but that's a different list. Poetry and plays are separate lists as well.

A third list will encompass all of the recommendations so you can enjoy them and they're not buried in comments. I'll also use that to build from for other reading recommendations.


ACTION/ADVENTURE
Isabel Allende, Zorro
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

HORROR
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

MYSTERY
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Sign of Four
Agatha Christie, [no particular work]

19TH CENTURY LITERATURE
Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

SCI FI
Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

FANTASY
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Garth Nix, Abhorsen trilogy

HUMOR
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charlie

NON-FICTION
World Air Power Journal
John Adams, The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams

HISTORY and HISTORICAL FICTION
Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea
Charles Dickens, A Tale Of Two Cities
Mary Renault, A Fire From Heaven
Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front*
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby*

Thank you again. This is still a work in progress.


* Both of these great works I loathe, so I'm not sure I want to inflict them on my students.

Comments

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

For speculative fiction that has great vocab, you could try something by China Mielville (sp?). His works tend to have some adult themes, though. Also, scifi, I suggest "I, Robot" by Asimov, and warn the kids it's nothing like the movie.

Or, even better, Asimov once edited a collection of short-short scifi stories- they are all excellent, they all have good vocab, and they are short enough for anybody's attention span. I love it, and a lot of libraries seems to have a copy. I can't remember the title off the top of my head, though.

And again, I suggest Wodehouse. Jeeves is always dropping good words, and Bertie never misuses them.

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

Found it! "One Hundred Great Science Fiction Short-Short Stories" and apparently there's a fantasy one too that I haven't seen.

[icarus]

Wodehouse must be added to this list.

I remember that collection of short stories. It had a very simple, obvious title, iirc.

[cofax7]

Cool list. The Renault is actually Fire From Heaven, though.

[icarus]

Ah, thank you. I haven't checked that one out on google books yet.

[nemonie]

Bit late to the party, sorry.

I'd say anything by Neil Gaiman, although some of his short stories are somewhat gruesome he uses language amazingly.