Recommendation for kids

I have a younger brother that is 9 years old that is beginning to read voraciously. I would like to have recommendations for books appropriate for kids that age that will hopefully help him develop as a literary snob. Any ideas?

Christopher Hitchens would recommend the classical myths as told by Robert Graves.

My kids loved adventure stories, like Dumas or Dickens. They also liked RL Stevenson.

Alan Garner! you can start anywhere between The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Red Shift depending on how complex you want it to be.

I've always been curious about Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages by Harold Bloom. Never read it myself but sounds like the perfect book for a little Literary Snob.

Choose Your Own Adventures
Warhammer 40K tie-in novels, if your teen is into space demons and such.
Gargantua and Pantagruel -- making fun of scholars, clerics, and other self-righteous fussbuckets, with fart jokes.
The Limerick
Dirty Jokes and Beer by Drew Carey
Mr. Natural by R. Crumb
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
The Book of the SubGenius

OK, I admit, some of these suggestions would probably best fit precocious, rebellious teens.

And as a companion piece for 5: Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein. Extra points, if you can teach your kid in the original German.

The book which turned me snobbish was Watership Down but that might be too dark/long-winded for nine. I also recall that Terry Pratchett's young adult fiction was illuminating with its mixture of fantasy adventures, humour and philosophical touches (The Bromeliad Trilogy and The Wee Free Men). Oh yes, and try to get him interested in historical fiction if you can.

Holes by Louis Sachar. There are some fun and unique elements to the writing and the construction of the plot, and it's just perfect for that age.

There are quite a few classics for that age. I'd recommend:

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

Treasure Island or Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Moonfleet

Swallows and Amazons

Swiss Family Robinson

The Chronicles of Narnia or The Hobbit

and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Joan Aiken.

The Power of One - boy growing up in WWII South Africa. Lots of boxing and action mixed in.

Animal Farm - I liked books with animal characters when I was younger (still do), which is also why I included Watership Down

Ivanhoe - Knights

Captain Blood - Pirates

Grendel - Monsters

The Killer Angels - Civil War

The White Mountains - Fight the (Alien) Power!

Tales of the Greek Heroes or The Tale of Troy by Roger Lancelyn Green

second Treasure Island

second The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

second Ender's Game

second Watership Down

And since every kid will eventually have these phases as a high schooler. I see these phases as "gateways" to the Good Stuff(TM):

For the Hermann Hesse Phase:

Steppenwolf
Demian
Beneath the Wheel

For the Beatnik Phase:

Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
On the Road by Jack Kerouac -- teens would actually appreciate this, as opposed to us adults who see the book as "typing." In the Beat Pantheon, Kerouac comes as a weak third-stringer.

Insert Stereotype Here Phase:

Lord of the Rings and/or The Fountainhead -- The sooner your kid actives his or her BS Detector with Rand's anarcho-capitalist temper tantrums, the better we'll all be.

For the Wannabe Poet:

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche -- Might stumble over Fred's philosophy, but this volume's poetry glimmers with beautiful imagery. One of those cases where they'll either be completely put off by Nietzsche's pretentiousness or they'll want to read more.

For the Aspiring Historian:

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Shirer -- A great single-volume intro to the horrors of WW2 and appeals of Fascism. It's also written at a level that high schoolers can grasp -- more journalistic than academic in tone.

Swords for Hire by Will Allen was my favorite book when I was 9.

From going back over what I read around that age:
the Doctor Dolittle series by Hugh Lofting
novels by Mark Twain
The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford and other classic animal novels, including the Black Stallion series
Stowaway by Karen Hesse
the original Oz series by L. Frank Baum
The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley

I third (?) Watership Down and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I second Holes by Louis Sachar. Other books that my daughters had loved at that age and that I also enjoyed are:
Alone on a Wide Wide Sea by Michael Morpurgo
Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web by E. B. White

I think the best way to turn kids into literary snobs is to encourage them to read widely (even if some of it isn't high-quality stuff), and not just what all the other kids are reading. My 13-year-old has read all the popular books (Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, etc.) but what she likes best of all is discovering a really great book that few people know about and sharing that discovery with those friends who would appreciate it.

14: I agree. Also, encourage them to stray out of the YA aisle of the bookstore or library. Marketing should not be the sole determiner of what you decide you feel like reading.

I second Charlotte's Web and also adore E.B. White's Trumpet of the Swan which is especially good for boys.

