Skip to footer

32 classic books for parents and kids to read together

How does a book become a classic? Experts say it’s through a combination of literary merit and the hard, timeless questions the stories raise – notions about choices, about class and society, about personal responsibility, about how societies are sustained and how they collapse, as well as about themes of interpersonal relationships and of love, as in the perennially popular “Romeo and Juliet.”  

Consider “The Great Gatsby,” suggests Nancy Carr, senior development editor at Great Books Foundation. Its enduring place in American canon, she said, derives from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ability to deal in a complex way with such questions as identity, selfhood, professed values versus the values revealed through action, responsibility to self and others and so forth.  Such a book, she says is “inexhaustible.  You can’t distill it down and say “this is the theme…You can keep revisiting it over a lifetime.” 

You don’t need an English degree for you and your children to read books simultaneously.  Starting at the middle school level, experts say, there are plenty of classic titles sophisticated enough to hold parents’ attention yet accessible enough for kids. 

Much like grown-up book club buddies, families can’t help but learn more about each other as they share literature. Your child may come to appreciate your fascination with plot while you’re delighted to discover that she’s mature enough to really understand metaphor.  Maybe you savor a lovely, melodic, description while he helps you relish gritty dialogue. 

What’s more, in adolescence, when relationships can be strained, a fictional situation may give you or your child just the neutral opening you need to broach a sensitive issue without having to address it directly.  

Rachel Claff, editorial director of the Great Books Foundation’s K-12 programs, suggests that parents who want to read with their children begin by piggybacking on the reading lists already being offered by their schools.

The Great Books Foundation web site provides some guidelines for discussion, and the Young Adult Library Services Association pairs classics with contemporary retellings.

Here is a list of 32 suggested book titles from the Great Books Foundation, provided by the Editorial Director of K-12 Programs Rachel Claff and Senior Development Editor Nancy Carr:

Jason Bean/Staff

1. "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank

Screenshot from Amazon.com

First published in Amsterdam in 1947, the diary writings of Anne Frank were brought to the US and published in English in 1952 and are best for students in middle school and older. The book tells of the travails of a Jewish family in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The writings focus on the years 1942 to 1944, after Anne Frank received the diary as a present on her 13th birthday. She documented her time in hiding with other families in the upper annex of a business building in Amsterdam, until the families were betrayed in 1944 and sent to concentration camps.

1 of 32
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.