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What is a book that every 13-year-old boy should read?
Thirteen is a difficult age for most. It's a time of transition from childhood into early adulthood.
I'm keen for book recommendations you think a 13-year-old should read. Specific topics I'm keen to be covered, either directly or through metaphor, are:
- Confidence
- Development
- Fitness / Nutrition / Physical Health
- Mental Health
- Finance
- Ethics
But really, anything you think one could tackle at that age and benefit from having read the content.
I've specified boy, because it is a boy who I wish to pass these recommendations on to, and I think that perhaps the advice would be different for a girl.
My side of the Mountain was my favorite book in that age, and I've found that it resonated with a lot of other boys my age at the time. It did an excellent job of showing you have to balance the urge to be independent with the need to spend time with the people you love. This is an important lesson for everyone, but I think holds a particularly important lesson for young men in the early throes of puberty.
Whether it will still resonate with more modern kids, who are used to 24/7 connectivity, I don't know. But I'd like to think so.
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is in a similar vein, but this time it is two kids, an older sister and a younger brother, running away from home and living at the Met. It's more funny, and it has appeal to boys and girls alike. Both books speak to the age-appropriate urge to start defining yourself outside of the parent/child dynamic.
I absolutely loved My Side of the Mountain as a kid, the whole series is pretty good though it does lose a little bit of its charm later on. That book single-handedly convinced me I wanted to be a falconeer for like 10 years.
I must've read My Side of the Mountain ten or fifteen times growing up.
Wow I had forgotten about My Side of the Mountain, my dad read it with me when I was younger. Thanks for the nice memory!
Anything by Gary Paulsen, but Hatchet and Harris and Me are personal favorites.
The main character in Hatchet is, in fact, a 13 year old boy.
Hatchet and Call of the Wild (Jack London) had 13 year old me convinced I wanted to live alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods.
I still want to do it, but I think my family will outvote me.
Depending on personality and interests, different things are important for different early teens.
Terry Pratchett has great books that show reading can be fun. I'd recommend any of The Free Wee Men series to get started.
The Outsiders and Holes are two other works well-suited to this age that are more about broadening minds and horizons.
Sadly, I think 13 is just too young for most non-fiction stuff that gets more directly at the topics you highlight. If he were around 15, there'd be an almost unlimited amount of things to consider, but judging by the 12-14 year olds in my family right now, they're just not there yet, sadly.
I would have to agree with you on the age limit. Although, if the child seeks out the non-fiction material themselves at that age, I feel like that acts as a good sign that perhaps they are ready for it even if they are 'young' for it.
Hatchet, Gary Paulsen. Independence outdoorsmanship, self-reliance.
Where the Red Fern grows, Wilson Rawls. Saving money for a goal, outdoorsmanship, Independence, dogs, loss, grieving. The saddest book I read as a kid. (I'm definitely not tearing up.)
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card, leadership, fitness, teamwork, military academy. This is an amazing intro to an amazing series however the subsequent books are at a much higher reading level.
Bonus: 1984, George Orwell. It doesn't necessarily cover your stated topics but an absolute must read for everybody in my humble opinion.
Too bad Orson Scott Card is a massive homophobe though. :( So personally, no matter how good Ender's Game is, I couldn't in good conscience recommend it while he is still alive and profiting off the work.
True regarding OSC. I also don't care for some of his religious themes.
I have an active debate in my mind about boycotting literature/artistic works for the character flaws of the artists.
Does buying a book used or going to a library feel better to you since the author doesn't get direct funds from your purchase?
In general, it depends. But when it comes to OSC in particular, I have completely boycotted everything he has ever been involved in or associated with. I think he is a genuinely horrible human being, and I find his views truly repugnant and incredibly harmful so I want absolutely nothing to do with him, even if he isn't directly profiting from it.
p.s. For a more thorough, nuanced answer, I've actually talked about this at length before, if you're genuinely interested in my opinions on separating art from artist: https://tildes.net/~games/1lcy/buying_a_game_from_a_director_that_you_really_have_problems_with_kingdom_come#comment-em4u
I am interested and read the link.
