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In this Discussion
- Cherry_Pie March 2012
- Clever_girl March 2012
- ed_chigliak March 2012
- flossy_log_lady March 2012
- freddy March 2012
- Leland March 2012
- Loose_Thread March 2012
- Lucy March 2012
- manmadeshark March 2012
- MirandaJuly March 2012
- the_owls March 2012
- YoursTruly March 2012
Books for Girls!
Hey you, UHX girlfriend!
Do you remember first and second grade? You were smart, one of the bright ones, and you began to use books to build a secret world of the mind that you could enter and control. In these books you found heroes and visions that captivated you and continued to resonate. These books gave you the foundation to flesh out an extravagant flourishing consciousness. They gave you guidance, solace, pleasure and power for your journeys across the surface of a cruel and alien planet.
I'd love to have a list of 100 books for bright females under the age of ten. Not little kid readers, the next level up, but still before arriving at the lavishly adorned horror, lust and pathology that we know and love as adult life. (We can wait 'til Jr. High for all that.) Really, I just want to know what worked for you, because it did!
Do you remember first and second grade? You were smart, one of the bright ones, and you began to use books to build a secret world of the mind that you could enter and control. In these books you found heroes and visions that captivated you and continued to resonate. These books gave you the foundation to flesh out an extravagant flourishing consciousness. They gave you guidance, solace, pleasure and power for your journeys across the surface of a cruel and alien planet.
I'd love to have a list of 100 books for bright females under the age of ten. Not little kid readers, the next level up, but still before arriving at the lavishly adorned horror, lust and pathology that we know and love as adult life. (We can wait 'til Jr. High for all that.) Really, I just want to know what worked for you, because it did!
Comments
OMG
SO EXCITED! STARTING A TEXT DOC TO BRAINSTORM!
ps- thanks for writing that description of my childhood up there.
5 Children and It (E. Nesbit - and a bunch of other E Nesbit books)
The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster)
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (E.L. Konigsburg)
A Wrinkle in Time (Madeline L'Engle)
Green Knowe series (L.M. Boston)
Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (Julie Edwards - yes, that one)
Mary Poppins (P.L. Travers)
The Egypt Game (Zilpha Keatley Snyder - might be a little scary)
Bunnicula (Deborah Howe)
The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O'Dell)
Little House series (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) (Ellen Raskin)
Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzhugh)
You said she's already all over Roald Dahl, yeah?
The Light Princess (George MacDonald)
All the Ramona Quimby books (Beverly Cleary)
Holes (Louis Sachar)
Interestingly, you just nailed 4 of my favorites. We just finished The Phantom Tollbooth as bed-time reading. Yes, on Dahl. She just started a third Dahl book (First time on her own. Sorry they weren't the common titles - I don't recall them right now.)
She's done some Lion, Witch, Wardrobe. Wizard of OZ. Pippi Longstocking. (Read to her at bedtimes.) She's read like 50 Treehouse Mysteries on her own, and now working through something called Bailey School Kids. She's in a Montessori program where, when she completes her work plan for the week, they basically cut her loose to read as much as she wants.
She read Ramona and Beezus. Cool.
Anne of Green Gables
Emily of New Moon
Sarah Plain & Tall
The Secret Garden
Black Beauty
Island of Blue Dolphins
Stuart Little
Charlotte's Web (sob) (possibly the source of my love for fairgrounds)
James & The Giant Peach- and all appropriate Dahl!
The Borrowers
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
The Wind in the Willows
Misty of Chincoteague
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Wind in the Door
The Indian in the Cupboard
Where the Red Fern Grows
My Side of the Mountain (so good)
Ballet Shoes (surprisingly badass!)
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes- for when she's ready to talk about death :)
Nancy Drew
Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from Around the World !
God bless whoever gave this to me, it continues to be one of my favorite books and helped me, from an early age, build an understanding of other cultures and generally bein' a badass.
If she's rocking Narnia, I might be able to dig a little deeper.
UHX Gals v. Nicki Minaj.... fighting for her soul.....
Book Report! Great idea. I'd love to facilitate an interactive dialogue.
So delicious, Knight's Tales and Dramas as acted by small woodland animals.
So informative for me, cementing my belief in the valor and dramas of critters as they lived outside and around me... obvy continuing to this damn day!
The Wind in the Willows could be a good start? And that feminist folk tales book, for dippin' in! PIPO!
Very deep old love for me. Brave animals taking their daily repaste of acorns, watercress, and mint cordial. Otters love pepper.
Who knew that when we picnic, we have just been privately recreating Redwall all along?
Books work!!!
Lemony Snicket
Coraline (scary?)
Guardians of Ga'Hoole (owls!)
AESOP
Isaac Asimov made some kid's books
Redwall picnic? They ate so well...
I have at this very moment a small velveteen mouse wearing overalls tucked away in a drawer in my bedroom... one of my many personal heroes from this time, about whom I would spin tales of glory and hot air balloon rides. He's a keeper.
When I was seven I was living in a commune full of bikers and hippies. My mom read us Mark Twain, Jack London, Robinson Curusoe and Lord of the Rings (ok I was 8 for Tolkien). The hippies all read pulp science fiction journals, furry freak brothers, wonder warthog, Dr. Strange, Silver Surfer comics and I'd catch their leftovers. R Crumb boobies, etc.
Yes, I was probably damaged, but...... maybe in a good way, too. Just sayin'. Be real. ;)
(This list is already so holy! Thank you!)
I also read so much trash, like The Babysitters Club.
I'd read anything that had words on it! Nothing seemed to mess me up too bad- in fact, I can't think of a single book that I remember being difficult or weird for me except for when I tried to read Shakespeare in the 5th grade.
Read it all up, little doggy!
