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Good books for late teens


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My kids seem to be going through a dry spell of finding good books. I would love a recommendation or two (or more) of books that 18+ year old boys and girls would like. (We are conservative Christian, just to give you a frame of reference). Dd likes Pride and Prejudice, we have all the Jane Austen. Ds really struggles to find things that challenge his mind and are really well written, he won't tolerate 'twaddle'. 

Actually, I could use some recommendations for Dd 14 also. Thanks!

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I agree with the Dickens suggestion.

 

Here are some other fairly clean ideas for your dds. My dd 15 is working on these series and I have been reading and enjoying them also. All are mysteries. These are not great works of literature simply enjoyable stories...

 

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winsper and the Daisy Dalrumple series by Carola Dunn are quite interesting. Both series focus on young women in Britain after WWI who are finding a place for themselves in a changed society. Maisie is by far the better written and more serious topic wise.

 

Another series that we just started is the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes books by Laurie R. King. The first one was great.

 

Some other ideas are Tolken and CS Lewis. Dd just read and loved Til We Have Faces by Lewis.

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I would definitely recommend Dickens as well!  You could start with David Copperfield.  Tale of Two Cities was a favorite too.  At that age, my son read a lot of Mark Twain, and also a lot of biographies of explorers, etc.  One of my daughters is reading the Maisie Dobbs series right now, too!  Also, my girls enjoyed the Mrs. Pollifax mystery series.  We enjoyed biographies and memoirs of people living during historical periods such as WWII.  I got a lot of book ideas from the Sonlight Homeschool catalog.  They have a lot of great listings, such as the book about the real Anna from the movie The King and I.

 

If you google classic literature, you will get a lot of ideas, such as The Three Musketeers, Les Miserables, The Mask,  Moby Dick.

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I second Til We Have Faces by CS Lewis. 

 

As a Christian I found Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe to be an interesting counterpoint to the missionary experience. 

 

I found just trying hard things at that age to be exciting and fun, even if I didn't finish them. Ditto lots of things about other cultures and people who weren't familiar. 

 

Infinite Jest?

Cloud Atlas?

In the Name of the Rose? 

The Magic Mountain?

Blood Meridian?

An Anthropologist on Mars? 

Wild Swans: Three Women of China?

The Sound and the Fury?

 

Whether an 18 year old would like these or not depends a lot on the personality of the 18 year old. None of them are twaddle though, all of them are challenging books. 

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