As I mentioned I have a long standing internal debate starting from my 10 years working at a bookstore out of highschool. (Many many years ago.)
It seems like it's not just monetary for you it's ingesting any media of a person with shit values.
Follow up question, do you make an effort to vet authors and creators? Personally I do like to read up on any creator or actor.
To oversimplify, I try extra hard to get money into the hands of good people rather than keep money out of the hands of bad people.
I do this by purchasing music directly from their website, or buying some swag, or in the rare case a funding patreons. Sometimes it means using an affiliate link (which involves letting down my layers of privacy apps.)
I try to, but it would be impossible to vet absolutely everyone. And it certainly doesn't help that a lot of hate on the internet is really overblown, misleading, or based entirely on misinformation too, which makes finding out whether someone is actually worth boycotting much harder to do.
E.g. I don't agree with calls to boycott Linkin Park just because their new lead singer, Emily Armstrong, was raised a Scientologist (even if she might still be one), was once friends with (now convicted rapist) Danny Masterson, and went to one of his pre-trial hearings... especially since she was supposedly "misled" by him into going, and hasn't spoken with him since. So IMO all the people online calling her a "rape apologist" just for that have either been misinformed, or don't understand what rape apologia actually is. AFAICT she never actually said anything to disparage any of the victims (which is what real rape apologists actually do), or ever publicly defended Masterson in any way either.
But at least in OSC's case, his bigoted opinions on homosexuality are 100% clear and undeniable, since they were stated in essays/articles written by himself... which made it a lot easier for me to come to the conclusion that he's a genuinely horrible person worth boycotting.
I haven't seen anyone recommend any of the Redwall books. I personally loved them, and they truly helped shape my world view (helping others, kindness, being giving, loving, and caring). It also taught me that there are things with fighting for when love and kindness fails.
The ones that really stick in my head are, of course, Redwall, but also The Legend of Luke and Mossflower.
I also read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings at that age, and they both left their mark on me the same as Redwall, but I figured that's already on your radar.
I recommend LotR as well. Partially, simply because it left such an impression on me from a young age and I just love it.
But more specifically to OP’s points:
Other themes I think are important for character formation:
There are so many other things that could be added to this list, but I’ll leave it there for now.
I would definitely agree with this! I vividly remember picking up LOTR from the store as a child - and recently got a hardcover one-volume edition to re-read. Furthermore, I think at least for me as a kid It was also just quite inspiring to see a story focussing on the impacts of "little" (both figuratively and literally lol) people. It is so easy to write a convincing narrative of the impacts of a larger (in terms of power) figure on the world, but having a frankly unexpected person be required to partake in such an arduous quest is quite inspiring and endearing.
The Redwall books are fantastic, and I'm hoping to start collecting a set to share with my boys. There's a few that came out after I read them, which would be fun to revisit. I enjoyed Salamandastron a lot and The Long Patrol.
I'd also agree with the Lord of the Rings being a great series for a boy this age. I'd read The Hobbit when I was younger, but if they haven't read it, it is also a fantastic novel for them. I've been needing to revisit the Silmarillion as I got into a Tolkien kick around that age and read it when I was ~13 and probably didn't understand it very well.
His Dark Materials might be a shout.
I really don’t like that I am going to recommend this book. I read it around that age. I think it affected my so deeply because I was dealing with similar themes in my Boy Scout troop. To this day, I hate this book, but not because it’s poorly written (it is excellently written). Anyway, enough preamble.
The Lord of the Flies
This book affected me deeply growing up. Extremely deeply. But I also think it’s a large part of what makes me me. In retrospect, that might have been the turning point where I decided not to trust other people’s prescribed morals and started building my own moral code. But it was so long ago that I can’t really say for sure. I can say that it changed my life for the better.
