World Literature

This list grew out of a conversation between a Ridgeview teacher and a parent. In light of that conversation, teachers were asked to recommend books that high school students might enjoy reading, ranging from the light to the serious. Many of us recommended books we enjoyed when we were in high school: We have not gone back to reread them, and some are clearly more appropriate for older than for younger students. For this reason, parents should exercise reasonable caution in obtaining any of these. At the same time, many could be read by middle school students with profit and pleasure.

The list is arranged in alphabetical order by teacher. The descriptions about books were written by the recommender. Several books are recommended more than once. At the end you will find music recommendations from the Music teachers.

Mr. Anderson

Rudyard Kipling. Captains Courageous

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein

Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Grey

Andthony Trollope. The Way We Live Now

Stephen Crane. The Red Badge of Courage

Short stories by Guy de Maupassant and by Leo Tolstoy.

Turgenev. Fathers and Sons

T.H. White. The Once and Future King

Mr. Ayers

Archaeology: Rodney Castleden, Mycenaeans

History: Stephen Dando-Collins, The Ides

Fun: Timothy Zahn, Icarus Hunt

Mr. Busek

Stephen King. Dark Tower Series

Mrs. Caravalho

Orson Scott Card. Ender's Game

Margaret Atwood. A Handmaid's Tale

Agatha Christie. any mystery

F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby

John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath

Richard Preston and Michael Crichton. Micro

Michael Chrichton. Jurassic Park

Science Books:

Richard Preston. The Hot Zone - this is a non-fiction book but it reads like fiction.

John M. Barry. The Great Influenza

John L. Ingram. March of the Microbes

Nessa Carey. The Epigenetics Revolution

Mr. Edwards

James Michener. Centennial is excellent because it is about Colorado, especially the Greeley/Fort Collins/Estes Park area.

Mrs. Halseide

Alan Lightman. Einstein's Dreams

J.D. Salinger. Franny and Zooey

Robert R. McCammon. Boy's Life

Bram Stoker. Dracula

Yann Martel. Life of Pi

Willa Cather. O Pioneers!

Charles Dickens. David Copperfield

Oliver Twist

Great Expectations

(I guess I've always loved Dickens)

Mr. Herndon

John Garth. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth - to understand where he got his deep insights into comradeship, loyalty, the reality of battle and the horror of war, the heart of courage against unimaginable odds, and the power of love and friendship.

Ernst Juenger. Storm of Steel - to understand what Germans actually took from the experience of 1914-1918 (hint: they read this, not All Quiet on the Western Front).

Norman Friedman. The Fifty-Year War - to grasp just how the Cold War qualifies as a full-blown military conflict, how it unfolded across these nearly five decades, what the stakes were, and how the West finally prevailed.