5 Little Peppers and How They Grew
East of the Sun, West of the Moon
A Wrinkle in Time and Island of the Blue Dolphins were also some favorites.
I, for some dark reason, also got deep into holocaust fiction at a young age. Number the Stars sticks out.
Bridge to Terabithia FOR SURE
There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom
Sixth Grade Secrets (about sixth graders, but kids like reading about older kids)
Sideways Stories from Wayside School
OK, you know what, ALL Louis Sachar books are good
Just as Long as We're Together by Judy Blume (my wife's favorite book when she was ten)
I was definitely reading Stephen King in 3rd grade, and with no namby-pamby censoring of pages either!
I think (with that in mind, I mean, considering I am obviously not some sort of genius) that the 10 year old mind can really rise to the occasion. For that reason I would not shy away from something like The Hobbit even though it seems long and complex. I have very intense memories of having it read aloud to me as a 5 year old and totally digging it--surely 12 can go deep. Definitely I had read it again by myself by 12. It can skew young because there's SO LITTLE PSYCHOLOGY. Just heroic deeds, bad guys and good guys, and cool beasts. Also MAPS.
Evie, very similarly, at age 9 I read a nuclear holocaust book that obsessed me more than probably any other book I've ever read. I still think about it probably weekly, and can see the cover vividly. There's a part where they have to shoot the family dog. Then everybody dies of radiation poisoning. YOUNG ADULT SECTION OF THE LIBRARY.
There was a Drew-like series for young girls called Trixie Belden that I was furiously into. It's like an updated Nancy Drew--way fewer dresses and fat jokes. The main character is a tomboy. I remember in particular one scene where she wears a dress to impress a boy and everyone is like "OMG LOOK AT YOU IN A DRESS" and she's so filled with rage, it really struck home with me. "My god it's like she's known me all my life"
Also!!!
ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN!!!!!!!!! Riddle-solving pre-teen sleuth!
And The Great Brain, which was about turn of the center Jesuit school boys and a weird genius who played clever pranks. You can read the book then play the pranks on your own friends (they are harmless and largely math based). There's a scene where they see a basketball for the first time.
Ralph S. Mouse, isn't that by Beverly Clearly? The mouse drives the car by saying the word "Vrooom!" WTF?!
At her age I also read The Plains of Passage series but I don't recommend that necessarily (best kept secret of my generation's girlhood: totally pornography. But your parents would still get them for you for christmas because they seemed vaguely education and certainly did not indicate their porniness up front. Such good memories though)
I don't know about Judy Blume anymore, what do you guys think? I of course loved them but in retrospect they seem super period-and-boob obsessed.
Thank you, this has been the perfect short break activity in my insane day
Periods!
Death!
Making Out!
oh god, literally started tearing up writing it
maybe don't give it to your girl
With Blume there's maybe more of an argument, but I still think a mature kid can handle that stuff. Kids want to know what's coming, what's the next step.
I was so disappointed Terebithia wasn't real
when I read it five years ago
Watership Down was my all time favorite. I was obsessed with it. I would love nothing more than to be partly responsible for introducing a young reader to Watership Down.
Any of the Moomin books!
Heidi!
The Witch of Blackbird Pond (maybe in a year or two)!
Tuck Everlasting!
The Hounds of the Morrigan!
We do go into the library and bookstores and follow our browsing, but I just really trust suggestions from your experience. Good stuff, especially for girls, especially in respect of a critical feminist consciousness, seems rare. Also, as a collectivity, and again one I feel like I know and trust, it means much more to me than a list out of a magazine or compiled by a librarian. I don't know what their agendas are, you know? Yours are just how you got awesome. Works for me!
Persepolis is the only one I can think of and it may be too old for her? You'd have to, like, explain what the Shah is and stuff. Burkas. Maybe it could be awesome for her age, I haven't read it in awhile.
Also when does a girl read the Golden Compass?? Pretty soon, right? That's going to be epic.
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier (maybe a 12+ book; "Do I Dare Disturb The Universe?"
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
Also WILLIAM SLEATOR, he wrote all those YA sci-fi dystopia novels, like House of Stairs, where a bunch of kids wake up and they're trapped in this house made of nothing but endless stairs and it's all about systematized brutality and capitalism and knowing yourself and rising above. He also wrote a book called Fingers about a kid whose hands somehow get possessed by the ghost of Rachmaninoff's hands or something? I had a signed copy of this one as a child. Interstellar Pig! that's his too.
I really liked his books when I was roughly J's age...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sleator
"His books typically deal with adolescents coming across a peculiar phenomenon related to an element of theoretical science, then trying to deal with the situation."
Great girl character named Rat Face who is a total tomboy.
Magic Treehouse (formulaic but pretty solid series- a good way in to chapter books)
Ivy & Bean (featuring fun, non-bitchy girls who are friends)
Clementine (the heir to Ramona)
American Girl books (I know, I know- the branding! But they are an engaging and reliable into to historical fiction)
Warriors (Fantasy- The Warriors are CATS!)
To Dance (A Caldecott Award winning graphic novel about ballet)
ALSO... not to state the obvious, but HARRY POTTER! The first book is PERFECT for a second grader, and if she's able to read them slowly (maybe with you at bedtime) she'll sort of grow up with the kids in the books. The last couple books are heavy- some of my students read them but I think like, 5th grade would be the perfect time to finish the series. Hard to wait though!
I think books like Golden Compass, Narnia, etc. are great to read with a nice mom or dad at bedtime- they're so worthwhile but hard to unpack at this age by yourself. It's nice to have someone to talk to about daemons and stuff- "Daddy, what would your daemon be?" etc.
I have more ideas! I'll watch my smarty pants girls at reading time today to see if what they curl up with would be a good fit for Miss J.
YOU ARE A COOL DAD, DR. J!