Page 2 ... Meg Cabot. The Princess Diaries. Malorie Blackman. Noughts and
Crosses. Benjamin Zephaniah. Refugee Boy. Anne Fine. Madame Doubtfire.
Recommended Reading
Crickhowell English Department
A Guide to Reading
This booklet is intended to be a guide of books suitable for students from KS3 to KS5. The list, covering a range of genres, is drawn from a number of sources including teacher and student recommendations; the National Literacy Strategy’s recommended texts; reading lists suggested by other schools and the National Literacy Trust’s website. Some of the texts are more challenging than others but every book in this list has been enjoyed by someone else.
Year 7 Recommended Texts Author Anthony Horrowitz Arthur Ransome Zouzou Carter Sally Prue
Title Adventure Stormbreaker Swallows and Amazons Lion Boy Cold Tom
Adele Geras Cornelia Funke Theresa Tomlinson
Troy The Thief Lord The Moon Riders
Brian Jacques
Castaways of the Flying Dutchman Chris Ryan Alpha Force Series Classics Louisa May Alcott Little Women Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden Johanna Spyri Nina Bawden Charles Dickens
Heidi Carrie’s War A Christmas Carol
Lewis Carroll Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Elizabeth Nesbit J R R Tolkein Charles Kingsley
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland The Lost World The Railway Children The Hobbit The Water Babies
Anna Sewell
Black Beauty
Noel Streatfield
Ballet Shoes
Frank Baum Eleanor H. Porter
The Wizard of OZ Polyanna
L.M. Montgomery
Anne of Green Gables
Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Little House on the Prairie J.M.Barrie Peter Pan Real Life/Teenage Meg Cabot The Princess Diaries Malorie Blackman Noughts and Crosses Benjamin Zephaniah Refugee Boy Anne Fine Madame Doubtfire Step by Wiked Step Jane Ure Plague 99 Nina Bawden Granny the Pag Rosie Rushton Just Don’t Make a Scene Mum! Cathy Hopkins The Game; Enchanted Glass Hilary McKay Saffy’s Angel Louis Sachar Holes Jacqueline Wilson The Story of Tracey Beaker Jaclyn Moriarty Feeling Sorry for Celia Fantasy Teresa Tomlinson Moon Riders Phillip Pullman
Northern Lights
Stewart and Riddell
Stormchasers; The Edge Chronicles
Brian Jacques NESS, Patrick.
Redwall A Monster Calls
J.R.R. Tolkien Ursula Le Guin Joan Aiken
The Hobbit The Earthsea Quartet The Wolves of Willoughby Chases Stravaganza: City of Masks Inkheart Artemis Fowl A Series of Unfortunate Events The Spiderwick Chronicles
Mary Hoffman Cornelia Funke Eoin Coifer Lemony Snicket Tony Di Terlizzi & Holly Black Stuart Hill
Cry of the Icemark; The Blade of Fire William Nicholson The Wind of Fire Trilogy J. K. Rowling Harry Potter C.S. Lewis Narnia Richard Adams Watership Down Marianne Curley The Named Biography/Autobiography Anne Frank The Diary of Anne Frank Judith Kerr When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit Adeline Yen Mah Chinese Cinderlla Gerald Durrell My Family & Other Animals James Herriot All Creatures Great & Small Science Fiction John Wyndham The Day of the Triffids Jean Ure Michelle Magorian
Plague 99 History Goodnight Mr Tom (WWII)
Jamilia Gavin
The Wheel of Surya (Indian Independence) Elizabeth Laird Kiss the Dust (Kurdish refugees) Phillip Pullman The Ruby in the Smoke (first of the Sally Lockhart trilogy set in Victorian London) Caroline Lawrence Roman Mysteries James Riordan Sweet Clarinet (WWII) Ian Serraillier The Silver Sword Nina Bawden Carrie’s War Sally Gardner I Coriander Life Issues Sharon Creech Walk Two Moons Jacqueline Wilson Vicky Angel (a girl coping with the death of a friend) Mary Hendry Chandra (arranged marriage) Prize Winners Sharon Creech Ruby Holler Alan Gibbons The Edge Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Frank Cottrell Boyce Millions Funny Sue Townsend The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Karen McCombie Ally’s World (series) Lauren Child Utterly Me, Clarice Bean Steward and Riddell The Edge Chronicles Gerald Durrell My Family & Other Animals Roald Dahl Other Cultures Elizabeth Laird The Garbage King
Beverley Naidoo The Other Side of Truth Benjamin Zephaniah Refugee Boy Eva Ibbotson Journey to the River Adeline Yen Mah Chinese Cinderella Film/T.V Tie-Ins Gail Carson Levine Ella Enchanted Mary Rogers Freaky Friday Lemony Snickett A Series of Unfortunate Events Louis Sachar Holes Jacqueline Wilson The Story of Tracey Beaker Allan Ahlberg Woof! E. Nesbit Five Children and It Mary Norton The Borrowers Roald Dahl