In a few years, I would recommend The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman also.

This might be a bit young, but if you want to encourage critical thinking about the structure and content of books, I like The Stinky Cheese Man, and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. We read it in my 3rd grade gifted class (or maybe 4th grade? I was 8 or 9), and it has been one of my favorite books since. I credit it with getting me started thinking about books in a different way, at least.

13: Ah yes, Dr. Dolittle! I enjoyed those books when I was a nipper. I also remember the Jennings series of books by Anthony Buckeridge. Set in a boarding school and made it seem like a lot of fun to us average kids who would never attend one. I devoured those.

Roald Dahl. Enough said.

When I was that age, I read (almost) all of Jules Verne. That was a blast - and it made me more interested in the world around me as well.

Only three or four of Verne's books are now readily available in print.

>21 iansales: B & N sells one of their special leatherbound editions of seven of his novels.

But you can find a lot of Verne's novels used. I've picked up five in the last two or three years from just browsing at stores and book sales.

He wrote over 55 novels. B&N are US only. In the UK, only Around the World in Eighty Days, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island are readily available in print editions.

Really, only so few are available? What a pity. I got them all from my school library back in the day. Oh happy times when reading novels was not slacking off and instead a good alternative to (school)work ; )

I liked 20,000 League Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth as a boy but by chance I read editions that weren't the most common (and most lacking) translations. When I revisited 20,000 Leagues as an adult I marveled at the imagination and perseverance of the youth that had been me. How had I been able to wring enjoyment out of that book? That was when I found out about the terrible English translations much of Verne's work received.

My money is on the B&N Verne collection featuring the most common royalty-free translations.

I wonder how well Verne is received by adolescents now. Some of the slightly older steam punk crowd might read it out of curiosity, but for most I've got to think that Jules Verne would come off as rather dusty. I enjoyed it as a kid, but I also grew up way out on a farm without much in the way of entertainment. Most anything tastes good when you're hungry.

26: Reading Verne in high school, I was surprised at how easily his prose reads! Of the "classic" authors, I thought he's the one who perhaps writes the most like modern authors. I was a little put out by Diana Wynne Jones's introduction in my edition because she seemed to make excuses for him supposedly being a bit boring and outdated, which was completely untrue...

Hmmm. 9 years old? Any of the Moomin books by Tove Jansson. Wind in the Willows. House of Stairs (pretty disturbing). The Hobbit. My Family and Other Animals. Ray Bradbury. Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates. The stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

They say a lot of the early Verne translations are poor, and it' s those versions that most people are familiar with. I'm pretty sure the edition of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea I read was one of those, as it mangled the units of measurement quite badly.

A really voracious nine-year-old (from what I remember) will read anything from stodgy Victorian novels to the backs of cereal packets with the same uncritical zeal. I used to read Captain Marryatt, Charles Kingsley and Biggles at that age - I doubt if I could get more than a few pages into any of them nowadays.

If you want to turn him into a self-respecting snob, hide the evangelical Victoriana and the cereal packets and keep him well provided with Scott, Dickens, RLS, Mark Twain, Erich Kästner, John Buchan and Conan Doyle. (Arthur Ransome and Kenneth Grahame if he likes boats.) If he insists on something from the late 20th century, Roald Dahl is probably the best bet. Dumas rather than Verne, I would have thought, but chacun à son goût.

26: My Google machine tells me that Diana Wynne Jones wrote an introduction to the Baldick translation of Journey to the Center of the Earth. That's regarded as one of the better translations. It's the the first one I ever read. The most common (anonymous) translation changes the character names — no Professor Lidenbrock or Axel in this one. They also completely invented a dream sequence where Axel aka Harry recalls getting stuck in a chimney while collecting eggs. It's still not as dry or bowdlerized as the Mercier translation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

29: I suppose it's an indication that his stories still hold the imagination even through the poor translations — or benefit amazingly from people recommending them out of habit. 20,000 Leagues is the most famous and it's the worst of the translations.

Maybe I don't give enough credit to the youth of today, but I have a hard time imagining them being drawn in. I'll try them out on The Boy when he's older. I don't mean to come off as down on Verne. I really do have a fondness for his stories.

Give him Arthur Ransome and tell him to start liking boats or get the hell out.

I was listening to part of Alan Bennett's adaptation of "Wind in the Willows" (on BBC 4).

