Teen Reporter - Recommended Reading

Books I Enjoyed…

For teenagers, books usually fall into two categories, mandatory school reading and pleasure reading. The following books provide enlightening reading for most teens while still managing to be entertaining. You are bound to find at least one thing you like, so if youre looking to add to your repertoire of notable books without boring yourself to death, check out any of the following:

Proof
by David Auburn — The daughter of a brilliant but insane mathematician attempts to determine how much of her fathers intelligence and how much of his madness she has inherited.

Memoirs of A Geisha
by Arthur Golden — The story of a Japanese girl and her training to become a geisha around the time of WWII.

The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne — A woman in the stifling Puritan community of the 1600Ås is forced to wear a bright red letter, “A” that proclaims that she has committed the sin of adultery.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov — A man’s obsession with a young girl.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard — Two parallel stories taking place centuries apart but in the same mansion interwoven into one play. The characters of the modern story attempt to unravel the events that took place two hundred years before in the older story.

Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill — Inspired by the ancient Greek classic, The Oresteia, this is a play that takes place after the Civil War and follows the dark secrets of a wealthy family.

The Crucible
by Arthur Miller — A man and his wife struggle with the mass hysteria that surrounds them during the Salem witch trials.

Flowers for Algernon
by Daniel Keyes — Fictional diary entries of a mentally retarded man who is the subject of a scientific experiment that turns him into a great genius.

Holes
by Louis Sachar — A boy framed for a crime uncovers a conspiracy at the correction facility to which he is sent.

A Natural History of the Senses
by Diane Ackerman — An interesting nonfiction work about the five senses and their history in different societies. If you like sociology or psychology, definitely read this.

Cheaper by the Dozen
by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. & Ernestine Gilbreth Carey — The humorous story of an efficiency expert, Frank Gilbreth, his wife, and how they raised 12 children.

Lord of the Flies
by William Golding — Several boys must work together to survive when their plane crashes on a deserted island.

In no particular order, all are paperback and under 10 dollars, some are about 6 bucks.