Books to Build Great Americans (Ages 13-17)
"Books tap the wisdom of our species -- the greatest minds, the best teachers -- from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient." - Carl Sagan
These are the most important books you or your child will ever read.
Great literature is a mirror. When we have the vocabulary and the will to contend with Steinbeck and Hemingway, Ellison and Wright, Rushdie and Naipaul, Dickinson and Brooks, we must reckon with our fallibility. Literature forces us to examine our priors, to evaluate, to judge and, ultimately, forgive. We are mere mortals, after all.
But we must learn the vocabulary and find the will, otherwise we waste our lives denying humanity, pawns in the designs of others who nudge us, using our own undisciplined desires, one way or the other.
And so I urge you parents and grandparents to do something: help the American (or Canadian) children in your life wrestle with the big ideas of life. The will to read grows alongside the vocabulary necessary to understand. The kids need your help with some words and ideas. You may need some help too — you’ll certainly need fortitude. Fortunately, reading literature is a self-supporting process. The more you read (especially the really good stuff) the more you know. The more you know, the easier the reading becomes, across all topics and genres — even nonfiction.
This is why when you give struggling readers who also play baseball a technical text about the game, their reading problems disappear. Poor reading is most often a function of limited knowledge. You know what fixes it? Reading more. You know what won’t? Public school.
How to Proceed
Because you’re going to have to do this at home, I’m trying to make it as easy as possible. Start with my list of books and stories for 3-7 year olds if you have a non-reader on your hands. Yes, your tween might balk, but you only have a few years to give your child the foundation she’ll build the rest of her life upon. If she resists reading, retrain her. If she’s been in school for years, they’ve trained her to see reading as pointless, unnecessary drudgery. You’ll have to break her of this attitude or prepare yourself to lose her to whatever “feels” right, which is dangerous — as you know — but is how she’s currently trained to decide.
The fastest way to make a non-reader a reader is to tweak incentives. Like I said, school teaches kids they don’t need to read to get good grades. But you and I know you need to read to be educated. You and I also know that education is an individual pursuit; a child must be given some choice in the matter. Get that list of books (Ages 3-7 here and ages 8-12 here) and make video game or social media access contingent on choosing a book, reading it, and talking to you about it.
If a kid has unlimited access to screens, he’s more than likely going to avoid doing the difficult thing if he doesn’t have to. Reading is shockingly difficult for kids who spend large chunks of their day gaming and scrolling; some of you (especially grandparents) are going to be horrified at how hard it is for your kid to accurately recount what happens in a narrative text. Extrinsic motivation (rewards) may be necessary at first to get a kid over the hump of focused attention that good stories require. Slowly eliminate rewards as your child recognizes that a great story is its own reward.
This process takes time, especially if you’ve allowed unlimited screen time in the past. It may take quite some time before your child chooses books on her own. I can guarantee, however, that if you allow unlimited phone/screen access, she never will. I see it all the time, and the effects of screens on children are far more pernicious than you think. (No currently published journalistic piece I’ve read on this accurately captures what I’ve seen in the classroom, so I’ll be writing about the academic effects of screen time on kids soon but, for now, know that the difference between kids who have unlimited access and those who don’t are enormous. Yes, it is both that bad and that obvious.)
The good news is that you have a far more powerful weapon in this fight than any teacher ever could: your love. If you make reading time mom or dad’s or meemaw’s undivided attention time, they will buy in. Pair it with a walk, a cuppa, a cookie, a bedtime snuggle, and your willingness to shut up and listen — not preach — and you may just find that these brilliant authors are the best relationship medicine there ever could be.
Here’s your plan of attack: Go to the library or buy the books you loved as a child and fill the house with them. Seriously. Get 20 or 30. Make them easy to access.