Any time The Lord of the Flies comes up, I think it is important to mention that the author made it up from whole cloth. While it may be a powerful story of allegory and the dark parts of human nature, it is fundamentally a work of fiction. When a real-life LotF situation happened, the results were completely different.. The boys banded together, took care of each other, and survived for well over a year until rescue. And that really happened.
When I read it (which, granted, was not at age 13; I think I was 16 or 17), I took Lord of the Flies not as a commentary on what children actually do when they are isolated from adults, but rather as a commentary on WWII and the hypocrisy of Britain's paternalistic mindset at that time, which was used to justify the colonization of "uncivilized" nations.
While the kids are devolving into violence in the absence of civilization, actual civilization is committing far grave violence on a far greater scale all around them. When the kids are finally rescued by a naval officer, he is appalled that they have killed two of each other — though he himself is actively engaged in war that killed over 50 million civilians and terrorized far more.
I'm not sure if that was the intention of the author, but I think there must have been a reason that he set it during WII and made a point to frequently reference the war throughout the novel.
This is even clearer, I think, with the context that Lord of the Flies was inspired by The Coral Island, a book that was considered a children's classic and included in many school curricula when Golding was young. It's much more of a classic Robinson Crusoe-style adventure, in which a group of young boys get stranded on an island in the South Pacific. It featured these young English boys forming an idyllic settlement, and their interactions with Polynesians are very much of that paternalistic colonial era. They defeat a group of Polynesians to prevent them from performing cannibalism, and later team up with Christian missionaries at work converting these Polynesians as well. It's the quintessential colonial fiction.
The Coral Island was wildly popular in the early 20th century, so contemporaries would have been very likely to be familiar with it and have it in mind when reading Lord of the Flies. It also references it explicitly -- in Lord of the Flies, the rescuing naval officer describes the situation as "jolly good show. Like the Coral Island." This makes it obvious how Lord of the Flies is attempting to subvert The Coral Island's colonial narrative, which imo makes its criticism of British colonialism much clearer. While it can be read as more general take on human nature (and given how shortly after WW2 it was published, it's not a shock to see its cynical perspective there), I think people who claim that it's "inaccurate" based on the story of the Tongan boys are missing the point of the text pretty significantly.
Huh, I've never heard of The Coral Island (until your comment, of course) and did not pick up on that reference, but that makes a lot of sense!
I think it's pretty normal not to have heard of it these days -- it's an interesting case of the subversion becoming way more popular over time, after all. And ofc the anti-colonialism message is definitely still able to be drawn from Lord of the Flies without knowing about it. But when I first learned about The Coral Island, the added context that Lord of the Flies was subverting a specific example of the genre really made that part of the message "click" for me.
I agree with you that the author had reason to write the way he did. But I disagree strongly that bringing up the Tongan example is missing the point, simply because I am not trying to change the mind of the author, I'm trying to give some hope to readers who reach the near universal opinion that it is a reflection of humanity overall, instead of very much being a product of its time, and a reaction to a specific mindset.
That article was a great read, thank you for sharing it!
Perhaps the real boys had read Lord of the Flies and understood it as a cautionary tale.
(I don’t really believe this, but nevertheless it’s a possibility?)
If you make 13 year old read stuff about ethics, nutrition and finance, the only thing you'll achieve is ensure they dislike reading and not read as an adult.
You should give them books that are fun for their age and their interests, not books that teach them finance. This is the age when you should be teaching them that reading is fun.
I disagree. I think this thirteen is quite late to be teaching that.
I've taught my son that reading is fun from birth by reading to him his entire life and by ensuring he has protected reading time every evening before bed. He loves reading and has completed most of the popular fiction series that are recommended for his age and several aimed at older audiences.
The reason I am searching for books with the kinds of topics I mentioned are that he has requested books of this nature, as he finished a confidence and self-esteem self-help book and wanted more along the lines of that.
(The book he finished is You Are Awesome by Matthew Syed).
