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!

F Scott Fitzgerald - Diamond as Big as the Ritz and other stories
Hemingway - Snows of Kilimanjaro
Cormac McCarthy - The Road (not light but very well written and nice length)
Michael Crichton - pacy stuff easily digestible if she liked King. I know it sounds mad but Jurassic Park the book is very good. But also Timeline maybe?

Oh and I forgot! One I'm reading to my 11 year old though a lot of the vocab goes over her head, I'm absolutely dying with laughter over it: Seventeen by Tarkington. It's from the 1920s and it's about the experience of a 17 year old boy in love.

“The man who mistook his wife for a hat” is a great read, Oliver Sacks makes his books very accessible.
Also recommend: “Children of Men” by PD James. The film really doesn’t do the book justice.
“1984 “ and “Animal farm” by George Orwell,
the “day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham
the “hunger games” trilogy by Susan Collins
“Into thin air” by Jon krakauer biographical book about the 1996 Everest disaster.

An autobiography with a sociological angle would be A Nurse in Time by Evelyn Prentiss, and the immediate follow up A Nurse in Action. A look at what life was like in the 1930s for a girl not much older than her - the first book begins when she's just about to finish school and is choosing a career (there's a choice of nurse or teacher, and her mother makes the decision) and continue through her training and into WWII after she qualified. There are more in the series but those were written after a considerable gap in her career when she's a lot older.

Her local library will also be delighted to help. We underuse our librarians and I am so glad you posted this @sonnybeaudelaire

If she's really into reading I would just let her get on with it. She sounds more than capable of finding things to read in spite of her bold assertion that she's read everything worth reading.

We all know that's crap, and she will figure it out soon enough.

It's such a shame we can no longer turn to the scholars and academics for guidance. They are so beaten down by the DEI bullies, and so afraid of being labelled 'Eurocentric' or 'neo-colonialist,' or whatever, that you cannot trust their opinion anymore. If you asked them for a list, they'd give you a DEI list, not a list based on what they think are genuinely the greatest works. Harold Bloom tried to make a last stand in defence of the canon, but the future is bleak. The left now have an iron grip on the universities.

The top five works of all time would probably be:

1. Shakespeare's plays
2. Dante's Divine Comedy
3. Homer's Illiad and Odyssey
4. Proust's A La Recherche
5. Tolstoy's War and Peace

As for novels in English, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Middlemarch, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sons and Lovers, Ulysses, Pale Fire and The Great Gatsby spring to mind.

Of course those are just a bare minimum, and that doesn't include the countless great works in other languages, from Goethe to Lao Tzu.

It's quite funny that she thinks she's read "everything worth reading". Honestly, teenagers just take your breath away😂. You should say "listen, missy, have you read the complete works of Virginia Woolf? Her fiction and her non-fiction? How about Iris Murdoch? Nabokov? D H Lawrence? James Joyce? Have you read Marquez's Thousand Years of Solitude or Borges' essays? Have you read Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell? I haven't seen you with your head in Russell's History of Western Philosophy lately! Have you read Kafka yet? Or Dostoyevsky? How about War and Peace? And naturally you've read Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and Sylvia Plath's collected poems, and Blake and Milton and Chaucer. And I'm sure you've read Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter. Not to mention T S Eliot's poetry and literary criticism, and obviously you've read Keats, oh and Wordsworth's Prelude. "

So funny

When I was her age, I loved, in no particular order

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark (if she likes that she can try her others)

The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (I wouldn't recommend trying his others!)

Oranges are not the only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson

Sylvia Plath's poetry (obviously)

I only came to like Virginia Woolf later but I never tried Orlando as a teen, and I reckon that would be a good shout.

There used to be a Rory Gilmore list of books. Or the Rory Gilmore Reading List Challenge. Not sure if this is still around and/or a good list or not. Think there were over 400 titles.

What about Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan Quartet (My Brilliant Friend, Story of a New Name)? I think they are so amazing in terms of capturing the panorama of life through the lens of female friendship.

The Bell Jar. She's just the right age! Does she like poetry? Because The Bell Jar then The Colossus might be a good way in.

Some Ursula Le Guin? I liked her short stories. Handmaid's Tale. Brave New World. Steinbeck's novellas. Colson Whitehead? I Capture the Castle. Passing by Nella Larsen?

What about Jeffrey Eugenides. The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex.

Ian McEwan? I loved Atonement at that age.

Graphic novels? Maus? V for Vendetta?

I really just rambling stuff I liked or would have liked at 16 🤣

I second the recommendations for storygraph/Goodreads and to send her to the library!

Anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or something in the magical realism cannon?

Death in the Andes or Aunt Julia and the Script writer by Mario Vargas Llosa? Both of these really stayed with me though I read them decades ago as they have something significant to say about the human condition.

Willian Faulkner or Gone with the wind - I have had phases of reading quite a bit of southern states of the US literature.

I would say Rebecca and My cousin Rachel. My 16 year old reader is a 4th wing/sarah j mass fan and likes fantasy and horror so at her English teachers recommendation she’s read Frankenstein, Dracula, picture of Dorian grey and murder in the Rue Morgue, all of which she’s enjoyed and we’ve had some good discussions about.

Balzac and Zola. They are pretty easy to read. The psychology and motivation of the characters is fascinating. Zola can be a bit depressing sometimes.
Cousin Bette, Cousin Pons.
Zola and balzac have characters who overlap from different novels. Nana is probably an accessible Zola novel. A bit rude though.
Russian novels, Doctor zhivago is quite difficult.

Oh to be 16 again 😁
The shell seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher. I reread it every summer, my favourite book ever.
and a good chunk of a series for the summer holidays for me would be Clan of the cave bear. It was a book club read and I thought that, that would be one of the books where I’d just turn up for the wine 😉 but oh my words what a story to get lost in. Actually might dig out my copies and read them again myself 👍
and for lighter reading jilly coopers earlier books.
oh and the house at riverton by kate Morton.

We have always lived in the castle by Shirley Jackson. She was a very successful American author who died in 1965 which might be why I’d never heard of her.
This was discussed on A Good Read (best book programme imv) on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago - You can hear the discussion there which was very favourable. I’ve just listened to an audiobook version and it was v good, quirky, spooky, different. I would think a 16 year old would like it.

Not sure if already suggested but she might like Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks. It’s fiction but chronicles the birth of modern psychiatry from the late Victorian era to the beginning of the First World War.

Please thank your daughter as I’ve just finished Song of Achilles from your OP and really loved it; top 10 reads!

The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden. A teenage girls waking in a long hot summer...she is the perfect age for his and we have the perfect summer to read it in.