My son has been happily reading princess stories where there is dragon training and adventures going on. The books on the list may not have a male main character, because boys can engage perfectly well with a girl – provided the girl isn’t swanning around talking about shoes and boys all the time. To loosely define modern, here, I’m sticking with books that were published after 1980 (a slightly arbitrary choice) which will likely be similar to the books the kids are familiar with from their school libraries.

Today, I am limiting the scope of this list to modern literary style novels. But I’ll address this more in tomorrow’s post on Classics. They are, and as a parent I mean to make them available and as appealing as possible to my kids. Which is not to say that those books aren’t fully worthy of recommending to the modern youth. The literary style has changed, language usage is different, and technology has advanced all out of proportion. The problem is that modern readers, and particularly kids that haven’t grown up in a household where reading the classics was emphasized, will have problems accessing those books without some preparation. I knew I’d get floods of ‘Heinlein! Norton! ER Burroughs!’ and I did. So I went to my friends and groups of readers and asked for suggestions. I found this to be true when I was a librarian and responsible for the YA collection, and it’s still true now.

But when you get into the young adult books, there is a paucity of material for the guys. Middle grade readers (intended for roughly second through sixth grade children) have plenty of titles meant for boys to enjoy – not always starring a boy, but the sort of action and adventure tales that will attract them and keep them interested. I started this yesterday, with my musings on the offerings of traditional publishing for teen boys.

Cuttlefish by Dave Freer