Is this person an active reader who wants recommendations or is this going to be assigned? I would hate to ruin a good book by making it a chore.
The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway: Tenacity, grit, male bonds
To Build a Fire - Jack London: Preparation, heeding wisdom of experience, awareness and respect of the natural world.
Stories that require some more maturity/discussion or would be good in a couple years:
The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An intro to early feminism, understanding the historical underpinnings of gendered social movements.
The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck: The human cost of revolution, poverty, drought, famine. Cycles of wealth. Aging and the shifts in perspective that come with them.
+1 for To Build A Fire and The Good Earth though I think the latter is more appropriate for older teens.
I think that's a good age for science fiction like The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.
Ender's Game was my favourite book by far when I read it around that age. It still holds up honestly. I also enjoyed its 3 direct sequels (although they would likely be less enjoyable as a 13 year old).
Edit - just realized someone else already mentioned this. Leaving it up anyways, it's a great book.
On second thought, there was another series I loved basically through all my teen years that I think meets your criteria: The Legend of Drizzt by R. A. Salvatore. Note that these books are slightly more mature-themed. They are DnD books, and have the classic tropes like violent battles, demonic planes, and mind-controlled harem girls. That being said, the hero is a strong moral guide (...unless you don't approve of cutting up evil wizards with scimitars). Definitely lawful good, though. Drizzt is disgusted by your orgy.
I was thinking of exactly this book!
I don't see it, so I assume we are all assuming these would obviously be the top four of the list:
The Hobbit
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
The Return of the King
(If you disagree, your opinion is wrong :P )
W.r.t. economics and current events, certain books from:
William Gibson
Neil Stephenson
Philip K. Dick
to provide some insight into possible dystopian techno-oligarch feudalist futures that certain very well known people are obviously trying to move the world towards as we speak.
Not books, but I think Star Trek TNG, Voyager, and DS9 provide a glimpse of an interesting more hopeful far future, even though the cybperpunk authors mentioned probably got it more right.
One other book I really enjoyed was The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Maybe the Earthsea series?
Lord Jim and other Joseph Conrad books had some impact on me in HS.
I really enjoyed the earthsea quartet at that age so would 2nd that recommendation.
I know you mention specifically that your advice is for a boy, but if the boy in question is open to reading books that are considered more traditionally feminine, I think there's a lot of value in reading the classic coming-of-age novels recommended to young women. Anne of Green Gables and Little Women are good stories for a kid that age regardless of their gender, imo. If this 13-year-old boy doesn't disregard them as "girl stuff" (very dependent on the personality of a given 13-year-old boy, ofc), I think their perspectives on coming of age and the moral lessons they try to impart are good ones, and the situations the main characters get themselves in and out of can be pretty funny.
Granted, the level of reader this boy is will also be a factor, so make sure he's the kind of reader who would be interested in/able to make it through them or enjoy reading them together with someone -- but given that someone else recommended Lord of the Rings, which I found to be a much denser and more difficult read than either of them, I think you'll need to make that kind of assessment for books in this thread yourself anyway.
A more recent novel featuring a young woman that I have given to teen girls I love is Wolf Hollow by Wolk. I think it is an excellent book that teaches life lessons.
The Millionaire Next Door is a very accessible book that covers the basics of saving, investing and living within your means.
Re ethics, if this isn't nice what is, graduation speeches by Kurt Vonnegut ,
Re ethics, possibly Sailing True North by Stavridis. I think the format is accessible.
Edit - The Chronicles of Prydain, but most especially Taran Wanderer. Watership Down. Leadership, teamwork, growing up, adventure.
Here are some other fiction and nonfiction books that I think a boy in his early teens could enjoy and learn from.
T H White the Sword in the Stone, The Adventures of Dunk and Egg by G R R Martin, The Outsiders by Hinton, Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, Solito by Zamora, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, The Physician by Noah Gordon, Wild Pork and Watercress by Crump, Wolf Totem by Rong. My name is Asher Lev by Chaim potok.
