The best books of all times and peoples that every teenager should read

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The younger generation is not very fond of reading. It is difficult for books to compete with computer games and social networks. But perhaps the wrong books just come across.

A selection of the best books for teenagers according to the versions of Time magazine, The Guardian newspaper, the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia, and also as a bonus - according to the Lifehacker editorial staff. In this case, adolescents will be considered young men and women aged 10 to 19 years, according to the terminology of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Time's 10 best books for young people and adolescents

In 2015, the weekly Time magazine published a selection of the top 100 books for young people. The list was compiled from the recommendations of reputable critics, publishers and reading clubs from around the world. The full list can be found, but the first ten.

1. The Absolutely True Diary of a Half-Indian by Sherman Alexi. The original title is The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. A partly autobiographical book about a boy growing up on an Indian reservation, for which the author received the National Book Award of America. The protagonist is a "nerd" who dreams of becoming an artist, challenging the system and the prejudices of society.
2. Series "", J. K. Rowling. The first of seven books about the young wizard and his friends studying at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was published in 1997. The story of Harry Potter has become insanely popular all over the world. The books have been translated into 67 languages and filmed by Warner Bros. Pictures. The series has won numerous awards since the first novel.
3. "", Markus Zusak. The original title is The Book Thief. The novel, written in 2006, tells about the events of World War II, Nazi Germany and the girl Liesel. The book is on The New York Times bestseller list and, as the literary magazine Bookmarks aptly pointed out, can break the hearts of both teens and adults. After all, the narrative in it is conducted on behalf of Death.
4. "", Madeleine Langl. The original title is A Wrinkle in Time. A science fiction novel about thirteen-year-old Meg, who is considered overly capricious by her classmates and teachers. Perhaps the girl would have remained a thorn and would have continued to suffer because of the sudden disappearance of her father without a trace, if not for one nighttime incident … The book was published in 1963 and received a number of awards.
5. Charlotte's Web by Alvin Brooks White. The original name is Charlotte's Web. This beautiful story of the friendship between a girl named Fern and a piglet named Wilburg was first published in 1952. The work was twice filmed in the form of cartoons, and also formed the basis of the musical.
6. The Pits by Louis Saker. The original name is Holes. It is a multi-award winning novel by a Danish writer and ranked 83rd on the BBC's 200 best books. The main character's name is Stanley, and he is totally unlucky in life. So much so that in the end he ends up in a correctional camp, where he has to dig holes every day … Unfortunately, the book has not been translated into Russian, but filmed under the title "Treasure".
7. Matilda by Roald Dahl. The original name is Matilda. This novel came from the pen of an English writer, whose children's books are famous for their lack of sentimentality and often black humor. The heroine of this work is a girl named Matilda, who loves to read and has some supernatural powers.
8. "", Susan Eloise Hinton. The original title is The Outsiders. The novel was first published in 1967 and is a classic in American teen literature. It tells about the conflict between two youth gangs and a fourteen-year-old boy Ponyboy Curtis. It is noteworthy that the writer began work on the book when she was 15 herself, and finished at 18. In 1983, Francis Ford Coppola made a feature film of the same name.
9. Cute and Magic Booth by Jaster Norton. The original title is The Phantom Tollbooth. A work published in 1961 about the exciting adventures of a boy named Milo. Puns and mischievous puns await readers, and Jules Fifer's illustrations make the book feel like a cartoon.
10. "", Loris Lowry. The original title is The Giver. This novel, written in a dystopian genre, rare for children's literature, received the Newbury Medal in 1994. The author draws an ideal world where there are no diseases, wars and conflicts and no one needs anything. However, it turns out that such a world is devoid of colors and there is no place in it not only for suffering, but also for love. In 2014, the film “Dedicated” was filmed based on the novel.

The Guardian's 10 best books for teens

In 2014, the British daily The Guardian published a list of 50 books worth reading for boys and girls. The list was compiled by the results of a vote of 7 thousand people. The works were divided into categories: "books that help you understand yourself", "books that change your worldview", "books that teach you to love", "books that make you laugh", "books that make you cry" and so on. This.

The top ten includes books that contribute to the formation of the personality of a young reader and inspire to overcome difficulties.

1. Trilogy "" by Susan Collins. Original title - The Hunger Games. The first book in this series was published in 2008 and became a bestseller six months later. The circulation of the first two novels exceeded two million copies. The plot is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and, according to Collins, it was inspired by ancient Greek mythology and her father's military career. All parts of the trilogy are filmed.
2. "", John Green. The original title is The Fault in Our Stars. A touching love story between sixteen-year-old Hazel, a cancer patient, and seventeen-year-old Augustus with the same ailment was published in 2012. In the same year, the novel entered the New York Times bestseller list.
3. "", Harper Lee. The original title is To Kill a Mockingbird. This work was first published in 1960, and a year later the author received the Pulitzer Prize for it. In the United States, they study it as part of the school curriculum. This is not surprising, since Harper Lee looks at very adult issues like racism and inequality through the prism of a child's gaze.
4. Harry Potter Series, J. K. Rowling. Here The Guardian coincided with Time.
5. "", George Orwell. A dystopian novel about totalitarianism, published in 1949. Along with Zamyatinsky "We" is considered one of the best in its genre. Orwell's work is ranked eighth on the BBC's 200 best books, while Newsweek magazine ranked the novel as the second in the top 100 books of all time. Until 1988, the novel was banned in the USSR.
6. Anne Frank's Diary. The original title is The Diary of a Young Girl. The only non-fiction work on the list. These are the records kept by the Jewish girl Anne Frank from 1942 to 1944. Anna made her first entry on June 12, her birthday, when she turned 13. The last entry is dated August 1st. Three days later, the Gestapo arrested everyone who was hiding in the shelter, including Anna. Her diary is subject to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
7. "", James Bowen. Original title - A Streetcat Named Bob. James Bowen was a street musician with drug problems until he picked up a stray cat. The meeting turned out to be fateful. “He came and asked me for help, and he asked for my help more than my body asked for self-destruction,” Bowen writes. The story of two vagabonds, a man and a cat, was heard by literary agent Mary Paknos and invited James to write an autobiography. The book, co-written with Gary Jenkins, was published in 2010.
8. "", John Ronald Ruel Tolkien. The original title is The Lord of the Rings. This is one of the most popular books of the twentieth century in general and in the fantasy genre in particular. The novel was written as a single book, but due to its large volume during publication, it was divided into three parts. The work has been translated into 38 languages and has had a huge impact on world culture. Films were shot and computer games based on his motives.
9. "", Stephen Chbosky. The original name is The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This is a story about a guy named Charlie who, like all teenagers, is acutely lonely and misunderstood. He pours out his feelings in letters. The book has been published in a million copies, critics dubbed it "The Catcher in the Rye for New Times." The novel was filmed by the author himself, the main role was played by Logan Lerman, and his girlfriend was Emma Watson.
10. "", Charlotte Bronte. The original name is Jane Eyre. The novel was first published in 1847 and immediately won the love of readers and critics. The focus is on Jane, an early orphaned girl with a strong character and vivid imagination. The book has been filmed many times and is ranked tenth in the BBC's 200 best books.

10 best books for schoolchildren according to the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia

In January 2013, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation published for secondary school students for extracurricular reading. The list includes works outside the school curriculum.

The creation of the list and its content generated a lively discussion in the press and on the Internet. The Ministry of Education and Science received a lot of criticism, and some literary figures suggested alternative lists.

Nevertheless, here are the first ten of the "100 books on the history, culture and literature of the peoples of the Russian Federation, recommended to schoolchildren for independent reading."

Please note: the list is alphabetical, so our ten consists of the first ten names. Two works by the same author will be considered one item. This is by no means a rating.

