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Ninth Grade Literature – Book suggestions, please!!
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Okay Ladies, I am stumped. My daughter is an advanced reader and I feel like I want her to continue with great reading but it is really hard to find quality books with subject matter appropriate for a Christian! Even the ‘Christian’ book lists I have run across have titles that I feel are unacceptable. So, if you were putting together a literature curriculum for a ninth grader, what books would be ‘must reads’? Do you have any favorite authors that I may have missed? Thanks so much!
Are you looking specifically for more modern literature? That would be more difficult for me, however, there are SO MANY great authors and literature classics that I seem to have the opposite problem when putting together my literature reading lists. So many great books that I don’t know that we will have enough time to get to them all in the time frame we are working with!
I think it would help if you could elaborate on the parameters in which you are searching.
-Miranda
Yes, I need more info too. I also cannot possibly read even a tiny fraction of the things I want my kids to read! I could suggest 100 books, lol. My 9th grader is doing a study of The Lord of the Rings and some myths/earlier lit that influenced Tolkien. I almost think that MOST really great books are appropriate for a Christian. I can think of some “classics” I wouldn’t read with my kids (maybe Lolita? NOT on our list!) but this is a perfect time to begin showing the response of good people to a fallen world. Which means sometimes you have to mention the fallen world. An example of this type of book would be To Kill a Mockingbird. Is it “Christian”? No, not exactly. Should thinking Christians read it? Absolutely.
Okay, some more parameters…
My requirement is not that the books should be necessarily Christian, but that they not glorify pagan practices (ie: witchcraft, new age philosophy, etc.)that they aren’t sexually graphic or overtly romantic, and that they are of true literary worth.
The time period isn’t really as important to me at this point as the morals and literary value (writing). I was an English Lit major, so I am aware of most of the classics, but there are many I feel include scenes or values that aren’t consistent with Biblical Christianity (themes of adultery or the desire for adultery seem common, for instance).
She has read all of Dickens, Austen, Bronte (other than Wuthering Heights). She has read some of Hardy’s novels and War and Peace. She has read all the Lord of the Rings, Redwall Series, CS Lewis novels and is currently working through CS Lewis’ non-fiction in her spare time. She is a voracious reader!! This is a good problem to have but I am hitting a wall when it comes to creating her book list this year!
Are there any great book lists out there which exclude books involving magic, witchcraft and sexuality? I am not saying there can’t be some romance involved since that would knock out most books, but I think at 13 she is too old to read a steady diet of books that are primarily romantic in nature. It shouldn’t be the center of our worlds or of our literary pursuits, IMHO.
Does that all make sense?
My dd likes missionary biographies, and books like “Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus” which is about a Muslim who converted to Christianity.
Rod and Staff and Christian Light have a few books for that age group.
Right now she is reading “Growing up Duggar”, “Time Management from the Inside Out”, and sign language books. She has a classics list too. “The Narrative of the life of Davey Crocket” is her current classic.
George Eliot? Elizabeth Gaskell? Edith Wharton? The Brontes? The varied works of the Dumas, pere and fils? Willa Cather? Chaim Potok? William Dean Howells? A study of the short story? (Hundreds of topics to choose from here!) Genre–how about Agatha Christie? Isaac Asimov? Wilkie Collins? Has she read all of Melville? Twain? You’d need to be choosy, but Hemingway? A well-read person ought to be at least familiar with him. Has she done any long narrative poems? There’s enough material here to keep her busy through college at least 😉
Henry James? A special year on Shakespeare? Have you considered a Lightning Lit course? There are a number that would fit. How about some of the stuff she’s already read, but go deeper? Probe the depths a little. A truly good classic can bear repeated reading and study and is different each time you experience it throughout your life. How about a survey of trends in literature, or even just developments in the novel over time? The “movements” and such, and then compare and contrast. How do these different approaches (romanticism, realism, postmodernism) relate to what is going on in the world?
Or what about Ben Hur, The Sherlock Holmes series, Kim (and possibly others by Kipling), the Anne of Green Gables series (and others by Montgomery) the Call of the Wild, the Yearling, the Pilgrim’s Progress.
Thank you Ladies! You have jogged my memory for some authors she hasn’t perused yet. She is doing a Literature Course this year that involves analyzing some books she has read before, as well as some that are new to her (like Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and How Green was My Valley). I will pull up the lists of several of the authors you mentioned and see which books she hasn’t tackled yet! Thanks again!
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