Make sure your kids read good stories, because the books they read as teens will shape them for the rest of their lives.
A friend recently sent me a Facebook challenge to name my top ten favorite novels, not expecting that her simple request would preoccupy my life for a week. At first I tried ignoring the request, but I am a list-maker, a ranker of things, so the challenge eventually proved irresistible. I started a list, but it quickly grew to twenty, then thirty titles, with more popping into my head as fast as I could jot them down.
Problem is, the word “favorite” is a slippery critter; it can mean many different things, and I’ve read hundreds if not thousands of novels in the past four decades, any one of which might be considered a favorite depending on the criteria. Does a book that I re-read more times than any other rank higher than a book that I only read once, but that had a profound impact on my life? Is the book that taught me how to be a responsible adult more of a favorite than the bubblegum novel that delivered the most delight ? Or should I simply list the ten most literary books I’ve read so I can make myself look smart to my Facebook friends?
I needed some criteria to narrow the list down to the top ten. But what? What requirements must be satisfied before a book can make my own personal top ten list?
So I came up with evaluation criteria. In order for a book to be considered for my top ten list:
- I read it more than twice.
- I learned something from it, and remember what I learned.
- I can vividly remember one or more favorite scenes or passages from the book.
- I read it to my kids (or I made them read it).
- It was important enough that I still own a copy.
When I applied the criteria, I discovered that most of the resulting list I’d read prior to my fifteenth birthday. I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps the hormone-soaked psyche of a teen experiences a novel in a more visceral manner, or perhaps it was because my young mind was a sponge soaking up vicarious ideas both new and exciting. These days I’m more of a literary reader, but despite my current bookshelf full of some of the world’s greatest novels, this top ten list is unusually heavy on adventure stories for teen boys.
All these books share themes of exploration, wonder, and discovery. Most of them feature at least one massive head-exploding surprise, and almost all of them deal with a protagonist who yearns to escape the bounds of his/her upbringing and explore the wider cosmos. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I blame the authors of these books for my entire adult life, for they are the ones who inspired my own wanderlust, my life-long interests and desires, good and bad. The spirits of these authors, many of them long-dead, still live on inside me as untamed urges, passionate yearnings, and intellectual pursuits. I don’t think I ever realized how much these books meant to me as I grew up and formed my opinions about the world.
Here they are, My Top Ten Favorite Novels (in no particular order, because trying to rank them would cause my head to explode):
- The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
This was the first book I ever read. Actually, I was too young to read, so my mom read it aloud to me. I was hooked from the beginning, and I can vividly remember the scene at the start of the book where young Mary, orphaned and alone in India, encounters a little green snake, or the scenes later in the book where she is alone in the English manor house of her uncle, and hears mysterious screams from the wing where she’s forbidden to go. And the moment when the robin reveals the key to the mysterious secret garden will be with me forever. This story was my very first hit of literary heroin. It addicted me to reading, hopelessly and forever. It’s all the fault of my mom and Frances Hodgson Burnett.
- The Boys Who Vanished, by John F. Carson
I was eleven when I discovered this book, and it was the first novel I read on my own. It told the story of two young buddies who are exposed to a compound from a lab that shrinks them to the size of small insects. They are forced to survive in the “grass jungle” while they make their way home, and along the way they (and I) learned about the science of nature (I’m convinced this book was the inspiration for the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids). I stumbled upon it on the bottom shelf in the back corner of the West Haralson Middle School library in Tallapoosa, Georgia, alongside two other books that I also devoured: Other Worlds by Friedrich Maher, and When Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, both early science-fiction adventures from the 1930s. This was 1974, so my only experience with science fiction had been watching grainy episodes of Star Trek on my family’s 9-inch black & white television. These three books were even better than television, more vivid, and I could read them any time I wanted, as many times as I wanted. From that moment forward, I was hooked on books.
- The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clark
This story about a very special boy who discovers a world far beyond his imagination is the most pure and sublime science fiction story ever written. It opened my eyes and heart both to the vastness of space and time and also to the wonders of the human spirit. I think it’s the only book I read where after finishing the last page I started over immediately on the first page and read it a second time in the same sitting. This book ought to be required reading in middle school, especially in poor areas where the kids don’t get exposed to the outside world. If you like this type of sense-of-wonder stories, be sure to check out The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, a seminal and incredibly prescient short story written in 1909 that predicts our dangerous dependence on digital technology (the recent mega-bestseller Wool by Hugh Howey is no doubt inspired by this story). In the same favorite vein (stories about people venturing beyond their perceived boundaries) are The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov, The Universe Between by Alan E. Nourse, and the pulpy but delightfully intriguing The Last Planet by Andre Norton.
