High School Reading Lists

A reader posted a comment on yesterday's post asking about what my children read in high school and was there any overlap in what they liked. I'm always up for answering questions because it means I don't need to figure out what to write. Thank you to the reader who posed the question. 

I've decided that this is a more difficult question to answer than I initially thought. It's been over a decade since my oldests were in high school, so trying to remember what they read is challenging. Plus, most of them read voraciously so keeping up also proves challenging. 

I tend not to assign reading at this age unless it is directly to do with what someone is learning about. I would say nearly all their reading was or is their choice. They also tend to read widely. More than a few times a book would occur to me and I would think, "It would probably be good if [insert current high schooler's name] read it." So I would go in search of said child and asked if they had read that book. Usually the reply would be yes, with a tone that indicated it was a slightly silly question. So assume that many of the classics have been voluntarily read by many of the children. 

The other thing about high schoolers is that I assume that they have moved into adult fiction. Sometimes in their freshman or sophomore years they'll read more YA, but with only sixteen year olds and up, I very rarely see any YA books lying around. I pretty much stopped reading anything but adult literature out loud several years ago. What's fun about this is that there is a lot of sharing of titles between younger and older siblings. A. and Y. are constantly recommending books to each other. L. recently borrowed a book from W., and it is now on my shelf waiting for me to read it. And while college classes have pretty much done in our teatime reading, there is sometimes that a book is so good that everyone gets to it themselves. Project Hail Mary is one such title and we are all very excited for the movie. 

I asked L. and Y. what some of their favorite books have been recently. L. really enjoys long, involved, multi-volume fantasy world building books. The Wager: a tale of shipwreck, mutiny, and murder by David Granny (it's narrative non-fiction) was also mentioned as a book they particularly enjoyed. This is one that is on my list of things to read, L. just beat me to it.  Y. adores books by Jane Austen and L. M. Montgomery, with Jane Eyre being her favorite. She also reads a lot of current fiction such as The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. 

I'm not sure I have really answered the question. Many of my children read a lot, and their tastes are all a bit different from one another, though a good story well told will often be popular with most of them. I guess I don't see high school in this sense as being any different from adulthood.