If none of the titles are familiar, get those books in your house and read them yourself. Get familiar with them. Understand the lessons they teach. Even if you’ve never read them before, it’ll be easy for you because you’ve lived what these stories help small humans with little experience understand. Who better to grok the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” than a parent? Who better to understand The Little Engine That Could than an ex-athlete or someone who’s worked a job they loathe?
It is very difficult to get a kid to enjoy something when you avoid it yourself. If your phone or other screens prevent you from reading these books with your child or sitting down to have a conversation about them, you’re going to have a rough go of it.
And here’s where this post asks you to examine yourself: if entertainment, TV, scrolling, or mindless gaming prevents you from reading with your child or discussing these stories with her, what are you telling her about the value of the western intellectual tradition?
What if the message we’re collectively sending our kids is that corporate cubicle slavery is the best we have to hope for and our reward for doing the bidding of others to an end we can’t see is watching someone else’s manufactured life unfold on TikTok, “winning” a game that steals hours of your life’s time and offers no reward outside the gaming chair, or buying things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like?
Turn off the TV. Put your phone on Do Not Disturb and connect it to a charger in another room. Turn on the microwave timer in the kitchen for 30 minutes. Pick up a book. Read. If your kid is game, cuddle on the couch and read to her. Then, hopefully without sounding patronizing — this can be a challenge with an adolescent — ask your child what she thinks the author is telling us about what it means to live a good life.
Add to the story. Tell her about the times when you were faced with a choice. Mundane, exciting, romantic — it doesn’t matter. Tell her when you caved. Tell her when you stood strong. Tell her when you did the right thing and suffered for it. Tell her when you chose the wrong thing and “won” but let her know how that moral failure still niggles at the back of your mind. Tell her how your life (and hers) might be different had you made different choices.
You are the primary teacher of your child. Teaching is scary, I know, but I’m good at it and I’m not special; I just figured out early that I could not only stand on the shoulders of giants, the Ellisons, Austens, Shakespeares, and Bradburys of the world invited me up and offered a boost. Public schools have largely thrown these genius men and women in the dustbin, calling them “culturally irrelevant” or saying their texts don’t engage modern readers — or worse, relegating them because they believe the systems present in K-12 classrooms prevent anyone from grokking their significance. In other words, the actions of the school bureaucracy in America demonstrate their knowledge that they render children too ignorant to engage with any of the great ideas.
Rubbish. School’s problem is that when a teacher has 30 kids in the room, some of whom can’t read at all, none of whom are hers for more than 180 hours, she has little incentive to bust her butt to work with them this way. She certainly can’t hold individualized, affectionate, honest conversations with each kid about her personal response to them.
But you, parents and grandparents, you can find the time, you know your kid, and you have all the skin in the game.
The List
Have you taken a peek yet? Petronius, Suetonius, Aristophanes. Dryden, Locke, Thucydides. Melville and Hawthorne and Conrad. The Lexile levels in the right-hand column might make you feel a little faint. They do me.
Remember that reading study I referenced above, the one where kids who scored poorly on reading tests but knew baseball understood as well as high test-scorers? The one that demonstrates the profound role cultural knowledge plays in a child’s ability to read and understand?
You can’t rely on our schools to build it. For numerous reasons, which I’ve detailed in my series of posts, Your Kids Aren’t Learning, school isn’t doing what it claims to do. It is, on the other hand, doing plenty of things it pretends not to do, the mechanisms of which I explained in these two posts: School Presents a Clear and Present Danger to Your Child’s Physical and Emotional Well-Being and School Trains Your Child to Be Unsuccessful.
Here’s the good news: as your child learns more, his motivation to learn more grows with his ability to learn it. That “I did it!” feeling is a huge intrinsic reward that keeps humanity moving forward.
Pop culture lies; motivation doesn’t come from a great pre-game speech or a hip-hop banger or even a hug, though hugs help. It comes from feelings of competence. When you tackle a difficult task and experience success, you learn you can, just like that little blue engine did. Confidence, as small as it may be when you begin, encourages you to take on a bigger challenge. When you know you have a good chance of success, you’re more likely to keep going. (Remember: if screens are an option, willingness to work hard at anything will decrease.)