Matilda; The Witches; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Frank Cottrell Boyce Millions C. S. Lewis The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe J. K. Rowling Harry Potter Animal Stories Richard Adams Watership Down Paul Gallico The Snowgoose; Jennie D. King-Smith The Sheep Pig Gerald Durrell My Family and Other Animals Jeanne Willis Dumb Creatures Michael Morpurgo The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips
Year 8 Recommended Texts Michael Morpurgo James Riordan Caroline Lawrence Lynne Reid Banks Robert Harris Mary Hooper Sally Gardener Ann Turnbull Dyan Sheldon Hilary McKay Cathy Hopkins Jean Ure Rosie Rushston Jaclyn Moriarty Narinder Dhami Mary Rogers Meg Cabot
J. D. Weiss Mary Norton E. Nesbit L. M. Montgomery Louisa M. Alcott
Historical Private Peaceful Sweet Clarinet Roman Mysteries Tiger, Tiger Pompeii Petals in the Ashes I Coriander No Shame, No Fear Teen Girl Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen Indigo’s Star; Saffy’s Angel Mates, Dates… Skinny Melon & Me What a Week to Make a Stand Feeling Sorry for Celia; Finding Cassie Crazy Bhangra Blues Freaky Friday The Princess Diaries; Missing Series; The Mediator Series Classics Swiss Family Robinson The Borrowers Five Children and It Anne of Green Gables Little Women Animals
Robin Jarvis Terry Pratchett
Deptford Histories etc The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents Richard Adams Watership Down Zizou Carter Lion Boy Brian Jacques Redwall Series Gerald Durrell My Family and Other Animals School Jean Ure Skinny Melon & Me J. K. Rowling Harry Potter Biography/Personal Stories/Real Life/Other Cultures Judith Kerr A Small Person Far Away; When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit Adeline Yen Mah Chinese Cinderella Roald Dahl Boy Elizabeth Laird Garbage King David Almond Fire Eaters Kevin Brooks Martyn Pig Anne Holm I am David Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Detective Stories Agatha Christie The Body in the Library Phillip Pulman The Ruby in the Smoke Eleanor Updale Montmorency Horror/Witchcraft Cate Tiernan Wicca Chris Wooding The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray John Wyndham Day of the Triffids Darren Shan The Sago of Darren Shan
Other Worlds/Fantasy Teresa Tomlinson Moon Riders Stuart Hill Cry of the Icemark; The Blade of Fire Mary Hoffman Stravanganza Series Phillip Pullman His Dark Materials Cornelia Funke Inkheart Stewart and Riddell The Edge Chronicles Shannon Hart The Goosegirl Christopher Paolini Eragon Lemony Snicket A Series of Unfortunate Events G. P. Taylor Shadowmancer Garth Nix Mr Monday; Sabriel Eoin Colfer The Supernaturalist Funny Louis Sachar Holes Louisa Rennison Georgina Nicholson Series
Year 9 Recommended Texts Biography Wild Swans Angela’s Ashes Memoirs of a Geisha Other Cultures Tanuja Desai Hidier Born Confused Rani & Sukh (Un)arranged Marriage; Bali Rai; Garbage King; A Little Piece of Ground; Elizabeth Laird Alice Walker The Color Purple Malorie Blackman Noughts & Crosses Jan Mark Useful Idiots History Theresa Breslin Remembrance Jung Chang Frank McCourt Arthur Golden
Robert Harris Tracy Chavalier Philippa Gregory Louise Rennison Cathy Hopkins Helen Fielding Jacqueline Wilson Julia Clarke Robin McKinley Meg Cabot Melvin Burgess Anne Cassidy Julie Bertagna
Pompeii The Girl with the Pearl Earring The Other Boleyn Girl Teen Girl Georgia Nicholson series Mates, Dates… Bridget Jones’ Diary Lola Rose Between You and Me Beauty The Mediator series Issues Junk Looking for JJ The Opposite of Chocolate
Classics Jane Austen Pride & Prejudice; Northanger Abbey Thomas Hardy The Mayor of Casterbridge; Tess of the d’Urbervilles Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities; Great Expectations Other Worlds/Fantasy Lian Hearn Across the Nightingale Floor Mary Hoffman City of Stars; City of Masks Philip Pullman His Dark Materials Terry Pratchett The Wee Free Men Garth Nix Sabriel Tamora Pierce Song of the Lioness Quartet Terry Brooks Tales of Shannara Terry Pratchett Discworld Isaac Asimov I Robot Alison Croggons The Gift JRR Tolkien The Lord of the Rings Trilogy G.P. Taylor Shadowmancer; Wormwood Adventure Anthony Horowitz Alex Rider Novels (Stormbreaker etc) Animals Jack London White Fang Paul Gallico Jennie Henry Williamson Tarka the Otter Yann Martel Life of Pi Funny Helen Fielding Bridget Jones Diary
