Book recommendations for 17 year old ds please.

[BertrandRussell]

Ds has asked me to come up with 5 books he hasn’t read for the summer holidays. He’s a reader so all the obvious ones are gone. I’ve come up with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and The Kite Runner. Any ideas?

My boys ( and DH) all love Flashman. And if your DS likes the first one, there's loads of them!

I started reading Austen at 16...was A level set text, and I loved them.

What about Elinor Oliphant is completely fine? Our book group loved it recently, and I think there are some lovely relationships portrayed in it.

I Pilgrim? Is a bit gruesome in placed iirc but a cracking read.

Ah, but Panda- are you a teenage boy? I really don’t want to spoil Austen for when he’s older. I am a hopeless Janeite and can’t bear the thought of him not liking her!

Brave New World- Huxley
Steppenwolf- Hesse
The Tin Drum - Grass
Auto Da Fe- Canetti
The Third Policeman- O' Nolan
The Outsider- Camus
Goodbye to Berlin- Isherwood
The Castle- Kafka
Gormenghast- Peake
Nausea- Sartre
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man- Joyce
The Idiot- Dostovesky
Hunger- Hamson
Dead Souls- Gogol
Master and Margarita- Bulgakov
Crash- Ballard
We Have Always Lived in the Castle- Jackson
Wide Sargasso Sea- Rhys

thats my definitive list of stuff to read in your teens!

Bloody hell Donna Tartt or David Mitchell?! Do you want to bore him to tears?!

The Reacher books by Lee Child are great easy reads.
Rivers of London series by David Aaronovitch also.
Anything by Margaret Atwood but especially her MadAddam trilogy.
Dana Stabenow writes great crime books, set in Alaska. I like crime books but only if they’re far enough away from my life to still seem like fiction!

I forgot 'Cosmos- Gombrowicz'

John Buchan, presume he’s read Hitchikers Guide etc, more recently I loved Night Circus and We are all Completely Beside Ourselves, Primo Levi, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Laurie Lee, Bill Bryson (I find them samey after a while but after a break they make me chortle).

Bertrand, good point!

Shantaram is a cracking read, really gripped me last summer - is based on true story, and I think would be suitable for a 17 yo boy. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shantaram_(novel)

DS1 read P and P at about 17 and enjoyed it. DS2 picked up P and P when he was 12, loved it and then read Emma as well. And then watched all of the BBC P and P by himself. So you can make an Austen fan pretty young.

He has just finished The Count of Monte Cristo. The Moonstone is good. I second Wolf Hall and the Handmaid's Tale and The Secret History (DS1 loved that). Dorothy L Sayers?

Yy to the Madaddam trilogy.

Also The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert.

The Poisonwood Bible (and any other Kingsolver)

1984

Any Sarah Waters

Galieleos Daughter Dava Sobel
The Map That Changed The World Simon Winchester

Arthur and George Julian Barnes

Off the literary track a bit:

David Nichols? Emma Donoghue?

I've been over and over this post for auto-corrects, hope I've finally got them all out!

Catch 22
The Third Policeman
Anything by John Fowles
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead is quite serious but others are more delightfully flippant
All Quiet on the Western Front

Ah to be 17 again. This latter is not a book just a whimsy.

Why on earth did you forbid Jane Austen?

Has he read bronte sisters, Orwell, Dickens, catcher in the rye, waterland, what about 'old' school readers like z for Zachariah, color purple, to sir with love, walkabout, the count of monte cristo, the scarlet pimpernel, moby dick,

Boys own adventure type stuff - James Bond, Bourne, le carré, Len Deighton, Tom Clancy, James Paterson...

God, Elizabeth Gilbert? Really?
Mine would only read her to annoy me.

LadyPeter- they were brought up on Sayers audio books!

Ah, I've avoided Eat Pray Love but really enjoyed the Signature of All Things. And I don't follow her on anything because I gather she's really annoying! But I'm glad that didn't put me of her book, because it was one of my best reads last year. Loved the length of history it covered, loved the weord main character, loved the subject matter and loved the whole Darwin thing.

These are some I've seen DS1 reading

Do androids dream of electric sheep, Phillip k Dick.

Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz .

Hunting the Hangman, Howard Linskey

Iain banks -the crow road/ the wasp factory.

Ben Goldacre eg Bad Pharma
John O'Farrell eg Things can only get Better
Scoop; Evelyn Waugh
Kerouac, On the Road
Kinflicks by Lisa Alther
Bounce by Matthew Syed
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Anna Karenina
Gormenghast
;
My 17 yo DS reads a lot alongside online games but reads no fiction! I'll go and have a look at his piles of books

My 17 ds has just finished The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

If he likes fantasy/adventure then Paul Hoffman’s Left Hand of God trilogy is amazing.

Similarly, Joe Abercrombie’s books are amazing.

I’m currently working my way through Robin Hobb’s work.

Your ds and mine (also 17) have enjoyed the same stuff before, I think, Bertrand.

My ds is really enjoying Paul Auster - has read The Music of Chance twice and various others.

He also loves Tom McCarthy and especially enjoyed Remainder.

He's doing Austen for A level and loves her

More obvious ones - has he read Spies by Frayn and Oranges by Winterson? Both loved by ds too.

My 17 yo has just finished Sapiens on holiday which he enjoyed.

Then he read The Old Man and The Sea which I had taken, in an afternoon.

And then a Jack Reacher in the airport because there was nothing else and no Internet.

My 19 yo is enjoying Nineteen Eight Four and also likes Paul Auster.

Had a look upstairs;
Lots of bill bryson and Ben McIntyre.
He has really enjoyed Andrew Rawnsley's 'the end of the Party'