And this is why you should be willing to drop back from this list to the list for 8-12 year olds and all the way down to the list for littles to build your kid’s competence which will feed his motivation. School does us all a great disservice by insisting on age-segregation because it makes a kid feel dumb when, really, he was deprived. If your kid hasn’t read Beatrix Potter or Jacob Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen or Rudyard Kipling or Greek and Roman and Norse mythology and doesn’t know the stories of the Torah and the New Testament, sit down and read those stories with him. Then go on to Tolkien and Lewis and Dumas and eventually, he’ll level up into Thucydides and Shakespeare and Locke because he’ll have developed the focus and vocabulary necessary to take those monsters of Western civ on.
When you get in the ring with the big boys, the only outcome is a win.
Take an Education or Get Schooled
Everybody loves the Twain quote, “I have never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” The problem is, Twain didn’t say it. However, he did quit school at 11 to work to help his family and proceeded to place himself firmly in the pantheon of America’s great authors. In Twain’s day, school was not compulsory, so if your family couldn’t pay for it, you were on your own for your education, as young rail-splitting Abraham Lincoln demonstrated. Millions of Americans had nearly zero formal education. The only book in many houses was a copy of the Bible; if your family had the means, you might also have a copy of the New England Primer so your mom could teach you the alphabet when she wasn’t busting her butt keeping the family fed, clothed, and clean. And yet, at the time, Americans were near universally literate.(Good job, mom.)
The Lincoln-Douglas debates are at a college-reading level and lasted for HOURS. Thousands of people willingly stood in the crowd to listen to them. And the only reason you’d stand there and listen for hours in a crowd approaching ten thousand people (or read transcripts in newspapers) is if you could understand them.
School is free now, but you get what you pay for. Our children spend eight hours of their day for 13 years of their lives listening to teachers who are increasingly conditioned to believe their primary responsibility is to act as a poor simulacrum of a mother and “build a relationship” with your child rather than teach foundational knowledge that will help them achieve success later in life. Too often learning takes the form of “group work” with the blind leading the blind, or one kid throwing her hands up and doing everything while the other three play on their school-issued devices. More concerningly, shortsighted teachers are now employing screens as their main information delivery system. Unsupervised by the teacher, reading difficult text — reading at all — is relegated as optional.
Your child’s good grades only means that her work was mostly turned in, she faithfully repeated what the teacher said in the very occasional writing assignment (usually not very closely graded), and she made the effort to retake or “correct” tests to keep her grade high. If not, there’s always extra credit for attending an event outside school or doing a “project”.
This isn’t learning, my dears. It’s compliance training. I gave up a tenured job, thirty grand in annual income, and torched a million-and-a-half bucks in pension to get out when I saw how aggressively modern K12 schooling was robbing my then-6th grader of his time while requiring zero effort from him. Nobody with any authority cared about outcomes as long as they could collect daily attendance money for every kid. They look the other way as some kids abuse each other and the teacher, while most of the rest spend their days checked out on their cell phones, learning only the lessons the TikTok, YouTube, and Insta algorithms put in front of them.
Your job is to get them the hiking boots and trekking poles that will allow them to climb their own mountain, wayfind their own route. School denies them shoes and keeps alternate paths obscured. It hides the greats from them, and now it tells them to focus on their feelings rather than on learning. It totally wastes their time.
If you need them in school because you believe you can’t trust them at home while you’re at work, or you don’t trust yourself to guide them, take some time every night to get them reading and then talk to them. Yes, the conversation will wander, but the only question you really need to tackle is “What does this author teach us about living a good life?” Let the conversation meander, but end it by asking what they think they’ll read next. If you’re reading a longer book, ask them to predict what they think will happen in the story and ask them why — you’d then actually be teaching them critical thinking.
