Books for Boys

I am in the process of ordering books for our 2013-2014 year, a little later than I would like, but in the process I came across a fabulous article called "The Dangerous Article for Boys"

An excerpt from the article: 

It is now well-recognized that boys are not reading. What is the problem? Most commentators want to say that boys have an aversion to books. But the problem is quite the opposite: books—modern books, that is—have an aversion to boys.

A recent edition of The New York Times Sunday Book Review featured a Robert Lipsyte article that attempts to address this problem. Here is the proffered solution:

[B]oys need to be approached individually with books about their fears, choices, possibilities and relationships — the kind of reading that will prick their dormant empathy, involve them with fictional characters and lead them into deeper engagement with their own lives. This is what turns boys into readers.

Excuse me while I dab my eyes delicately with my handkerchief, touched as I am by this tender thought.

Okay, let's get something straight here: solutions like this are part of the problem. I'm normally against shooting spit wads in class, but I am willing to make an exception in this one case. The entire educational establishment has tried for over 50 years to force boys into their effeminate mold, and in the process, they've succeeded in evacuating literature of all the things boys like in books: action, adventure, danger, bloodletting—and an iron moral code that is taught, not by smarmy sermonizing, but by immersing them in the moral universe of a story about a hero who not only believes in this code, but enforces it with a vengeance.

Great article can be read in full here: http://www.memoriapress.com/articles/dangerous-article-boys

However, I wanted to post on my blog the book list for boys that Martin Cothran suggested.

• Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (and anything else Wilder ever wrote)
• The Jack Tales, by Jonathan Chase
• Call it Courage, by Armstrong Sperry
• Robin Hood, by Roger Lancelyn Green
• King Arthur, by Roger Lancelyn Green
• Adam of the Road, by Elizabeth Janet Gray
• Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi
• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Lost in the Barrens, by Farley Mowat (and anything else Mowat ever wrote)
• Goodbye Kate, by Billy C. Clark (and anything else Clark ever wrote)
• The Bronze Bow, by Elizabeth George Speare
• The Mask of Zorro, by Johnston McCulley (and the rest of the Zorro books)
• The Scarlet Pimpernel and El Dorado, by Baroness Orczy (and the rest of the Scarlet Pimpernel books)
• Men of Iron, by Howard Pyle (and anything else Pyle ever wrote)
• Shane, by Jack Shaeffer
• The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien
• Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
• Old Squire’s Farm, by C. A. Stephens
• Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
• The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow, by Allan French
• Little Britches, by Ralph Moody
• Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
• A Texas Ranger, by N. A. Jennings
• Penrod, by Booth Tarkington
• The Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling
• Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
• The Worm Ouroboros, by E. R. Edison
• The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien