It’s a truth well known that chil­dren en­ter­ing sec­ondary schools should have been read­ing books oth­er than those pre­scribed by the “book­list”—manda­to­ry for the aca­d­e­m­ic pur­suit of the holy grail of ob­tain­ing en­try in­to the hal­lowed hall of suc­cess held out by the CSEC or CAPE.

But dis­cern­ing par­ents, teach­ers and chil­dren must guard against buy­ing books of poor qual­i­ty. It’s tough to de­fine qual­i­ty. But ba­si­cal­ly, it has to do with the orig­i­nal­i­ty of ideas, imag­i­na­tive use of lan­guage; beau­ty of lit­er­ary and artis­tic style that gives a work a fresh, in­ter­est­ing use of lan­guage—and has the pow­er to sus­tain in­ter­est for a long time. These are the kinds of books that have and will re­main at­trac­tive for a long time.

I con­cede that the Hardy Boys, Nan­cy Drew, the Dork Di­aries, the Har­ry Pot­ter and the myr­i­ad se­ries of Sci-Fi and Fan­ta­sy thrillers are the big “go for” by a le­gion of young read­ers. I agree that they can be a pre­am­ble to mov­ing on to books that have a val­ue of much greater im­pact.

Par­ents of­ten carp that their charges “don’t like to read.” Here is where the best chil­dren’s books can of­fer read­ers en­joy­ment as well as mem­o­rable char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions and “valu­able in­sights in­to the hu­man con­di­tion.” We must all try not to give them books that re­flect the “low end of the qual­i­ty spec­trum.”

With these con­cerns in mind, here is a starters list of rec­om­mend­ed fic­tions (sto­ries) for those on the brink of en­ter­ing the phase of sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion:

Ea­gle of the Ninth by Rose­mary Sut­cliff

Trea­sure Is­land by R L Steven­son

The Ma­chine Gun­ners by Robert West­all

1984 by George Or­well

Car­rie’s War by Ni­na Baw­den

Catch­er in the Rye by J D Salinger

The Di­ary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank

The Earth­sea Tril­o­gy by Ur­su­la Le Guin

Gold­en­grove by Jill Pa­ton Walsh

The Ad­ven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn by Mark Twain

Jane Eyre by Char­lotte Bronte

Lord of the Flies by William Gold­ing

The Owl Ser­vice by Alan Gar­ner

Pride and Prej­u­dice by Jane Austen

These are con­sid­ered as pure en­trees and there are oth­ers that can find a place on the list. Give them books that will give en­joy­ment. This could spark the fire in them to want to read more. When they en­ter a world that is dif­fer­ent from the present one, the feel­ing of vic­ar­i­ous­ness helps de­vel­op their imag­i­na­tions.

Just en­cour­age them to keep on read­ing. The more feel­ing of vic­ar­i­ous­ness they gath­er, the more they want to go fur­ther—to places and times they can nev­er ever vis­it. That is en­rich­ment that read­ing gives. They would want to keep on read­ing; it would be­come part of their ar­se­nal for lan­guage de­vel­op­ment.

A spe­cial rec­om­men­da­tion for the list is The Friends by Rosa Guy. It’s a sto­ry of a West In­di­an girl new­ly ar­rived in New York. Life is tough, and friend­ship does not come eas­i­ly. Bus as prob­lems with a dom­i­neer­ing fa­ther and an un­pre­dictable fam­i­ly in­creas­es Phyl­lisia’s re­la­tion­ship with the un­tidy cheeky, un­scrupu­lous girl Edith, be­comes more and more im­por­tant to her sur­vival.

Par­ents need to en­cour­age their chil­dren to read out­side of the pa­ra­me­ters of their “school books” or so they are called. You want to vis­it your near­est li­brary (NALIS)?–or your favourite book­store. And in­stead of call­ing up for a de­liv­ery of your best buck­et of “you know what,” vis­it your near­est book­store and buy the lat­est nov­el by your favourite au­thor, pro­vid­ing you have one.