What next for book-obsessed DD16 who has “read everything worth reading”

[NemoNerd]

Looking for some suggestions for summer reading for my book-obsessed 16 yo dd. She hardly read anything in y8 and y9 but in y10 suddenly became a voracious reader. It’s her biggest hobby now - she reads 3 or 4 books per week and no longer watches Netflix at all. I barely recognise her!

She does read fiction, and has tapped out the big hit classics like Pride And Prejudice as well as more recent novels like Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles.

She really enjoys books about psychology, sociology, astronomy - for example she enjoyed reading an old 1999 book called The Calendar which is very dense but explains how religion and politics have changed how we measure and understand time. She has also read some of the self help books about improving your personal power and influence over others.

Anyway…she’s just finishing up “Man’s Search For Meaning” by Viktor Frankl which she chose for herself.

She’s pondering reading “The Man who mistook his wife for a Cat” next as she really quite enjoys medical/psychological weirdness (she was a big Stephen King fan in year 9!).

For her next read I recommended “Sapiens: A brief history of humankind” followed by “Thinking Fast And Slow” which I told her may be a bit of a stretch.

But for the summer I’d like something a bit lighter…

What else may she like?! When I was her age I read a biographIes and enjoyed them, but it would need to be something really engaging.

She proudly tells me she’s read everything worth reading and is “running out of books” which I found extremely cute. Help me build a reading list!

I get almost all my book recommendations from booktube.
Tell her to go on you tube and search the name of her favourite book, someone will have posted a review of it and this way she will find book tubers who have similar tastes to her/ read similar books, she can then watch their other videos to find reccomendations.
The only downside to this is I have now have several book tubers that I follow and spend almost as much time watching book tube as I do reading.

War and Peace, I managed it around 14. Had to look up words like soiree and samava though!

Oscar Wild short stories are very relatable to today and quite easy to read.

Works by Haruki Murakami are worth a read, I enjoyed The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Fyodor Dostoevsky observations of the human condition are astute but of an age, Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov are well worthy of a read.

I am a big fan of Trollope. I actually think his female characters are written with far more nuance and sympathy than those of most of his male contemporaries. I think his writing on the way that women could become involved in politics while being disenfranchised is fascinating. I do like Dickens, of course, but his female characters are rarely multi-dimensional and tend to fit into very narrow social confines. Trollope's female characters are frequently much more ambitious and intelligent and are allowed a degree of moral ambiguity, while retaining their heroine status, which Dickens does not tend to afford to his female leads.
I loved Victorian literature as a kid, still do, and since most Victorian novels are incredibly long it should keep even the most voracious reader busy for a long time!
Some of my other favourites are Vanity Fair, which I still re-read occasionally with great enjoyment, a truly remarkable historical novel with an extremely problematic but completely fascinating heroine! I also loved Jane Eyre, such a great novel with a really strong and quite quirky female lead, which I have always preferred to Wuthering Heights, which always left me pretty cold. Maybe because I never found Heathcliffe anything but troubling and repellent as the 'romantic hero'! In fact, I think the rest of Charlotte Bronte's work is great too, particularly Villette, definitely my favourite Bronte, though I do enjoy The Tenant of Wildfell Hall!
I am a big fan of George Eliot too, particularly Daniel Deronda and Adam Bede, both extremely compelling stories with genuinely intriguing and well-drawn characters.
One of my favourite Victorian novels is Miss Marjoribanks by Margaret Oliphant, which doesn't get talked about much but which I have always found charming. It is quite a gentle, low-key novel but an interesting glimpse into middle-class provincial life in a small Victorian town.
For a bit of light reading, I always fall back on a bit of trusted Austen, Mansfield Park probably being my favourite, though I love them all. The Sherlock Holmes stories are also a lovely comfort read for me!

Maybe consider authors outside the English canon?
DD is also an eater of books and has got very into the show Gilmore Girls. There is a Rory Gilmore reading list that I can see her doing:
Rory Gilmore Reading List: Complete Challenge (400+ Books) | The Candid Cover

There is a New York Times book on literary pilgrimages called Footsteps (the title is slightly extended) which gathers together travel column writing based particularly on places that are central to some writers' work. It's an interesting read to combine with thoughts on travel or seeking out similar locations to look around and books to unlock them.

I agree it's not 'cute'.

(Also, on the Oliver Sacks recommendation, bear in mind that he's now known to have made up many of the details of his 'case studies' and, while they're interesting and beautifully-written, should be regarded as autofiction rather than science writing/non-fiction.)

I just found the reading list suggested for DS1 for the summer:

1. If you are looking for a summer read, we have the author of Orphan X by Gregg Hurwitz coming in to school next year. It's a bit like Jason Bourne.
2. It's the 300th anniversary of the publication of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift this year. You've no doubt heard about it, but have you read it?
3. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - the English-speaking world's answer to Tolstoy and the most amazing book.
4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy - the unseen passage this year. Awfully violent and yet full of love. You'll finish this in three days.
5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - one of the defining dystopias of the 20th century
6. Bleak House by Charles Dickens - his greatest book by spme distance.
7. The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor - you will understand when you get there.
8. Middlemarch by George Eliot - regarded by many as the greatest novel ever written (I think you're not ready to read this book perhaps till you're 30. Still - give a go - you'll see through a glass darkly how good it is).
9. The Drowning People by Richard Mason - 500 words written each morning when he was a schoolboy. The book sold over 5 million copies in over 120 countries by the time Mason was 21.