Whatever you do Don't run True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide is entertaining and has some life lessons.
How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flybverg. (Cooperation and team work are proven to provide advantages)
Being Wrong Adventures on the Margin of Error, (Entertaining anecdotes about risk management)
The history of the world in 50 Lies. (Short historical episodes where history was changed through misinformation)
Deep Survival by Gonzalez. (Disasters and who survives and factors that increase survival)
Nation by Terry Pratchett,
Leadership Without Easy Answers by Heifetz (Gets into leading from the top and leading from a subordinate or outsider position. Case studies based on Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King. )
Edit - some classics that I liked and learned from at that age, Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London, Treasure Island, Kim and Captains Courageous by Kipling. These will not be politically correct.
Fun science fiction - Pip and Flinx series by Allan Dean Foster.
@bugsmith I keep making edits so I'm pinging you now. These are suggestions of possibilities.
The Earthsea books by Ursula K. Le Guin. Kind of low fantasy coming-of-age? I never read these as a child, but as an adult I kept thinking they would leave a good impression on a teenager, and deal with areas you've mentioned like confidence, development and ethics. Notably, the protagonists making mistakes our outright being wrong in their beliefs and learning from that is a recurring theme. I enjoyed them as an adult, too. The prose is simple but very effective.
I second this recommendation
I've got nothing to mold a young person into a model young adult, but I do have something that will entertain them, and that something is Jeff Smith's Bone.
I loved Rocket Boys by Homer Hickman. The memoir October sky is based on. Was one of my favorite books around that age.
As someone who was once a thirteen year old boy, one of the most pivotal books I remember reading around that age was Angry Management by Chris Crutcher. The book doesn't pull its punches and describes realistic high schooler lives and the problems they face, and how they dealt with them. It dives into mature topics that were novel to me at that age, but did so in a controlled way that I could still handle.
I also remember reading a few of his other books, including Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. I think Angry Management might be a sequel to his earlier works? I don't remember exactly, I just remember it was the one I happened to read first, but if it is you'd probably want to recommend one of the earlier books first.
I can't really recommend anything seriously heavy like The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath but I deeply recommend that for anyone who is much older (That is, in their early 20s). But I would recommend "Flowers For Algernon" if you're looking for something that deals with mental health.
As for books for a 13-year old, I think "Of Mice and Men" and "The Outsiders" are perfect. "The Outsiders" is an excellent coming of age novel which deals with numerous themes like friendship and the loss of innocence. Of Mice and Men is a book about companionship, a depressing one but it signifies the friendship between two unlikely people in a time period where there is complete animosity.
For Wartime novels this is a much difficult question, but I read Night when I was 12. The ending fucked me up because... Well I mean it's obvious due to it's themes of complete annihilation and the concept of god, but if a kid can stomach that then I'd suggest it.
I also read Night at 13 and it’s stuck with me ever since.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian
The Catcher in the Rye
Huckleberry Finn
Great Expectations
A Christmas Carol
The Great Gastby
1984
And honestly: YA stuff like The Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars are perfectly suitable for his age.
Enders Game and 1984 are what started me into serious reading around that age along with Guards Guards by Terry Pratchett.
I do personally recommend that people read making money to better understand finance because I think it walks you through one of the best ways to understand the point of modern currency and why locking piles of gold in a room is pointless.
Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander!! it was my gateway fantasy series, as well as a lot of my friends'
if he likes that, there's a whooooooooole genre for him to discover after that
I had great fun with Orwell's 1984, Bradbury's Farenheit 451, and Huxley's Brave New World at that age. Dystopias were my thing in late middleschool / early highschool.
The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: A Mayan Tale of Ecstasy, Time, and Finding One’s True Form
https://floweringmountain.com/product/the-disobedience-of-the-daughter-of-the-sun/
Does this 13 year old boy love to read?
13 today is different from 13 when we all grew up.