- The Hardy Boys Series, by F.W. Dixon
Like the generation before mine, I grew up with the Hardy Boys. Frank, Joe, and their buddies Chet and Biff were my closest friends in the dark days of grade school and middle school bullying. I had every single book in the series, most of them old Grosset & Dunlap editions from the 1930s and 40s (prior to their being re-edited for modern politically-correct sensibilities). In addition to the Hardy Boys, during middle school years I wolfed down other juvenile series including The Space Eagle by Jack Pearl, Tom Swift Jr. by Victor Appleton, The Brains Benton Mysteries, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, and later in high school The Phantom by Lee Falk, Doc Savage by Lester Dent, and Perry Rhodan by Scheer and Ernsting. As an adult I graduated to mystery series like the Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker and the Leaphorn/Chee Mysteries by Tony Hillerman.
- Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Robert Heinlein
This may be the most perfectly crafted young-adult adventure book ever written. Even though it was originally written back in 1958 at the dawn of the Space Age, I read it to both my kids and they loved it. I’ll freely admit that I enjoyed reading it as an adult just as much as I did when I was thirteen. Heinlein wrote several young adults books that were very popular, but this one is far and away his best and most accessible. The characters of Kit, Peewee, and the Mother Thing are utterly memorable, as is the pulse-pounding, flag-waving climax. Hurray for humanity! Heinlein wrote many, many masterpieces of science fiction, including The Puppet Masters, a truly great book that spawned a truly horrible movie (a unfortunate pattern for Heinlein books—see the Starship Trooper films for proof).
- The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Winter, 1977, and I was sick with a head cold, stuck at my grandmother’s house and bored to tears. In desperation, my mom bought me the only paperback book from the spinning rack at our small-town grocery store that she thought I might like. It was called The Fellowship of the Ring, and it changed my life forever. It was during this book that I decided I wanted to become a writer. I knew that a skinny, handicapped kid would never be able to discover worlds like Middle Earth, or go to the moon, or probably even travel too far from my hometown. I wanted to explore the universe, walk on other planets, trod on ground where no human had ever stepped foot, and the only way I could achieve this dream was to do it through writing. Thanks, Professor Tolkien.
- Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
This book is one of the few on this list that I read as an adult. It’s a loosely-knit collection of stories inspired by Chaucer’s classic The Canterbury Tales. This is big, inspiring science-fiction storytelling at its very, very best. While it is set among big sweeping vistas that span the universe, it’s mostly about the vistas of the human heart. It’s unpredictable, soaring, and lyrical. If I had to pick my number-one favorite book of all time, this, along with the three sequels that form the Hyperion Cantos (The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion), would be a strong contender. It blew my mind, and author Dan Simmons set a standard that I can only hope to achieve in my own writing career. I’d put it right up there with the incomparable Dune by Frank Herbert as one of the most vivid examples of world-building in all of fiction.
- Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
This seminal world-ending disaster story contains one of the most memorable scenes in all of adventure literature. I won’t give it away, but it includes a mile-high tsunami, a surfer, and an unfortunately-placed skyscraper. Nuff said. I cheered out loud several times during this book, and I repeated the cheers every time I read it. I love everything by Niven and/or Pournelle, including Ringworld, The Mote in God’s Eye, The Legacy of Heorot, and the satirical sequel to Dante’s masterpiece, Inferno.
- Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
It wasn’t until I reached my mid-thirties that I ventured too out of the realm of science fiction and began reading literary works. One day I was bored and my wife handed me a book by this guy called Stegner. I was skeptical, but I was also desperate. Despite my preconceived notion, by the end of the first page I was in awe. I’d never read anything like this; a story where the words themselves, not the characters or the plot or the setting, were the core of the experience. Stegner wove words and sentences into a tapestry, each individual stitch a small work of art. And the more I read, the more the tapestry itself became breathtaking. Boom. My face was blown off. I’ll never read a book the same way again. Once you’ve discovered a true master writer, it’s difficult to go back to reading bubblegum.
- Star Trek Blueprints, by Franz Joseph
Okay, this isn’t a novel. It’s not even a book. But it is a seriously amazing work of fiction. The year was 1975 and I was twelve and I’d seen a copy of this small leatherette packet at the bookstore. I’ve never wanted anything so badly in my entire life, then or since. I desired this more than the kid from A Christmas Story wanted the Red Rider BB gun. Then one day a copy showed up on my bed, right there on top of my astronaut quilt. Twelve large sheets of paper with intricate diagrams of every deck, every room of the U.S.S. Enterprise. I spent untold hours exploring the corridors of the fabulous starship where my heroes walked, my imagination running wild, conceiving a new adventure at every turn of the corridor. I think it was the Blueprints that made me realize that I could make up my own stories, tales of adventure just as good as anything on TV. And sure enough, twenty years later in 1995 I wrote a Star Trek story that won a writing competition and was published in an anthology by Simon and Schuster. That was my first writing sale. Thanks, Franz, for the inspiration!
I think the lesson here is that it’s really important to make sure your kids read good books, because if my experience is any indication, the books will shape them for the rest of their lives.
