Hi everyone! I haven't been around for a while because things have been going smoothly, but right now I could use some input from the hive mind.

I'm looking for ideas for what to read to DD8, who has very high verbal intelligence. (I read to her for hours a day, because her comprehension level is way beyond her own reading fluency.) I still read her lots of children's novels, but it's getting harder to find ones that hold her interest. And young adult lit is obviously not a good next step for an 8yo.

So we've been dipping our toes into "real" literature. So far I've read her these:
Pride & Prejudice
Emma
Persuasion
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, by E.T.A. Hoffmann
A Christmas Carol
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Much Ado About Nothing
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Tom Sawyer

She has enjoyed all of these and understood them on a pretty sophisticated level.

On my list of other things to maybe try:
Sherlock Holmes
O. Henry stories
The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde
Treasure Island and Kidnapped
Homer's Odyssey, with me skipping some of the dull parts
parts of the Canterbury Tales

I'd love to hear other ideas of adult literature that is engaging and fun and will get a kid hooked at an early age. Obviously, I don't want to hit her with Bartleby the Scrivener and Waiting For Godot!

(P.S. Yes I've looked at the book lists on this board, and also lists on the web of kid-friendly books for ahead-of-their-age readers. These don't really work for my kid's particular problem, or else we've already read them!)

Does she (do you) like science fiction? If so, I recommend To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. Time travel and screwball comedy. It's a sequel, but it stands fine on its own. The previous book, The Doomsday Book, is also very funny but pretty heavy at the end with a lot of deaths of sympathetic characters, so I hesitate to recommend it for an eight-year-old.

MegMeg, have you read her Jane Eyre? I didn't see it on your list, and it was my older dd's favorite novel from a very young age. My ds loved Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Not sure what your specs are re quality of literature or subject matter, but fwiw, I loved all the Lassie and Alfred Lord Tennyson books when I was around your dd's age. I've also enjoyed many of the tween and teen novels that are popular now, or have been popular in the past 10 or so years. Have you/she read series such as Guardians of the Gahoole, Percy Jackson etc?

Re science fiction - my ds loves loves loves science fiction - but I had a bit of a tough time picking titles for him to read because I'd never read much myself, and there can be a lot of adult-nature subject matter in classic science fiction.

Happy reading!

polarbear

Oo, good one, I've read that!

Yes, that's always the rub, because each person has their own idiosyncracies. So I'm open to a wide range of suggestions, hoping we'll find some ones that work.

DD does like a bit of blood-and-thunder, stories with bad guys and so on. But they can't be TOO creepy. She definitely doesn't like "sweet" books where ordinary girls have ordinary adventures growing up, along the lines of Anne of Green Gables. But then, she's got this Jane Austen obsession, so go figure.

What would you recommend as a first Tennyson to read?

And when you say the Lassie books, do you mean starting with the original Lassie Come-Home?

If your daughter enjoyed Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, have you considered Mark Twain's somewhat more controversial Huckleberry Finn?

My problem with Huckleberry Finn is not that it's controversial but that she would find it boring.

Taming of the shrew?
Agatha Christie?
PG Wodehouse
I loved Louisa May Alcott and Jules Verne at 9
My son loved Sherlock homes

Thinking of the kind of thing I liked or would have liked around that age...

Chronicles of Narnia
Redwall
Charles Dickens
Dorothy Sayers
Anne McCaffrey's original two Pern series. There is a little adult content in them, as there is in Dickens and Sayers, though more discreetly so in Dickens and Sayers, probably because of the eras in which they were written.

Don't forget to check out the book thread by age, elsewhere in this RResources forum.

We ran through a number of Newbery medalist and honor titles at this age.

I'm personally a huge fan of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, but it's likely a bit much at 8. It's quite slow, probably.


What type of content does she like, generally?

I read many of Kate DiCamillo's books to DD at 7-8yo. Lois Lowry's works are another idea-- those are surprising deep, in terms of theme and content, but are definitely aimed at a youth audience for all their sophistication. Gathering Blue is the less well-known of her dystopian novels.

Caddie Woodlawn was a book that I liked at this age-- but DD found them boring.

Trixie Belden-- those are back in print now, and they are slightly "younger" than Nancy Drew, but just as 'clean' in terms of nonsexual themes. I was obsessed with them at 8-10yo, but those are probably best for her to read, not for reading aloud.


Dickens. Looking at your list, I'd definitely suggest Dickens-- it's lovely for reading aloud.

Richard Adams' books-- Watership Down is THE book here... though... The Girl in A Swing, ehhhhh... probably not. I won't spoil the ending, but it's seriously creepy. On a tangent, DD texted me over the holiday, with a tearful note about the BBC's elegiac headline upon his recent passing. He's a personal favorite of hers and mine.


Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael books-- there are quite a few of these.

James Herriot's books are a wonderful introduction to memoir if the accounts of Anne of Green Gables or Caddie Woodlawn don't appeal.

