Must-read, rite of passage book suggestions please for my soon to be 16yr old dss

[Marquez]

Dss will soon be 16. In addition to a larger gift
from my dh I want to get him quite a few 'classics' that teenage boys love. Any suggestions? I already have:

the Outsider- Camus
Slaughterhouse 5- Vonnegut
The Catcher in the Rye- Salinger
On the Road- Kerouac
Clockwork Orange- Burgess

any more? He is a very advanced reader but is sadly unacquainted with many of the classics!

[KurriKurri]

Lord of the Flies - Golding

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning-Lee

Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man - Joyce

Also Doing It and Junk by Melvin Burgess are both good books for teenagers, but also fairly explicit so you may want to have a look at them first.

[Sinkingfeeling]

To Kill a Mockingbird

Moby Dick

Huckleberry Finn

[Jaybird37]

A stunning book, although not at all well-known, is The Cap, or the Price of a Life, by Roman Frister.

It is a Holocaust autobiography. Frister was a young, spoiled,middle class boy in Germany when War broke out.

He recounts his story, of becoming in many ways the head of the family as he went out to work the black market, whilst his parents could not leave the house, and then his experiences in concentration camp.

He deals brilliantly with moral contingencies, survivor guilt and his own culpability. For example, whilst in concentration camp he was prepared to take at face value his father's assertion that he was not hungry and accept his father's food ration.

I heard him on R4 discussing an event which is not in the book, where several hundred concentration camp inmates were led out to the edge of a pit, where a doctor injected them with something to kill them. The bodies were then thrown into the pit. The doctor in fact only pretended to inject a significant percentage of the people in line, so that they were able to creep out of the pit in the middle of night and escape. After the war the doctor was brought up or war crime charges for this incident, for all the people who died that day, whereas within the concentration camp at the time his actions were seen as incredibly courageous, because he saved many people. If he had refused both he and all the inmates would almost certainly have been killed.

Not sure if it is a rite of passage book exactly, but the protagonist is a teenager and it is so thought-provoking and moving.

What really makes it is the restrained elegant writing by the way.

[sethstarkaddersmum]

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer. Good for his education and he will love it because it's full of rude words....

[LowLevelWhiinging]

fear and loathing in Las Vegas

[MrsDoofenshmirtz]

Fahrenheit 451

[comtessa]

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

[MrsDoofenshmirtz]

Catch 22

[Marquez]

Thank you! All excellent suggestions, will be placing an amazon order now for catch 22, Brave new world, farenheit 451 and fear in loathing in las Vegas.

He has already read Lord of the flies, mockingbird, moby dick and enjoyed them very much.

Art @ female eunuch, while I do believe that it is a book all teenagers should read, it might be a bit much to present him with it on his birthday! Perhaps my copy will make his way into his room instead

the Roman Frister book sounds extremely interesting- we all read Primo Levi's If This is a Man recently and enjoyed it so I will definitely look into that.

[Marquez]

Re: Portrait of the artist as a young man I am a big JJ fan and have read and enjoyed Ulysses but I found Portrait to be absolutely impenetrable! Although, who knows, he may have better luck with it.

[KurriKurri]

Marquez - I agree, but just thought I'd throw it in

[comtessa]

Ooh! And Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 100 years of solitude.

[Jaybird37]

Meant to say, lovely idea as a theme Marquez

[clemetteattlee]

Margaret Atwood - A Handmaid's Tale.
Sebastian Faulks - Birdsong.

Not exactly rites of passage, but essential reading all the same...

[bruxeur]

Collected works of Saki.
Ditto Wodehouse.

[dahu]

My family and other animals

[TwoIfBySea]

He's probably a tad too old but The Outsiders by S E Hinton.

At that age though I was deeply into horror books!

[said]

The Diceman
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[BelfastBloke]

Shineon, you asked my yesterday why I like you.

Well, turns out one reason is that we both love My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl.

Even if only one of us can spell Roald Dahl...

[pebblejones]

For a 16 year old boy I would definitely recommend 'All Quiet on the Western Front' By Remarque.

[AppleHEAD]

The Outsiders, Tex by S E Hinton
slightly dated possibly but a good transition writer