Thread: Books for Boys?

I would suggest "Holes" by Lois Sachar. I think it's a grade 5/6 level, but it's an awesome book for boys (as well as girls).

I found some great ideas going to a large bookstore and just looking at what's on the best-seller or reccommended shelves for that age group. Have you read Silverwing/Sunwing and Firewing? Those are popular with my grade 6 boys.

Another good one is called "Dust" (I forget who it's by but it's a new release)./ Hmm... Oh, The Golden Compass is a good one... hmmm
Good luck!

I teach math, but I have boys.

They always enjoyed Gary Paulsen books. I wrote him once to tell him and I've gotten a Christmas card every year since! Those are lower level books.

As they grew older, they liked John Grisham and Tom Clancy books.

Bitsy

For my high school students, the books I usually get the most positive feedback (from the guys) are: All the Kings Men by robert penn warren, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway, Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, Catch-22 by (um... I forgot... do a google search... I am sure it will come up), and Crime and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Those are some of the books I would recommend to early high-schoolers.

The Great Gatsby is a great book for people with short attention spans.

as for more modern books.... Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Frank Herbert are all good.

(note: Tom Clancy and John Grisham can be a bit offensive in their language whereas Frank Herbert can be rather... adult... at points... keep that in mind before recommending)

oh... just to make it clear... I don't teach all the books I get positive feedback from... for example I'm not allowed to teach Catch-22 :evil: .

oh by the way... if the student is into horror, Stephen King is pretty good for high-schoolers

When I was a sophomore I really liked A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, Slaughter-house Five, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Except for the Tolkien, I don't think many girls would find any of those books very interesting, but adolescent boys seem to enjoy them immensely.

An older title, Flowers for Algernon, has a brief section or two that gets sexy, but the balance of the book overshadows that. The movies based on the book can't convey the emotions of the story as artfully as the source.

Otherwise, one of my favorite current authors for boys is M.T. Anderson. His first novel, Thirst, is a very thought-provoking vampire story. It never descends into mindless gore. Burger Wuss, his second novel, is realistic and funny. His third novel, Feed, is set in the not-too-distant future, when nearly everyone's parents agree to have a "feed" implanted in their kids' heads. The feed is like a high-speed internet connection to the person's brain, and the person's reliance on it for communicating supplants the use of simile, metaphor, or even speech.

Kids and adults alike enjoy the Lemony Snicket books, but I don't know that teens would allow themselves to enjoy these silly stories.

Try:
Tex
The Chocolate War
A Separate Peace
Friday Night Lights

Some boys just aren't much interested in fiction. Many boys much prefer fact-based reading, including historical books (not necessarily historical novels), biographies of scientists and adventurers, popularized science books, etc.

Here's an article that looks into this:

[url="http://www.aft.org/american_educator/spring2003/void.html"]http://www.aft.org/american_educator/sp ... /void.html[/url]
Filling the Great Void: Why We Should Bring Nonfiction into the Early-Grade Classroom
by Nell K. Duke, V. Susan Bennett-Armistead, and Ebony M. Roberts, American Educator, Spring 2003.

The authors report that only 14 percent of materials that primary-grade teachers reported reading aloud on a given day were informational, and that as little as 12 percent of the content in some basal readers is informational. They blame the lack of interesting, substantive material on three "unsupported beliefs":
***1. Young Children Cannot Handle Informational Text
***2. Young Children Do Not Like Informational Text
***3. Young Children Should First Learn To Read and Then Read To Learn
The authors tackle each of these falsehoods in turn, and explore the harm that they can do.

Worth a try!

-- Kevin Killion

You got some great suggestions so far; I raised two boys, and here are some of their favorites, listed by author rather than title:

Ray Bradbury
Kurt Vonnegut
Stephen King
Gary Paulsen
Will Hobbs
Ted Taylor
Stephen King
Tolkein
Le Guin (earthsea; I hear it's about to become a series on the scifi channel)
Asimov
Edward Bloor
Andrew Clements

And a few titles:

The Princess Bride, William Goldman
The Once and Future King, TH White
Cornelia Funke: "The Thief Lord" was good, "Inkheart" is great.

And for the readers needing shorter/easier motivating stories:

Hank the Cowdog, for it's slapstick comedy. Also available with the author reading on tape, which is one way to get them interested. Author Jon Ericson. (sp?)

The Dangerboy series; relatively new scifi adventure by Mark Williams.

And lastly, a really great article about building reading collections for boys, including a really long good list, can be found here:

[url="http://www.teacherlibrarian.com/tlmag/v_30/v_30_3_feature.html"]http://www.teacherlibrarian.com/tlmag/v ... ature.html[/url]