10. The Flashman Papers by George MacDonald Fraser - totally inappropriate for study in the schoolroom but among many people's (secret) favourite books. 11. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk - the movie is good, the book even better. Palahniuk has a cult following for a reason. He is, as a writer, engrossing. 12. Paradise Lost by John Milton - the greatest poem ever written in English. It's hard to read so it is for those who want an intellectual challenge. 13. P.G. Wodehouse - the only complaint I received about the original twelve recommended books is that Wodehouse is missing. Not any more.

I was thinking of suggesting War & Peace, I think I was around 16 or 17 when I first read it. But it is a commitment! Possibly start off with Anna Karenina?

For light fluff, I read a lot of Barbra Taylor Bradford at that age! Also all the Agatha Christie novels.

DD16 has just read The Power which she enjoyed.

When I was a teenager a BBC list came out “100 greatest reads” or something. I worked my way through most of it. Might be a bit outdated as this was early 2000s but a good start.

www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml

All of Oliver Sacks' books are fascinating, and pretty easy reads as far as pop-sci goes. But she should be aware he was somewhat elastic with the facts. The medical issues are all real, but the details of individual patients are significantly embroidered.

I second Invisible Women - things every woman should know. And if she's interested in psychology then also Gina Rippon"s The Gendered Brain. The latter is not easy reading - it's very well and clearly written but densely packed with facts and goes into quite a lot of technical detail - but it's a really good grounding both in the neurobiology and in the pitfalls of scientific research in general. She'll come out knowing how to spot junk science, and poor reporting even of good science. It will also give her a massive 'must also read' of history, philosophy, psychology, and other women in science.

Biographies/autobiographies: Diane Fossey (Gorillas in the Mist). Lee Miller (Can't remember the title, the one written by her son. Might just be called 'Lee'.) Jane Goodall's In the Shapwmof Man and sequel Through a Window are primarily biographies of the chimps but also an autobiography of herself and how she came to work and live with them

Novels. If she wants something decidedly off the wall (with some interesting bits of history tucked into the weirdness) Tibor Fischer's The Collector Collector. The narrator of which is a sentient, shape-shifting, ancient ceramic. Slightly less weird, but still a bit nuts and with a glossary of unusual words beginning with Z, is The Thought Gang by the same author.

Asimov - the short stories are a good way in, and with some quite thought-provoking aspects.

Ursula le Guin. The Earthsea series is the light 'on ramp' for her work. She may feel a little old for the first couple of books in that series but you need them really to understand the cast of characters and world building for what follows. The later books in the series are more developed, mature and feminist. After that, there's a lot of le Guin to chose from and most very different from each other.

Pratchett. The first couple of Discworld novel are a bit shaky, so she'd be better starting with Mort or - if she likes Shakespere - Weird Sisters.

Jerome K Jerome, Three Men in and Boat and the followup Three Men on the Bummel are excellent light summer reading. And if she gets on with Edwardian humour she can then try the rather more ascerbic Saki.

And for light relief, Inspector Montalbano.

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How could I forget Mary Beard's Women and Power? Short. Brilliant.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier is an excellent read for a young girl.
Seconding Agatha Christie plus for brilliant psychological mysteries, Barbara Vine. Superb

I read The Catcher in the Rye (J.D Salinger) at 16. I also read George Orwell and Graham Greene. Doctor Fischer of Geneva (Greene) had me on the edge of my seat with “The Bomb Party.”

I can't recommend The Pact by Jodi Picoult enough. If she's usually into heavier books but you're looking for something slightly lighter then it could work as it's all fiction and the "difficult" chapters are spaced out with a bit of fluff. It's about a teenage suicide pact though, so perhaps worth you reading the blurb and deciding if it's suitable for her.

(The gist of it is that two kids grow up next door and fall in love, they make a suicide pact but only one of them ends up dead and the other is accused of murder. You read about their past and the remaining child's present, and you get a front seat view of the court proceedings which I found fascinating when I was 16. You also see it all from multiple points of view, i.e each individual parent as well as the lawyer.)

Margaret Atwood?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is largely autobiographical rather than fiction. The updated edition is especially sad because it reveals that his son, Chris, was later murdered during a robbery.

It’s funny and quite sweet that she thinks she has run out of things worth reading!

Has she read all the classics of Russian literature- Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov etc?
I loved Tolstoy as a young bookworm.

Various 20th century literature from all over- Italo Calvino, Simone de Beauvoir, Nabakov etc ?

Something different might be the original gothic novels that inspired Northanger Abbey like Anne Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho. Modern gothic like Shirley Jackson’s work.

I didn’t know that. I just remember it being huge when I was in the six form.

Keep suggesting a variety of books, she'll soon enjoy discovering that far from having read everything worth reading a lifetime is not enough to do so.

For a sociological non fiction try Virginia Axline Dibs, in Search of Self.

For fiction, assuming she liked Harry Potter, there is J K Rowlings Cormoran Strike series, although be aware that there are some fairly graphic descriptions included, so you have to judge if she is ready for this.

Another good call is Claire Chambers, Bright Girls is written for teenagers, and Learning to Swim and In a Good Light both largely tell the stories of a teenage girl growing up.

Joanna Trollope, the quality varies, but I'd mostly recommend the earlier ones, The Rectors Wife and A Village Affair.

Monica Dickens, light hearted autobiographies One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet, set pre war and during the war. Also lots of fiction.

Good luck to you and her finding g things she loves

Recently I've been engrossed in several of Malcolm Gladwell's books as well - broadly communications and human 'pattern' research (Outliers, Blink, Talking to Strangers are the ones that come straight back to mind).

Fried green tomatoes at the whistle stop cafe

Has she read any George Orwell?

Non fiction I have enjoyed recently and would recommend

• Find me Unafraid
• diary of a young naturalist
• Moral Ambition
• around about a pound a week