No one gets an education if they don’t have choice in the matter — they get schooled. The latin roots of education (e + ducere) mean to draw out or lead out. Education draws out what’s uniquely great inside the individual, it doesn’t stuff in someone else’s feelings and thoughts and conclusions. School can’t even accomplish that; for most kids, anything the teacher does try to get them to remember is in one ear and out the other, sometimes not even long enough to pass a test which is why so many school districts have adopted Equitable Grading Practices to ensure kids can get good grades even when they learn little.
But you can let your child follow their passions. Keep in mind that if they haven’t read much and don’t know much, the only thing they’ll want to do is be entertained, which is passive. Education is NOT passive. You’re after a kid who reads The Lonesome Gods and realizes he loves the West and now he’d really, really like to go on a road trip to the National Parks in the Southwest, or a girl who reads Island of the Blue Dolphins and develops an interest in marine mammals and begs you to visit aquariums. So find the books you think he’ll like, the books that tell a story similar to her favorite movie, or the ones you loved that you can share with deep fondness — that alone often draws kids in. Talk about what they meant to you. Trust me, children want to know about what it was like when you were a kid — and these stories connect us all; it’s why they matter.
Give your child freedom to stroll down a path, but let them wander off it too. Support them with nonfiction when they want to learn more about a topic. Indulge their interests to keep them moving, but don’t be upset if they abandon study of something. Just encourage them to choose something different to learn about. I know I’m a broken record, but screens will derail their progress; I’ve seen it hundreds of times. It breaks my heart when I recognize a kid who has zero ability to focus on reading because their attention has been destroyed by the fractured way algorithms present wildly different topics. Brains don’t make strong neural connections that way; dopamine runs the show, giving the Algos all the power. It’s certainly not in YouTube’s best interests if your kid would take James Clavell over Mr. Beast.
Childhood shouldn’t be a forced march though. That’s yet another gift the Western Tradition has given us — an economy so productive that for the first time in recorded history, most kids in our country have the freedom to spend all day doing nothing at school. Unlike Twain and Lincoln, they don’t have to work to help the family survive. As a kid, I was able to move through books like wildfire, one book spurring interest in the next. I wish I’d had a list like the ones I compiled for you — I read an awful lot of trash that wasted my time and didn’t give me any additional competence to tackle the really hard things that aren’t just fun, but grow the human soul. Those books found me - eventually.
If you’ve read any of the titles on any of the lists, you’ll be able to link one to another. They don’t go in any order because the linking itself is education, unique to each human. (Also, tangentially, that human ability to make connections is why I’m not afraid of AI.) You may have to choose with your child at first, but if you can read with her for 30 minutes, you’ll get through 10-15 pages of the typical book written at a 6th-10th grade literacy level. That means in a few weeks, you can finish a book together. And if you have no money, like my family when I was little, books give you the best opportunity to travel far and wide together - meeting the best (and worst) people and learning who you want to be along the way.
The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Speaking of good and bad, education is about developing in virtue as well as knowledge and skill. Schools used to attempt to teach virtue. Now they don’t bother, but they never really could, not at scale. You can, though, just by encouraging your child to read widely. Temperance, Fortitude, Honesty, Humility, Prudence — all are a result of discipline. Reading challenging texts forces you to develop that discipline. (If you want to level up your kid’s education, have them write about the books using the virtues as a baked-in essay question, i.e., “Which virtues do you think the author was trying to teach with this novel? Consider his use of protagonist, antagonist, and minor characters in your answer.” If you want details on this, you can read here to learn how to use the Feynman Test as a universal assessment of your child’s learning across all disciplines.)
Nobody is better at teaching virtue than authors of Western literature and history. Stories for young children generally place a lovable — if flawed — protagonist out front. In the books I’ve curated for ages 3-12, the authors set out good examples for kids to emulate.
