Along the same lines as
The Ghost Map, my DD recently really loved
Wicked bugs: the louse that conquered Napoleon's army & other diabolical insects by Amy Stewart. Similar in content and theme.
Another recommendation to go along with the above list--
The ALA's Newbery award booksI heartily recommend the ALA's award booklists. The Newbery books offer an enormous range and a view of children's literature that is matchless in scope. It's a tantalizing look at what experts in the genre deemed the "finest" examples published in each year... and this definition has certainly changed in the past ninety years! It's equally fascinating (and a higher-order activity-- bonus) to read the 'honor' books alongside the gold medal winner for a year, and discuss what it was about the winner that made it stand above the others.
Many of the Newbery winners are completely content-suitable for children under eight; that is a real bonus since the early selections have that same lovely quality of deeper writing. Writing that doesn't read like the next step up from phonetically controlled easy-readers (since those didn't exist then). Writing that asks the reader to explore language and metaphor, to visualize and imagine.
But at the same time, these books are, by and large, for and about
children. 
I love that juxtaposition; it takes a masterful or gifted author to write for pre-adolescent children in an authentic way.
DD, now 13, has read most of the Newbery medalists, and many of the honor books.
Another idea-- pick an author and read his/her works. We read George MacDonald's works (well, what is still in print) one summer. It's easy to see why it is endures.
Oh-- Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide is one of DD's favorite books of all time. That's lovely summer reading for gifties ages 8-15.
For slightly older kids, there are
adult fiction series that use some literary classics as a jumping off point. Alan Gordon's
Fool's Guild series uses Shakespeare and world history in a fun and innovative way (and the series is pretty devoid of sex and profanity), and there is another that uses, of all things, the world of Beatrix Potter! DD and I have both enjoyed this type of book a lot during her pre-teen years. This is an awkward age for EG/PG kids, since they
can read whatever they wish, but there is little written for them in particular. Children's literature is stilted and hobbled by vocabulary and sentence structure which is unedifying, to say the least, and young adult and adult fiction all seems to contain content which is flatly inappropriate for most nine or ten year olds.
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More general observation on the subject of reading and book lists...
While I don't argue against inclusion of really good quality literature for children and adults alike, I'm also of the opinion that there is no such thing as a
bad book. Mostly. I love books, and so does everyone else in my family. (Hey-- there's a new book for everyone-- the history OF the book!! No, really--
Books: a living history by Martyn Lyons. I have it checked out right now. Along with thirty-four others.
)
Okay, so we probably aren't as discriminating as some people about this sort of thing. I consider summer to be a time for self-
indulgence as much as self-improvement.
Laissez-faire time, if you will. As long as DD is passionately pursuing
some interest that isn't harmful, we're happy with that. I think of summer as a time to rekindle the lust for reading-- to remind kids WHY they love to read. Heaven knows schools seem to do all they can to stifle that understanding during the year...
DD (then 9? 10?) one summer read at least 30 Nancy Drew mysteries, at least half a dozen Trixie Belden mysteries, several astronomy books, one about how to build wacky spy contraptions from household stuff, along with a variety of very tongue-in-cheek books about the Zombie apocolypse and survival planning, which led to
The Serpent and the Rainbow (we simply had it on a bookshelf, but she abandoned it mid-way through at the time)... then followed that up with
Great Expectations and finished up with
Oliver Twist. That's not that unusual for her, by the way-- thus my statement that I tend to take a hands-off approach with her.
DD's summer reading so far this year has consisted of a variety of non-fiction, mostly contemporary current affairs or political science, legal thrillers (
a la John Grisham), and quite a few fanciful Dan Brown-like conspiracy thrillers in addition to the Manga that her friends all love. She loves high fantasy, but has run out of material that isn't overtly sexualized beyond her tastes; the Xanth novels are sly about it and she likes those, but they are not particularly well-written past the fourth or fifth one, either, and she's definitely noticed. It's unfortunate, because she loves the puns.
At this point, I'm not into limiting what she
does read, as long as she's reading in volume and in a fair degree of variety-- which she does all on her own. She has an e-reader and library cards at both the public county library (one of the best in the country for its size) and also the local uni, so she's pretty independent.
We figure that she needs proficiency in cultural idiom and the autonomy to do as she pleases during the summer just as much as she needs additional capital-L Literature. We know that she gets the latter in abundance, and we have a lot of those books just hanging around the house.
I've not used book lists as a "choose something from this menu" tool, but probably because I've not needed to. We've used book lists more as a 'checklist' the way birders use one to build a life list. LOL. She's a kid who has always been a voracious and indiscriminate reader, though, so the real battle is getting her to get her nose OUT of any book she finds.
