1) Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
I'm not even going to explain what Harry Potter is about because we all know... The reason I'm putting these as Number One (even though my favourite book is Number Two) is because Harry Potter presses the "write" button on any other person who creates through literature. Rowling activates the creative gene in us and even if you just like reading it's a great story! You can read each book again and again and still feel the same sense of excitement you did the first time round and that is a rare thing. It is also an even rarer thing for a good book to transfer to a movie and become a good movie as well so we have to give credit for that too.
2) His Dark Materials Trilogy - Philip Pullman:
1) The Northern Lights
2) The Subtle Knife
3) The Amber Spyglass
This is a story about a girl, Lyra, and a boy, Will, who meet each other in very strange circumstances and set off together for very different goals. They meet in book two and Lyra is determined to find a friend from book one and ask for his forgiveness and Will is determined to find his long lost father and bring him home to help him look after his mentally ill mother.
Everyone, everyone, everyone should read these books. I first read The Amber Spyglass when I was ten (yes, I started backwards) and it has stuck with me all these years and it's still, to this day, my absolute favourite book. The first two books are brilliant but The Amber Spyglass is one of those books you can pick up, start anywhere in it and just continue to read. Over and over and over again, I might add. The book has so many layers. Every time I read it I find something new or something mentioned in it sends me on a philosophical spiral. Another thing I really like about this book is that he starts each chapter with a quote from a poem and the name of the author and I owe my love of names such as William Blake and Emily Dickinson to the fact that I was introduced to them by this book.
Wow, wow, wow... I am eventually going to write about this on my blog but I want to be able to dedicate a lot of time to it because this book it so important to me. I'm going to just put one of the paragraphs from the first page of The Amber Spyglass on here so those of you who are short on time or just don't want to read it, feel free to skip ahead to Number Three.
"It was a place of brilliant sunlight, never undappled; shafts of lemon-gold
brilliance lanced down to the forest floor between bars and pools
of brown-green shade; and the light was never still, never constant,
because drifting mist would often float among the tree-tops,
filtering all the sunlight to a pearly sheen and brushing every pine-cone
with moisture that glistened when the mist lifted..."
Just stay there in that moment for a while and see the forest with your mind's eye. Beautiful isn't it?
3) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
This is a book written about a fifteen year old boy with Asperger's Syndrome. Christopher Boone can't understand body language or facial expressions, or sarcasm or why people lie. When his next door neighbour's poodle is found dead in the back garden, Christopher sets off to solve the case.
I've already written a piece on this book so for those of you who are interested you can read a longer version of what I'm about to say on my blog. I believe we should read books that broaden our horizons and put us in other people's shoes. This is a very interesting book and I believe reading at an early age helps people become more understanding and tolerant towards people who think differently.
4) Jenny Nimmo Books
Jenny Nimmo has written a range of books with many different topics. The Charlie Bone series is about a school for talented children. This school is for only the best. Students are split into houses depending on their talents which include music, acting, art etc. and then there are the children who are the descendants of the Red King and have very special talents like Charlie Bone who can hear and go into photographs or Billy who can talk to animals. Charlie is a good kid surrounded by mean people. The owners of the school are mean, he lives with his aunts who are mean and the owner's son also goes to the school and makes sure that Charlie and the other students are unhappy. These stories are about a group of children and then adults who gang together and stand up to the owners of the school and their evil ways.
Jenny Nimmo also has a trilogy about a magical, white spider and the child wizard who owns him. Emlyn is a young boy trying to figure out what happened to his sister. Nimmo's books deal with things that most children have difficulties with. In The Charlie Bone series you have a young boy mourning the loss of his father who disappeared without a trace. In The Snow Spider trilogy you have a boy trying to cope with the loss of his older sister and parents who could not come to terms with the fact that one of their children is missing. In other books you have main character whose parents are divorced and whose mother is marrying a man who doesn't want her. There is a lot of tension between the older and younger characters in her stories and a general lack of communication between them. I think this is something that most children/teens can relate with and I believe that these books help them because in the end a new line of communication is set between the characters which gives hope.
5) The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Are you also sensing a pattern here? OK, OK, OK... you got me! I have a thing for rebellion stories. Each one of the books on this list is about the young standing up to the old and challenging an established system. I enjoy them and I think most people do. I like The Hunger Games because everything in it is very believable. Katniss doesn't want to be a hero. She just wants to save her sister and I think when every older sibling read the book, we all jumped up and said "I volunteer as tribute!" at the same time. She shies away from Peeta because she knows the chance of him surviving is low and if she is to make it home to her sister then he has to die and she doesn't want to take on that emotional guilt.
The whole world has grown accustomed to the fact that ever year 11 children will die. They all sit back and say that's the way it is because those who are brave enough to make a stand and point out that it's not right are immediately shot down or as the characters point out in the books "Things aren't as bad as they used to be," so they believe things are better; they're not OK but they're better. That's a very human thing to say and to think. Human rights are not universal and are not equal between race, gender and religion but they are not as bad as they used to be so we do nothing. We say "People need time to adjust. They need time to understand. Things aren't as bad as they used to be; look we have a black president!" We point out the comparison between the past and the present because we are too afraid or can't be bothered to work for the future and just hope things will work out themselves.
This is a good story with underlying criticisms of humankind and society. You have the needed romantic side of it because it not only makes it easier to relate to Katniss but because it gives people a reason to read on and then catch on to hidden messages.
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