Terry Pratchett Meg Rosoff
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents Miscellaneous How I Live Now
Suggestions for Boys (11-14) Jules Verne Milena Baisch Sarah Hammond Paul Dowswell James Dawson Julia Golding Pete Johnson Rick Riordan Fletcher Moss Garth Nix, Sean Williams Alex Scarrow Rick Riordan Jeff Norton, Ryan Hunter Andrew Beasley Nigel McDowell Mark Lowery Derek Landy Anthony Horowitz Marcus Sedgwick Keren David
Around the World in Eighty Days Anton and Piranha The Night Sky in My Head Eleven Eleven Being a Boy Young Knights of the Round Table The Vampire Fighters The Throne of Fire The Poison Boy The Mystery The Mayan Prophecy The Mark of Athena The Fight for the Future The Claws of Evil Tall Tales from Pitch End Socks Are Not Enough Skulduggery Pleasant: Kingdom of the Wicked Russian Roulette Revolver Another Life
KS4 Recommended Texts Author Helen Dunmore Claire Wigfall Elizabeth Baines Haruki Murakami Penelope Lively Ridjal Noor Leila Aboulela William Golding Kevin Brooks Joe Simpson Susan Hill Dylan Thomas Arthur Miller Diane Samuels J B Priestley Dennis Kelly John Steinbeck Lloyd Jones Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Harper Lee William Shakespeare William Shakespeare William Shakespeare William Shakespeare William Shakespeare Jane Austen
Title My Polish Teacher’s Tie When the Wasps Drowned Compass and Torch On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl The Darkness Out There Anil Something Old, Something New Lord of the Flies Martyn Pig Touching the Void The Woman in Black Under Milk Wood The Crucible Kindertransport An Inspector Calls Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) Of Mice and Men Mister Pip Purple Hibiscus To Kill a Mockingbird Macbeth Romeo and Juliet Much Ado About Nothing Twelfth Night Julius Caesar Pride and Prejudice
Emily Bronte Charles Dickens Thomas Hardy George Orwel
Wuthering Heights Great Expectations The Withered Arm and other Wessex Tales Animal Farm
In addition, the following writers come highly recommended and any of their texts would represent worthwhile reading: Pre 20th Century Matthew Arnold Jane Austen William Blake Charlotte Bronte Emily Bronte Robert Browning
20th Century Kingsley Amis WH Auden TS Eliot EM Forster Robert Frost William Goulding
John Bunyan Lord Byron
Graham Greene Seamus Heaney
Geoffrey Chaucer William Congreve John Clare
Ted Hughes
Other Cultures Chinua Acheba John Agard Monica Ali Moniza Alvi Maya Angelou Isaac Bashevis Singer James Berry Edward Braithwaite Anita Desai
Aldous Huxley
Emily Dickenson
Elizabeth Jennings James Joyce
F Scott Fitzgerald Athol Fugard
Phillip Larkin DH Lawrence Katherine
Jamilia Gavin Nadine Gordimer Doris Lessins
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Wilkie Collins Joseph Conrad Daniel Defoe
Charles Dickens John Donne John Dryden George Eliot Henry Fielding Elizabeth Gaskell Oliver Goldsmith Thomas Hardy George Herbert Robert Herrick Gerard Manley Hopkins Henry James John Keats Christopher Marlowe Andrew Marvell John Milton Alexander Pope William Shakespeare Mary Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley RS Sheridan Edmund Spencer Robert Louis Stevenson Jonathan Swift Alfred Lord Tennyson
Mansfield Sean O’Casey George Orwell Wilfred Owen Harold Pinter Sylvia Plath JB Priestley Siegfried Sasson Peter Shaffer George Bernard Shaw RC Sherriff Stevie Smith Muriel Spark Dylan Thomas Edward Thomas RS Thomas William Trevor Evelyn Waugh Arnold Wesker John Wyndham WB Yeats
Arthur Miller Les Murray Beverley Naidoo RK Nurayan Grace Nicholls Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Bali Rai Wole Soyinka Meera Syal Mildred D Taylor Mark Twain Dereck Walcott Walt Whitman Tennessee Williams Adeline Yen Mah Benjamin Zephaniah
Anthony Trollope Henry Vaughan HG Wells Oscar Wilde William Wordsworth
KS5 Recommended Texts Author Angelou, Maya Atwood, Margaret Austen, Jane
Barker, Pat Burgess, Anthony Bronte, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Camus, Albert Coe, Jonathan
Title I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings The Handmaid’s Tale Emma Pride and Prejudice Sense and Sensibility Persuasion Northanger Abbey The Regeneration Trilogy A Clockwork Orange A Dead Man in Deptford Nothing Like the Sun The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Jane Eyre Wuthering Heights The Outsider The Plague The Rotters’ Club What a Carve Up!