Most 13 year olds have smart phones, laptops to play games on, gamestations, TV's with wildly inappropriate streaming shows...
I only know of one 13 year old in my extended kids class who loves to read, and her mother is a librarian.
So I am going to suggest books that are lovely for adults or for children. Even for children who have a lot of competing interests. Even for those of us with a much short attention span than we used to have.
Why? by Nikolai Popov. This is a book of paintings, and only one word in the title. Why? It is haunting, as it shows the devastating toll of war.
The Missing Piece Meets the Big O by Shel Silverstein. This book is a rudimentary stick picture book, and it tells you everything a young teen you ought to know about relationships. Through the analogy of a big giant circle with a bit of it missing. And because it has a piece missing, and because that makes it sad, it looks for someone to help it fill that void of that missing piece, and on the journey looking for the perfect piece that will compliment it and make it's life perfect, it learns a lot of valuable lessons about relationships.
When I was around 13 I loved reading Moby Dick (the abridged version, I have the hardcover unabridged version now and I believe it could double as a bludgeon) at school when I was done my work. I believe it was the Great Illustrated Classics version. From what I can remember my key takeaways were that whales are really cool, the sea is really cool, and that holding grudges harms you and others around you more than the subject of your grudge. Good lessons for any boy coming up in the world.
Gödel, Escher, Bach, if I was feeling like being the most asshole teacher ever in assigning reading-level inappropriate lit to my students.
Ten thousand word essay on the book due next week. Good luck.
when i was a little younger—maybe 9 or 10—i read basically just the dialogues. they don't hit quite so hard without the fuller, more direct expositions that follow, but are still nice to read (and might invite curiosity into the latter, piecemeal)
Playboy. Well, at least the ones they were making in the 80s.
Many of these suggestions are superb, and frankly overlap with what I was likely to suggest anyway. Consequently, I am going to give some other advice on this topic.
I think it is important that you still give him the opportunity to seek out novels himself. Sure, some YA is absolute garbage, when I look back at some books that I read like the Divergent series I CANNOT for the life of me understand how I liked them - but it is important to let him nurture his interests himself. This is not to say that you should NOT give him suggestions on what to read, you definitely should, but being able to nurture interest in reading around that age in an independent manner (e.g. through a local library) is really important.
I do think there are plenty of great options in this thread for you to choose from, though!
The Black Stallion by Walter Farley - self reliance, grit, horses. A bit dated, but a classic.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - R. A. Heinlein - politics, revolution, AI, on the moon
Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov - a good introduction to Asimov as well as an interesting story about understanding other cultures
The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K Leguin - a good introduction to LeGuin
Rendezvous with Rama by A. C. Clarke - a good introduction to Clarke and a classic tale of exploration.
The Curse of Chalion by Lois Mcmaster Bujold
If he likes spy / thrillers, I remember liking The Fist of God by Fredrick Forsyth, though it's a bit of a tome.
If he likes non-fiction, he could try biting off The Peoples's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, but it's pretty long.
Look up Rules for a Knight by Ethan Hawke (the actor). It’s sort of a primer on being a man, duty and morality written for a young audience. It was better than I expected. Plan to give it to my kid when he’s older. It’s short too.
I know it’s sometimes considered a canned response but I really think The Alchemist is a great book for any young person to read.
It’s short, so much so you can fit the book in your back pocket. I personally feel that it shows great examples of overcoming odds outside of your control and gives an alternative (by western standards) viewpoint on spirituality and introspection.
It provides a nice language for young boys to access spirituality and emotions in a way that doesn’t feel off putting given the culture they’re often exposed to.
The language of the universe is emotional and artistic simply because that is the way it is. So if you want to master your fate, you should expect not to have precise answers.
Edit: and then yeah, Hunger Games. Everyone should read that. Absolutely everyone.
Whole Discworld series by Pratchett, definitely. I would recommend either Guards, Guards! and Mort to get him started. I think you should just read it and see for yourself.