Some of Gaiman's works, but preview these carefully.

Lord of the Rings series, Hobbit, Peter Pan, Narnia are some of the books that I read aloud to my son at that age.

Though not "adult" literature, another series that we did before that was Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz series. We also did all the follow-up books to the Oz series which were a lot at that time. My son was very impressed with Dorothy and friends and wanted me to read as many stories of them as possible.

Anastasia
Animal Farm
A Wrinkle in Time
Island of the Blue Dolphins

Don't rule out adult nonfiction. Depending on your mutual interests, there are wonderful biographies you could read.

My son is only 6, but three recent read alouds that he really enjoyed were The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows (I edited out the word ass throughout, saying instead I've been so stupid or silly instead of I've been such an ass), and Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. He especially loved The Wind in the Willows and made me reread it immediately. I personally found reading it to be very difficult, I swear every sentence is like 5 run on sentences all smooshed together. Plus I found it boring. But he loved it!

I preview everything I read to him or give him to read. Some of the most recent books I've given him to read are Howl's Moving Castle, Time Cat, Augie and the Green Knight, and Norby the Mixed up Robot. Since we are a sci fi/fantasy family I am always looking for kid friendly stuff in those genres. DS has also recently been very into reading Winnie the Pooh and has the cutest voices he uses for the different characters.

Like I said, my son is only 6 and might be well behind where you guys are at, but I thought maybe even some lower level ideas might help out some. We read at all different levels and are always looking for good books that are kid safe anywhere from early chapter books to books written for adults. Hope you find some good stuff

Speaking of To Say Nothing of the Dog, you guys might also enjoy Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. (It would be a good one to read first, as TSNotD refers to it.) I find that humorous books tend to make some of the best read-alouds, except in some cases where the humor is very dependent on the way words are written (e.g., some Terry Pratchett, The Phantom Tollbooth).

DD loved some of George MacDonald's works-- and Betty MacDonald's, too at this age and slightly younger. They both make great read-alouds.

(The Princess and the Goblin, in the case of the former, and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle in the case of the latter, incidentally.)

Also count us as another family that got a lot of mileage out of the Oz books. DD was another young lady who appreciated Jane Austen enormously, so I hope that her other favorites might be helpful to you.

She also likes Connie Willis' sensibilities. Her sense of humor is terrific. Ahh-- she has another set of time-travel books, set in WWII London during the Blitz. DD and I both have enjoyed those (though she is a bit older than the child in the OP's post)-- something about being asynchronous is treated very seriously by those books, that's all I'll say about that. It's a very deeply resonant and seldom well-explored theme. But Willis treats it quite seriously. It's the ONLY book in which a "solution" involves time travel, as far as I'm aware. Great, great themes in that one-- as long as your child is prepared to manage the darker themes inherent in the era, and the topics of, say, The Blitz.

Based on your comment about Homer's Odyssey, she might like more prose-based literature or mythology. As an added bonus, mythology is a terrific segue into discussions about history, culture, geography, and religion. These have been family favourites at our house for a few years.

If she has dystopian leanings, Lord of the Flies might not be a far reach.

For humour, Wilde's The Canterville Ghost is delightfully wry since you included Earnest.

This is just a comment, definitely not saying don't read these at this age... but this is the place in reading where we definitely bumped into a "gifted gotcha" - my ds was way ahead in reading ability and was able to read high school and above level material while in early elementary. I gave him a lot of classics to read because I really wanted him to experience them... Animal Farm was a book he loved and read more than once... at home, during early- to mid-elementary school. During middle school Animal Farm was part of the curriculum, and it went over ok, because he was in a school with integrated studies, passionate and engaging teachers, in a class with other high ability and high-level-thinking students so there was a lot of deep thinking and discussion going on. Then in high school his first year English class (a class that was restricted to highly gifted students) read Animal Farm again... and by then.. ds was done with it

FWIW, his middle school teachers also noted that over the years they'd been frustrated that they felt they couldn't or shouldn't offer classics that their highly capable students were ready to read and would be interested in because those same books would be read again in high school, and they were receiving feedback from students and parents that the students didn't really appreciate that second (or third... or more) go-round in high school. That didn't mean they weren't able to pull together a program in middle school with insightful challenging literature, they just didn't focus on classics.

polarbear

When I was in high school and we did a group read of a book I had read years before, I was able to substitute a book that I hadn't read yet and do parallel assignments (that I often wrote myself) related to it. You might want to look into that as an option when you get into this situation, polarbear.

It sounds like the middle school teachers need to have a dialog with the high school teachers and divvy up the books in an appropriate way. It's not like there's a shortage of classics.

That reminds me, MegMeg, you guys might also enjoy some Anthony Trollope, if you're not intimidated by thick books. Start with The Warden and/or Barchester Towers and see if you get hooked.

Thanks everyone for the lovely ideas!