Jon Scieszka is the author of several books for children, and the founder of guysread.com, a Web site designed to help raise young boys’ interest in reading. His most recent book is Hey Kid, Want to Buy a Bridge? (Viking Children’s Books, $15), another installment in the Time Warp Trio series. His book selections are taken from guysread.com votes.
Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel (HarperCollins Juvenile Books, $4). Usually shelved in bookstores as “Early Reader” fare, these stories are really Zen koans on friendship for everyone. Frog helps Toad look for his lost button. Toad tells stories to Frog. Why? What did your face look like before your parents were born?
The Wreckers by Iain Lawrence (Laureleaf, $6). Fast-moving, cliffhanging, seafaring adventure. Believable characters that Robert Louis Stevenson would have loved, in a swashbuckling yarn that hooks both the “10 and up” reader and parents.
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Holes by Louis Sachar (Yearling Books, $7). Would it help to know that narrator Stanley Yelnats is sent to a juvenile detention center to dig holes in a dry lake bed? Or that the Yelnats family suffers from a long-standing curse? Probably not. Crazy, funny, dark humor.
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler (Vintage Books, $12). After seeing so many movie variations and parodies of the hard-boiled detective story, you owe it to yourself to check out the original. Chandler’s sarcastic, wiseguy, internal-monologue detective, Philip Marlowe, is the original.
Run Silent, Run Deep by Edward L. Beach (out of print). W.W. II submarine warfare as told by a veteran submarine commander. Heroic suspense. Fascinating history in the offhand details. Don’t read this if you are afraid of confined underwater spaces, because with Cmdr. Beach—you are there.
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (Ace Books, $7). You will never read a wilder, funnier, wiser book about the apocalypse. Two great writers for the price of one, alternating passages of prose that will make you grab perfect strangers and read aloud to them.
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