<p>Nonfiction:
Barbarians at the Gate
Gang Leader for a Day
The Informant
Lies My Teacher Told Me
The Smartest Guys in the Room</p>
<p>Fiction:
Animal Farm
Catch-22
Ender’s Game
Jurassic Park
The Westing Game</p>
<p>I liked Animal Farm, to agree with everyone else. And Steinbeck was good…try The Pearl, about a poor diver who finds an awesomely valuable pearl only to be hunted down and terrorized for it by the world. The Red Pony, Grapes of Wrath, and some others weren’t as interesting (in my opinion), but has the same kind of depressed reflective style, if you like that kind of stuff.</p>
<p>I would recommend HP (which I’m pretty sure mature middle schoolers will have already read in any case, but whatever 
), along with Percy Jackson (Rick Riordan), Pendragon (D.J. MacHale), Hunger Games & Gregor the Overlander (Suzanne Collins), Artemis Fowl (Eoin Colfer), Keys to the Kingdom & Abhorsen Trilogy (Garth Nix, although not sure about the latter, since it’s a bit…well…), Warriors (Erin Hunter, though the later series started seriously annoying me), LOTR (Tolkien, which I seriously think middle school would be fine for if student is mature), Discworld series & other novels (by Terry Pratchett 
), and Series of Unfortunate Events (Snicket)…</p>
<p>…all for enjoyable, mostly fantasy fiction, since that’s what I read in middle school. :o Not great classics, but these are (well, I found them to be) so awesome and engaging that I found them to be actually helpful for my writing later on.</p>
<p>Also try assorted stuff by Diana Wynne Jones, Cornelia Funke, Angie Sage, Michelle Paver, and Phillip Pullman (don’t blast me with devil charges lol…). lol there’s a billion other books I would also throw in, but most of them are kind of…meant to appeal to a female audience. Oh well.</p>
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<p>OMAGOSH YESSSSSSS!!! But Beka Cooper owns them all. Anyway, Pierce is amazing, but her stuff is mainly about female ability/intelligence/empowerment, has 99% female protagonists, and I’m not sure how a middle-school-aged male student would react to that LOL. But LOVE her. ;)</p>
<p>I conclude (until I think of more titles) my overzealous list from a reading enthusiast.</p>
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<p>Disgusting. I vomit upon mention of that horrific literature. Worst book eva…</p>
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I second that.
I’m rereading Terrier this moment.
I wouldn’t recommend that to a male middle schooler though.</p>
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<p>Haha yes! Usually a book just needs that kind of mesmerizing universe and characters to pull you in. Have you read Bloodhound? What did you think? What are you looking forward to in Mastiff?</p>
<p><em>obviously never met anyone who’s read Beka Cooper before</em></p>
<p>lulz so I commented twice because
- I like to read
- It didn’t say I posted when I reopened this thread</p>
<p>" To Kill A Mockingbird"
" A Wrinkle In Time"
" The Golden Compass"
“Dogsong”
" Sweet Summer"</p>
<p>They’ve all been mentioned, but I’d definitely recommend the Outsiders, the Book Thief, and A Separate Peace. </p>
<p>-I actually read the Outsiders for school twice (in 5th grade our teacher read it to us for fun, 8th grade it was an actual class reading assignment) and it’s still one of my favorite books today (I’m 16 now).
-The Book Thief is in my top five favorite books of all time… it’s truly phenomenal.
-As for A Separate Peace, like RAlec114 mentioned already I don’t know if he’ll really understand the true significance of the book as a whole, but it could be something that he could read again in a few years and see how much more he can get out of it. I read it for school during the first semester this past year, and I actually didn’t realize how much I liked it until it was over. I always hate being “forced” to read things (I LOVE reading… just not when someone tells me what to read) so I didn’t really try to get into the book, but by the end I realized how much more I would have liked it if I had tried to get into it from the start. I’m definitely going to read it again sometime during the next year so I can finally make a better judgment on it.
-I’d agree with TKAM but for some reason I feel as if it should be a strictly high-school novel… I’m sure he’s more than mature enough to read it, but like with A Separate Peace, I think it’s better saved for later on.</p>
<p>Aside from those, I’m not really sure what else considering most of the books I read are either geared more towards girls… but from what other people have posted, looks like your brother will be set for quite a while :)</p>
<p>Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman and the rest of the treasury</p>
<p>Whaa? I couldn’t get through Pierce’s new series with Cooper. Her originals were just too good xDD We can at least partly agree.</p>
<p>And hey, I was a male middle schooler reading those books! D< We can be mature and open.</p>
<p>In 6th grade, besides books I figure a boy wouldn’t really enjoy (most of which were faves from my younger days anyway), along with *The Lovely Bones<a href=“about%20the%20rape%20and%20murder%20of%20a%20young%20girl”>/i</a>, *Notes on a Scandal<a href=“about%20an%20affair%20between%20a%20teacher%20and%20a%20young%20student”>/i</a>, and *The Birth of Venus<a href=“chronicling%20a%2014-year-old’s%20marriage%20to%20her%20brother’s%20gay%20lover,%20and%20her%20attraction%20to%20and%20subsequent%20affair%20with%20the%20family%20painter”>/i</a>. My sister preferred Anne Rice, whose characters are often similarly deprived. They might not have been written for people our age, but we enjoyed them and aren’t completely ruined.</p>
<p>“The Giver”
“To Kill a Mockingbird”
“Lord of the Flies”
“The Book Thief”
“Animal Farm”
“The Outsiders”
“The Chocolate War”
“Fallen Angels”
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”</p>
<p>Those are some that I remember reading when I was in middle school and I was at an advanced level</p>
<p>The Giver (and the prequel and the sequel), The Thief Lord, Harry Potter (the whole series), Charlie Bone, Inkheart (and the ones after it), The Children of the Lamp, Dragon Rider, Thunder from the Sea, the Chronicles of Narnia, Among the Hidden (and that series), A Series of Unfortunate Events, Peter and the Starcatchers, Running out of Time, Number the Stars… those were all books I read when I was in sixth grade and seventh grade.</p>
<p>Lol I used to be obsessed with margaret peterson haddix (among the hidden series) just because of the lame twists she employed in every book. “full of twists and turns” loolol</p>
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<p>What? You didn’t even like Rosto? :D</p>
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<p>Ah. You are loved.</p>
<p>^^^Oh yeah, Children of the Lamp is good. Also, has anyone mentioned Maximum Ride (James Patterson) or Alex Rider & other books (Anthony Horowitz)? Also great mid-school books.</p>
<p>Ender’s Game and Ender’s shadow I loved the whole series, Frankenstein, Temeraire series it is about dragons but is really good, timeline</p>
<p>The Chronicles of Narnia series by CS Lewis could be a good fit.</p>
<p>Get him an Xbox :)</p>
<p>Oliver twist is good. David Copperfield is horrible, something that bad would have been given an F by any self-respecting english teacher. Don’t read “classics” just because of their status, I had a very high reading level as well but I shied away from terrible books like David Copperfield after reading the first half of it. War and Peace and Dostoyevsky are decent though. Personally, I still prefer Harry Potter to those, and I didn’t even like it that much. Read things you enjoy.</p>
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<p>Nice one.</p>