I often mention how  much I love reading with the kids, and the older kids all have daily mandatory reading time of books on my approved list.   I’ve been asked several times for a list of books I recommend, but I’ve never written out a list so I can’t do that!

Instead of being a perfectionist and not sharing a list because it’s not comprehensive at all, I’ll share about the books that I loaded onto the Kindle for ds11 and dd12 earlier in the week.  All of the books I got were via Project Gutenberg and therefore free in the public domain.  These are mostly older books which is fine because I like the classics because the language isn’t dumbed down and the ideas tend to be more stimulating than contemporary books (I’m obviously generalizing, because pulp fiction has always been around so there are insipid books from a hundred years ago, too). This isn’t an extensive list of books I recommend, just books that I put on the Kindle that night.

There are loads more amazing books that are more current that I get from the library (eg Newberry books, Narnia series, Little House series) I’ll list authors rather than books when it’s a writer who we’ve read more than a few of their books, and I’ll loosely put them in order of difficulty:

• Arthur Scott Bailey – lots of books in this series
• Thorton Burgess – lots of books in this series
• Tom Swift series – lots of books in series
• Margaret Sidney – Pepper series
• Lewis Carrol (Alice in Wonderland)
• Horatio Alger – lots of books in series
• Rudyard Kipling
• Louisa May Alcott
• Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens

Books:

Heidi
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
The Secret Garden
A Little Princess – one of my all time favorites
Understood Betsy – another all time favorite
Pinocchio
Robinson Crusoe
Swiss Family Robinson

As I said, there are loads more books that could be added to this list and it still would be far from complete, but this is a partial answer and gives you an idea of the kind of writing that I like the kids to have exposure to on a regular basis.

Avivah