Coupland, Douglas
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Hey, Nostradamus! Girlfriend in a Coma Eleanor Rigby The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes The Sign of Four A Tale of Two Cities Great Expectations Hard Times Oliver Twist The Pickwick Papers Crime and Punishment
Faulks, Sebastian Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Birdsong The Great Gatsby
Garland, Alex
The Beach
Golding, William Hardy, Thomas
Lord of the Flies Tess of the D’Urbevilles Jude the Obscure Catch 22 About a Boy Fever Pitch Brave New World Dubliners Portrait of the Artist… Ulysses Sons and Lovers To Kill a Mockingbird Beloved Paradise Bend Sinister Despair
Conan Doyle, Arthur Dickens, Charles
Heller, Joseph Hornby, Nick Huxley, Aldous Joyce, James Lawrence, D.H. Lee, Harper Morisson, Toni Nabokov, Vladimir
Orwell, George
Plath, Sylvia Poe, Edgar Allen Remarque, Erich Marian Salinger, J.D Shelley, Mary Steinbeck, John
Stoker, Bram Swift, Jonathan Syal, Meera Tokein, JRR Walker, Alice Wells, H.G Wilde, Oscar Winterson, Jeanette
Lolita Pnin Animal Farm The Clergyman’s Daughter Inside the Whale and other Essays Nineteen Eighty-Four The Bell Jar Tales of Mystery and Imagination The Raven All Quiet on the Western Front The Catcher in the Rye Frankenstein Cannery Row East of Eden The Grapes of Wrath Of Mice and Men Tortilla Flat Dracula Gulliver’s Travels Anita and Me Lord of the Rings The Colour Purple The Time Machine War of the world The Picture of Dorian Grey Oranges are Not the Only Fruit The Passion
Quick Reads These recommendations are ideal for dyslexic students.
Author Bradford, Chris Chambers, Beth Childs, Rob Cross, Vince Don, Lari Gardner, Sally Johnson, Catherine McGowan, Anthony Rooney, Anne Wooding, Chris
Title Ninja: First Mission Petrify Moving the Goal Posts Bighead Drawing a Veil Various titles-dyslexia friendly The Nightmare Card The Fall Grim, Gross, and Grisly Disgusting Facts About People Pale
For more information about dyslexia and reading please visit the following sites: http://www. barringstoke.co.uk http:www.booktrust.org.uk/books/teenagers British Dyslexia Association Dyslexia Action Being Dyslexia
Writers’ Recommended Reads for Parents or Guardians Teens are more likely to read if they are surrounded by reading role models, so make sure they’ve got a chance to talk to you about your reading choices and the reasons behind them. Talk about everything: why there are some books you didn’t finish, why you re-read certain books, how you go about choosing a new read, etc. William Boyd recommends:
Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Greig Breakfast at Sotheby's by Philip Hook
Bill Bryson recommends:
The Compatibility Gene by Daniel M Davis London: Hidden Interiors (English Heritage)
Eleanor Catton recommends:
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press) Colin McAdam's A Beautiful Truth (Granta) Elizabeth Knox's sly and ingenious Mortal Fire (Farrar Straus Giroux)
Roddy Doyle recommends:
George Saunders's collection of stories, Tenth of December
Reading Strategies Good readers always have strategies that help them to read. Here are some useful strategies that can help your reading: De-coding:
Chunk it up and sound it out.
Can you work it out by breaking it into prefix/stem/suffix?
Comprehending:
Go back and read the sentence again.
Look up any words you don’t understand in a dictionary.
Read it out loud.
Use a reading ruler.
Take your time, pause to process.
Is there a clue in the title?
Start with the bits you do understand and see if you can work the rest out from there.
Highlight important sections for later reference.
Useful Websites
Fan-fiction sites:
http://hungergamesfanfiction.com/ http://www.twilighted.net/ http://www.squidoo.com/fanfictionsites
Malorie Blackman’s Top 10 graphic novels for teens: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/19/ malorie-blackman-top-10-graphic-novels
The Teenage Book Forum: http://theteenagebookforum.proboards.com/
The Spark (competitions, reviews, blogs, and more) - www.facebook.com/thesparkpage
More reading lists: http://www.lovereading4kids.co.uk/
For further adult recommendations try visiting: http://www.theguardian.com/books