1. "Book of Siege", Daniil Granin and Alexey Adamovich. This is a documentary chronicle of the blockade, first published with cuts in 1977. In Leningrad, the book was banned until 1984.
2. "" And "White Steamer", Chingiz Aitmatov. The title of the novel "And the day lasts longer than a century" contains a line of a poem by Boris Pasternak. This is the first major work by Aitmatov, published in 1980. The story "White Steamer" about a seven-year-old orphan boy living on the shore of Issyk-Kul was published ten years earlier.
3. "" And "", Vasily Aksyonov. The story of the Denisov brothers, told in the pages of the Star Ticket novel, once “blew up” the public. The most harmless thing that Aksyonov was accused of was the abuse of youth jargon. On the contrary, the fantastic novel "The Island of Crimea", published in 1990, was greeted with a bang and became the main all-Union bestseller of the year.
4. "", Anatoly Aleksin. The story, written in 1968, in the form of the diary of the girl Zhenya, who dreams of devoting her life to her brother-musician. But it turns out that each person is like a separate planet, and everyone has their own goals and dreams.
5. "", Vladimir Arseniev. One of the best works of Russian adventure literature. The novel describes the life of the small peoples of the Far East and the hunter Dersu Uzala.
6. "" And "", Victor Astafiev. Two stories on two main themes in Astafiev's work - the war and the countryside. The first was written in 1967, and the second in 1976.
7. "" And "", Isaac Babel. These are two collections of stories. The first tells about the pre-revolutionary Odessa and Benny Crick's gang, and the second - about the civil war.
8. "", Pavel Bazhov. This is a collection based on the mining folklore of the Urals. "Malachite Box", "Copper Mountain Hostess", "Stone Flower" - these and other works of Bazhov are known and loved by many since childhood.
9. "", Grigory Belykh and Alexey Panteleev. An adventure story about street children who lived at the Dostoevsky School of Social and Labor Education (ShkID). The authors themselves became the prototypes of the two characters. The work was filmed in 1966.
10. "", Vladimir Bogomolov. The novel takes place in August 1944 on the territory of Belarus (another title of the work is "In August forty-fourth"). The book is based on real events.

The best books for teens according to the edition of Lifehacker

We decided to find out what the Lifehacker team read as a teenager. Called both "Harry Potter" and "The Lord of the Rings", and other aforementioned works. But there were several books not mentioned in the top ten of any of the lists.

I read the "Great Soviet Encyclopedia". There are thousands of thousands of unfamiliar interesting words, and I, being small, sat in the toilet, just opened on any page and read, read, read, learning new terms and definitions. Informative.

Anastasia Pivovarova Author of Lifehacker

I met Vysotsky's collection of poems when I was very small: I read only texts in which I understood at least something. She especially loved about evil spirits and about what happened in Africa. And from the age of 11 my life went somewhere wrong (and here Professor Tolkien is to blame a lot, by the way), namely in all sorts of tents. And there Vysotsky was re-read several times. And it was because of his collection that I began to love men as a form of being of matter and earned my first money. These events are in no way connected with each other, if that.

Maria Verkhovtseva Chief Editor of Lifehacker

One of the books that influenced me most as a teenager was Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. Love, passion, nature, philosophy of nihilism - what else does a teenager need?:) Here it is, fertile ground for youthful maximalism. The work made me think about my place in this world, about the essence of being and all that, eternal.

Sergey Varlamov SMM-specialist of Lifehacker

When I was 12-13 years old, I read the book The Mysterious Island. At this time, I was generally fond of Jules Verne's books, full of adventures and surprises. Mentally, together with the heroes, he overcame difficulties and traveled. "The Mysterious Island" taught that even in the most hopeless situation, one should not give up. You need to dream, believe, and most importantly - do.

Nastya Raduzhnaya Author of Lifehacker

As a child, I did not like to read. Perhaps because I was forced. But at the age of 10–12 I came across the story of Valentina Oseeva "Dinka", and I disappeared. This adventure story about real friendship has sunk into my soul forever, and Valentina Oseeva's syllable showed that reading can be fun. After that, I binge read all the works from the school curriculum.

Lydia Suyagina Author of Lifehacker

I got acquainted with the works of Remarque at the age of 13, I think. It began, as usual, with Three Comrades. It is clear that then the theme of the lost generation did not really bother me, much more interesting was the relationship between the protagonist and his beloved. They were really hooked on "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Return" - poignant stories about destinies, plowed up by an unnecessary war. I don’t know if these books would have made the same strong impression if I had become acquainted with them now, but for a teenager, I think they are strictly obligatory for reading.

What did you read when you were 10-19 years old? What book are you sure to buy for your kids when they are that age? And what do you think is a must for Gen Z to read?