In his dramatization there's definitely a homo-erotic element to Mole and Rat's relationship. Was that, ah, hinted at in the original book?

33: I definitely didn't notice that in the book this past summer. Then again, I might have been too busy trying not to fall asleep.

>33 CliffBurns: In his dramatization there's definitely a homo-erotic element to Mole and Rat's relationship. Was that, ah, hinted at in the original book?

Not that I ever saw.

33: As a kid I didn't notice such a subtext if it existed.

I thought it very strange. At the conclusion of the play, the jailer's daughter kisses Rat, who kisses Mole, who pronounces it quite pleasant. Mole inquires if they should try to kiss Badger but Rat replies firmly that "Badger isn't the sort who'd like it" or words to that effect. And Mole has left his hole in the ground and is living, full-time, on the riverbank with Rat.

Hmmm...

Also recommended:

MAD Magazine
The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins
The work of Shel Silverstein
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett
Trouble for Trumpets by Peter Dallas Smith

The last two are more juvenile, but they are visual feasts. Something a young kid can really get lost in.

>32 ajsomerset:
"Better drowned than duffers"

>33 CliffBurns:-37
Mole's definitely meant to be read as gay. No question about it. Shy bachelor with a housework fetish, a taste for velveteen smoking jackets and a nice line in repartee ... what more do you want?
I've never been quite sure about Ratty, but he certainly made quick work of installing Mole in his best bedroom, didn't he?

In-teresting.

39: From what I understand of the history of gay subtexts, they are subtle and meant only to be noticed by members of the in group, especially in fiction written a while ago when being gay was so not OK compared to now, so I guess the author succeeded in that case.

Now that you mention those points, seems a bit "oh, yeah, true" but definitely did not strike me at any point before that. And I have had similar experiences with people pointing out gay subtexts in other books.

I was over at abebooks recently and noticed this list of 50 Books For An 11-Year-Old. There is some overlap with what's already been mentioned here.

>41 anna_in_pdx:
It's fun to do that sort of thing, but of course, it's "Oh, yeah, true" because it's facile and anachronistic. The real point is probably that Mole's a bit of an outsider, and that makes him easy for all sorts of young readers to identify with and project themselves onto. And that's probably what Grahame was really trying to do with the character.

Thanks everybody for all the suggestions! I had to open a new word document to keep track of all the good advice...
Anyway, I will start with Arthur Conan Doyle, Roald Dahl and Alexandre Dumas. And I will get him new books by RL Stevenson and Jules Verne, authors that he has already read and enjoyed.
And how about sports related books? Any ideas?

Tons of great suggestions above, Animal Farm, Mad magazine, Verne and Holes. Yay. Some oldies but goodies that I didn't see:

A gateway drug to environmental adventure fiction: My Side of the Mountain which could/should lead to Jean Craighead George's other books and then to Jack London's Call of the Wild and White Fang.

Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and many of his short stories.

Tintin (see permissible diversions for Snobs below)

William Saroyan's charming, if somewhat sentimental My Name Is Aram and The Human Comedy. They are nice in that, like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, they feature kids and the sweetness of youth.

Richmal Crompton's very english series Just William is about as fun and funny as it gets in Kids Lit. As if Dennis the Menace was written by Barbara Pym.

But it is not as great as A.A. Milne's Pooh stories, which should be read annually at all ages.

I think some snobbish warnings are in order. We are about to descend into Hobbit mania, thanks to the upcoming Peter Jackson movie. The temptation will be great to read this stuff. Or at least try it. I counsel against this: It could exacerbate the nerd tendencies that all snobs must grapple with. For that reason alone, I say, put down the Tolkien and walk away. But there are other reasons, too: It is not great writing. It's unduly long. It could lead to Dungeons and Dragons and bizarre role playing games. And that could detract from the role we are all destined to play: being literary snobs.

Also -- and this probably it's own thread -- fantasy in general should be treated with grudging respect, but not reverence. There's a reason The Onion mocks fantasy freaks. Still, a snob can have guilty pleasures and dabble in, tut, tut, "lowbrow" literature, as long as nobody sees one doing it and one takes the genres for what they are: Diversions with occasional strokes of genius. You know, like TV.

As for what permissible youthful diversions might be, I'm sure I don't know. I'm a snob. But a close friend of mine swears by:
The first 3 Harry Potter books
Carl Hiaason's kids books, because the man is funny.
Emil and the Detectives
The Asterix series (comics filled with puns and history)

fantasy in general should be treated with grudging respect, but not reverence.