In books for more mature readers, baddies often take a starring role. The great stories demonstrate what happens to humans lacking virtue — and to the people who fail to stand against them. The writers are all master teachers. Where you would have to preach at your kid and be subject to eye-rolling hostility, Jane Austen just suggests. Twain gets the audience laughing at the bad guys. Shakespeare makes us pity them. McCarthy terrifies us with the details of exactly what a bad human is capable.
When you add the reading of history, kids get graphic, gory details of what happens when you fail to respect the rights of others. And it shows them, unequivocally, that no matter how good we try to be, we will fail, over and over again, but that human greatness is uncovered in the trying.
I suggest, with humility, that you let the writers of the greatest books of the west pick up some of the heavy lifting when it comes to your child’s moral instruction. The more examples of good and bad they can access, the more clearly they will see the architecture of human goodness and, as a result, human happiness.
Once you have a reader, you don’t need to lecture much at all, you just have to ask questions that will help your child think about where she is falling short. Ask them if what they’re going through reminds them of any books they’ve read. Ask which characters remind them of themselves. Ask them if any historical figures they know of went through this and how they coped. Tell them your stories. Give them the freedom to take the lessons they need most, to find the models who’ve offered an example. Then, stand back, and watch your child grow through and out of the struggle, knowing you’ve given him the tools he needs to live a good life.
The Ticking Clock
All together, my lists include about 400 titles. I’m old enough to’ve read them. You probably know more of these stories than you think. But if you’re struggling with a young adolescent or a teenager and that child is disaffected from years of the perverse, near-abusive way public K12 treats reading, give yourself permission to breathe.
Focus on the books that deal with a subject your kid has high interest in and, thus, a solid foundation of vocabulary specific to that subject or genre.
I don’t mean to be a downer, but a lot of kids don’t know much unless it’s rolled across their YouTube Shorts feed and, even then, Shorts aren’t exactly known for their commitment to truth. What that means is that your child may not really have any interests outside being entertained by screens and socializing with friends where the main activity is… being entertained by screens.
True story and it stings, so I keep thinking about it: I recently had to break the news to my 10-year-old that his closest neighborhood friend refuses his invitations to come over and play because our family doesn’t allow unlimited screen time. He cried disconsolately when I told him.
Honestly, the thought has crossed my mind more than once that I might be dooming him to a lifetime of acute, disgusted sensitivity to the abject corruption of our world — not to mention loneliness — when it might be better for him to just hang out on a Minecraft server all day.
But if I did that, I’d also be denying him the ability to appreciate the stunning beauty of our planet and its people. I would make it infinitely harder for him to locate others who’ve cultivated a commitment to truth and goodness — and their lack of character would almost certainly hurt him. He’d have to ask Siri what to think instead of being able to draw on his unique ability to tie together the lessons of history and literature and philosophy and science: what the most brilliant humans who’ve ever lived brought to bear on real human problems.
So maybe you start with the stories for 3-7 year olds. Maybe you wander over to the ones for the 8-12 set. Maybe you’re game for Plato’s Dialogues or you vaguely remember being blown away when your Professor mentioned Medea. Get a book and a highlighter and a pen. Dig in. Show your kid how it’s done.
This is not a list of books, it’s access to the most important lessons ever taught, set out by the best teachers on the planet.
I invite you, implore you, to use it to help build a great American, one you love more than any other. There is nothing more valuable you can do with your time.
If you’ve made it this far without the desire to curse me and my posterity, please hit the like button. This makes my posts more visible to other parents who don’t understand how much worse things have become since they left school. The system actively robs American children of their full potential in order to serve mediocre adults and maintain power in the hands where it currently rests. Only parents can reverse this trend; American authoritarianism is born in its “free” public schools.
Those lexile scores must be for vocabulary difficulty and not meaning/context.
The slaughterhouse 5, according to lexile, would be for a 4th or 5th grader.
That book would give them nightmares and maybe require therapy!
Such wisdom! Thank you!