After Great Expectations, we should read......?

[kokotg]

We're FINALLY almost finished with Great Expectations for our bedtime read aloud, after many, many months. Despite how long it's taken us to get through it, it was a big hit with all the kids (11, 9, and newly 7)....they even hung in there with very little complaining for the long stretch in the middle where Pip just whines about money and Estella for forever. So where do we go next? Most of the big kid classics/modern classics we've already read aloud or they've read themselves, so I'm focusing mostly on adult novels that would still be a little too challenging for them to read independently (or a lot too challenging, for my 7 year old). Although I do have Wind in the Willows or Tom Sawyer in mind, too. So...ideas? I'm trying to remember anything about The House of Seven Gables and whether that would be appropriate/interesting. More Dickens would work, but I think we need a break from him for a little while (DS just played Tiny Tim in a local production of A Christmas Carol, too, so we've been pretty well immersed for months now!)

[Aurelia]

Wind in the Willows might be good, there's also the Narnia series, or The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings trilogy. Ariel has enjoyed Black Beauty, The Water Babies, At the Back of the North Wind, and The Railway Children. We just finished Little Lord Fauntleroy and she didn't want it to end. There are other less well-known books, like the Green Knowe, Moomintroll, or Pineapple Place series. They might like Tom Sawyer, the Prydain chronicles or The Wizard of Earthsea, Redwall, or Captains Courageous. Others: Kidnapped, The Eagle of the Ninth, The Light Princess, The Book of Pirates, The Mysterious Benedict Society, The House of Arden, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.

 

Classics we read in high school (that I remember as being relatively appropriate for children, though I might be wrong): Animal Farm, The Age of Innocence, The Brothers Karamazov, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frankenstein, The Last of the Mohicans, The Sword in the Stone, The Stranger (by Albert Camus), A Death in the Family, A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, The Inferno (Dante), Moby Dick, The Strange Case of Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde, The Invisible Man.

[kokotg]

Thanks for all the suggestions! We've done some of those, but there are plenty that we haven't, too. I have 40 more pages before I have to pick another book!