Couldn't have said it better myself. To make this relevant to the discussion, we should pass on that attitude to kids. This Cracked.com article is probably the best one I've seen for a reform of how high schoolers are taught to read:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-ways-high-school-makes-you-hate-reading/

Classes need equal doses of "lit appreciation" and "critical reading." And students, at home with blabbing about the high school caste system, should be able to unload on an author he or she doesn't really like, without being shut down by the School Cultural Thought Police. (One caveat: They can only do that if they back it up with sufficient evidence. You can't say, "It sucks." and then expect your opinion to be respected.) Probably because of high school, that's a major reason I hate, hate, HATE Hemingway and Nathaniel Hawthorne -- to a visceral and, well, totally irrational level. Luckily, I had a could great high school English and History teachers (the knowledge interconnections and junk). So I didn't like Hemingway, but I loved John Milton and Herman Melville Didn't really go for Jane Austen, but, again, this is high school, and my reading attitudes and reactions were predictably gender-based. (Still, does the book need to be entirely games of whist and marriage proposals?) But, in the end, I appreciate Austen and Hawthorne and their place in the Western Canon.

The article also illustrates this re: fantasy: Have your kid The Hunger Games, but then they'll be able to converse better about dystopias when reading required reading like 1984 and Brave New World. They might also get a taste for dystopias and pursue things like Zamyatin's We and Burdekin's Swastika Night. Instead of using populist YA lit as some sort of crutch ("At least their reading!"), fashion it into a gateway drug. "So you like Harry Potter, why not read some Warhammer 40K, Lord of the Rings, or The Once and Future King?"

46: Also a problem: students aren't asked to read anything with much age to it until high school. Classes skip from reading children's/teen books from the 1960s and later to The Scarlet Letter, and students have difficulty with the jump in writing style and thereafter hate classics. Older elementary schoolers are perfectly capable of reading the children's classics we've mentioned in the above thread (Twain, Verne, London, Kipling, etc.), but most are never asked to and judge them from the covers as too long and difficult.

Re: the Cracked rant and 47:

My son is reading The Scarlet Letter right now in 9th grade. He likes the story, history, discussion and analysis, but he is not crazy about the book/writing/storytelling itself. I'm guessing that educators probably like the rigor and attention that such a book requires of the reader. Challenging books hone the ability to focus and think critically and then verbalize your thoughts. But, I agree: you have to wonder why a teacher couldn't demand the same close reading of almost any of the books on this list. Indeed, 1984--in an age where any home with a Connect box actually has a camera pointing into that house's life, and when China airbrushes history and controls media--would seem much more relevant and provocative.

But, hey, this thread is for a 9 year-old budding snob. So The Scarlet Letter has no place in this discussion.

And, honestly, I'm not sure I'd push the dystopian books very hard either at that age. He will get there.

Oh right, I forgot to mention George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin. Although I read it much later, it was a delight. Not as good as Phantastes (which holds the title of my favourite "early fantasy" novel), but unlike the latter - it was written for kids.

45: That close friend of your has good taste, Seth. Particularly Asterix, although I would contend that the true aspiring young snoblet should read it in the original French. Not only for the considerable inherent snob value in doing so, but because it is, at least in my experience, an excellent aid to learning the language.
He would probably have to be a couple of years older than nine and learning French at school. When I discovered the books on a holiday in France, I was first captivated by the drawings, then determined to get the jokes, then pleased with myself whenever I did. A wonderful incentive to learn.
Besides, the books are so much better in French. The translations are good, but many of the jokes don't translate.

Yes, thank you. I mean my close friend thanks you. Ooohlala, Asterix en francaise...mais oui. I love some of the puns/gags in the english versions, but learning French is the literary snob thing to do, with or without Asterix. (Especially with all the kids now rushing to learn Chinese.) Why I believe the term Le Snob has even entered the lexicon over there. For that reason alone, the mantle must be upheld.

My kids loved Asterix almost as much as Calvin and Hobbes.

I like Walter Moers' weird retellings of fairy tales, that is, having read only The Alchemaster's Apprentice I assume the others are going to be cute, quirky and fun, too.

My lads loved Walter Moers. A good choice for young, smart readers.

I will file this conversation away and dig it up for when my kids are 9. 5 years to go.