On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. If this doesn’t psyche them up for writing, nothing will!
In the Suicide Mountains by John Gardner. Sort of a Canterbury Tales with 1970s sensibilities.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Rebecca by Daphne duMaurier. I read these back-to-back in 8th grade. Might be worth asking why Mary Shelley couldn’t relate to her own female characters.
I see I’m too late to be the first to recommend Sleator, so I’ll just say my favorite is House of Stairs or Singularity. A YA author I’ve recently discovered is Chris Crutcher. Haven’t read all his stuff yet, but the best so far was Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. However, it touches on some pretty heavy subjects.
Oooooh…I loved the Outsiders. Will schools let you teach that book? I think it has so much to offer young people. I’d love to see my niecelette read it. She’s only ten, but she reads at a very advanced level.
Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. I liked it a lot when I was a kid and would probably still read it now.
I would also like to recommend A Day No Pigs Would Die. I read it around that age and really enjoyed it.
I would also like to add White Fang by Jack London.
Watership Down is fantastic, as is Wizard of Earthsea. One point about both these books, however, is that they have almost no female characters in them. This could be a point of discussion in class; you could also look at having some books with predominately female characters. The Last Unicorn, IIRC, has a nice mix, and is a helluva lot better than you’d think it’d be from the name.
Daniel
The Giver was a good book, but it was challenged in the schools around here, some blather about eugenics IIRC.
When I was in junior high (late '80s) we read a lot of Jack London stuff, and the other kids seemed to be into it. I was a supercolossal nerd so I was into some heavier books too, but London had lots of exciting adventure and it had a lot to do with animals, so girls stayed interested. I remember 7th grade as the Year of Dead Animal Stories. Call of the Wild, White Fang, Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Red Pony, etc.
My husband says he got really into existentialism at that age, so he was reading lots of Camus and Kafka. Nerds of a feather, I guess.
This is right up my alley!
If you’re adventurous, I’d suggest reading ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ by Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler). They’re easy enough that weaker readers won’t have trouble concentrating but interesting enough to keep the stronger readers interested. The characters are great and the style is hilarious. Plus they have a nice rhythm so they’re easy to read aloud.
‘The Hobbit’ and ‘Watership Down’ are both classics, too. Although I might steer clear of ‘The Giver’. Nothing personally against the book, it was very interesting but not very fun. And sort of creepy. I read it when I was in 7th grade and I just found it pretty…emotional. ‘Mockingbird’ is really good, although here it’s in our high school program, so you might want to check if they’re going to have to read it again in two years.
I think that must be one of the saddest things I’ve read on these boards.
Since you asked about books we loved, I’ll mention Hajii Baba of Ispahan. I’m not sure it’s age-appropriate or if it’s considered a classic or even good literature and it’s probably terribly un-PC, but it was one of my favorites many years ago. I think the swearing is limited to such as oaths as “by the beard of the Prophet!” and there’s no explicit sex, but the eunuchs could be embarrassing.
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle–I did a report and presentation on this book when I was in the eighth grade.
The Devil’s Arithmetic–we read this as a class in the eighth grade. Good for a bit of a history lesson, too.
Remembering the Good Times–excellent book, but might get challenged because one of the characters commits suicide.
Perhaps a bit late (I began series in 5th grade)
The Redwall series
Ficitonal series about rodents and creatures in their own universe.
very cool.
I loved Tom Sawyer at that age. My dorky friends and I would write fan-fiction about them at that age. I remember Junjoe Djinn, the evil twin of Injun Joe, who had magical powers and came out to haunt Tom and Huck when they lit the lamp in the Widow’s house. I did mention that we were dorky kids, as if my name didn’t tip you off.
All of these are pretty good, I remember doing some of the suggestions before and after 8th grade. However, No one mentioned the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is a great book and pretty funny to boot. It isn’t too long and is an easy read. If I remember it correctly it didn’t have any objectionable material other than destroying the Earth. I can see lesson plans based off of having the students write about the character’s motivations both alien and human. I don’t know how much you can milk it though to get a good and proper curriculum out of it.
At that age, I really liked the first Dune book. This one is sci-fi of course and pretty clean. You can force a lot of parallels to modern society (Paul set’s up a religious zealot movement…hmmm may not be safe territory now) that overthrows the ruling government. It took a bit to get into it and has a miniseries and a movie adaptation. This would be a good book for detailed discussion but I don’t know if it will fly because of the previous.
If your kids are bad you can always make them study Plato and any of the other Greek philosophers. Punishment reading may not be what you are going for though.
I fondly remember both Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace from round about that time in my life.
Coming up with some titles was actually surprisingly more tricky than I thought it would be – if you’re currently teaching them Tom Sawyer, I’m guessing you’re looking for something more in the classic literary category than YA “for fun” reading.
A few suggestions, some of which might have already been mentioned, I lost track:
The Chosen
Animal Farm (I think this is a good age to teach this book, it’s an adult book, but it’s so easy to pick out stylistic choices like symbolism and foreshadowing, a good warm up for when they get more subtle. Plus, it’s short.)
The Odyssey (is this objectionable? I have no idea.)
Cry, the Beloved Country
The Miracle Worker (which is a play, not a novel, sorry)
Black Like Me
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Island of the Blue Dolphins
Alice in Wonderland (quick read, they all know the story, I think there might be some interesting lesson plans that show the contrast between the sophistication of Carroll’s writing and the dopey Disney version)
cbawlmer – that’s hilarious, I also think of 7th grade as the year of Dead Animal stories. In addition to the titles you mentioned, we also had Bless the Beasts and the Children. After that, we had to read Flowers for Algernon, could English class possibly have been more depressing?
If I seconded all the great books that are listed here, this post would be far too long (not that I’m averse to long posts, as some of you probably know), so I will just say that many of these are great choices. The only one that I’ve read that doesn’t strike me as a good choice is Gulliver’s Travels. But then again, I just didn’t like it at all. The beat-you-over-the-head symbolism and the Sturm und Drang of it all were just too too much. I know it’s a “classic,” but yeesh.
One I haven’t seen mentioned here that was required reading in my eighth grade English class is I Am the Cheese. Great book.
As a side note, I think that many kids think of assigned reading as just that, an assignment. It doesn’t occur to them that the author originally wrote for an audience that paid for the privilege of reading said book because it was enjoyable.
Blech. I read Gulliver’s travels in college and I hated it. Stupid Jonathan Swift.
I’m still having a hard time imagining a group of kids that are 13 or so and yet Tom Sawyer is over their heads. Maybe they’d be happier with The Poky Little Puppy. What is it with kids today? I was in 7th grade in 1988. Have things changed that much?
We did Animal Farm in eighth grade. I think later she used something of Phillip Pullman’s.